Rolex

Two mechanisms

A player alone in a circle of light, on absolute black. He bounces the ball, settles, and the film leaves him to go inside his watch. The bracelet becomes steel architecture, the fluted bezel a run of columns, and the sapphire back opens onto the movement at work. Rolex times Roland Garros: rather than film the tournament, this study borrows its light, the light of floodlights during a night session, and lays it on metal.

Our approach

The film is storyboarded, then the camera moves are built in 3D on simplified volumes, mainly for the cinematic shots. After that everything is played in chiaroscuro, which forgives nothing on a watch. Every polished edge has to catch a thread of light while the brushed surface right beside it stays matte, or the steel takes on the look of moulded plastic. So the sources are narrow and placed one by one, for each shot, with very little fill. The shift in scale does the rest: at this level of macro a bracelet stops being a bracelet, and the watch is looked at the way you would look at a building. The sound design follows the same breakdown, with its own sound for every shot and every transition. That is what holds the film together.

Self initiated project. No affiliation with the brand.