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This is the story of master watchmaker Denis Flageollet and his unique approach to creativity. Denis is known as being one of the world's most influential watchmakers and a true master of his craft. Our challenge was to capture the dedication and deep level of engineering knowledge that goes in every one of his unique timepieces.
This was a dream job to direct because De Bethune doesn't normally do this kind of promotion. The first step for me was getting to know Denis through a pre-interview process to better understand the environment he was most comfortable in, and how he preferred to project himself. This was hugely important for me to capture correctly.
Working with Gilles Sandoz, Around Communication, we formed a small and very focussed crew, able to move quickly between various locations and tight spaces. We shot for 5 days around Switzerland. Gilles started by scouting locations and meeting Denis so that we could get to know him better before forming any shoot schedule.
Although it's only 36mins, we aimed to cover a wide range of locations which we felt would elevate the overall 'grandness' of a short piece like this. Starting in Geneva, we shot on the lake and city environments. We then moved the team to Sainte-Croix where we found the surrounding forests, Denis' workshop, De Bethune's factory and of course the classic Grand Hotel De Rassus where we captured Todd & Wei's main interviews with a suitably Swiss heritage feel.
For the sake of speed, I took on the editing of this project too. Using RoDo Works as our post-production partner meant we could remotely, yet complete the offline edit within 3 weeks of shooting. Next came the post production -including grading, title animations, product retouching, translations (3 languages) - which took a total of a month and a half - delivering the full edit and a series of social media cuts with corresponding HDR and SDR versions.
