The Mill Helps Launch the New home of EurostarDawn over St Pancras, London. As the dark fades and the day begins, clouds scud across the horizon. The sun rises higher in the sky, its light glinting and reflecting on the spectacular glass and iron structure of the newly-restored station.
This is ‘Today’, a 90-second spot celebrating Eurostar’s move to the new 800 million terminus (and marking a farewell to the train operator’s home of 13 years, Waterloo). Directed by Joaquin Baca-Asay for Falon, it’s a wordless hymn to the beauty of this famously fabulous station, which launched its first high-speed Paris/Brussels service on 14 November.
The visuals are all about light ?Äì flooding the massive train shed, filtering through on to glass walls, escalators and departure areas, highlighting both the high-tech new structure and the original 19th-century brick building, and finally shining on four high-speed trains ready for departure.
The idea behind the ad was to use time-lapse photography to show day and night at the station as it awaits passengers. Lead Flame Judy Roberts made sure the light looked perfect (and tidied away any stray clues that construction wasn’st completely finished when filming took place.)
The biggest challenge in Flame was to shoot the interior areas, as the crew had only been able to film the interiors with either emergency low lights or the house lights on full. The dramatic lighting effect was impossible to create in-camera and so Judy animated it in Flame using multiple lighting plates, which had been shot with lighting rigs in frame. These were cleaned up and combined to create the epic shots of the terminal lighting up in its full splendor.
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