Seven Seconds

The central sequence was shot in an underground tunnel in Barcelona with no practical lighting of its own. The only light in the whole space was a moving source chasing the talent as he ran, which meant the drone was flying centimetres from a person inside a frame that went black the moment the light moved on. An FPV aircraft has no gimbal to hide a mistake and, without light, it has nothing to fly by either: lose the reference at that distance and there is no recovery, only a person in the dark. The rest of the campaign was finished at night on the working docks of the Port of Tarragona, on a breakwater and inside an active container terminal.

The light, the runner and the aircraft were treated as one choreography rather than three departments working in parallel. The drone flew to the light cue and not to the actor, so the illuminated volume was always ahead of the aircraft instead of behind it, and every pass was walked and rehearsed at speed before anyone was asked to run. Positions were agreed to the metre, with an abort agreed just as precisely: if the light did not arrive, the shot was dead and the aircraft climbed. Nothing about that tunnel was improvised.