Ford Night Swimming: This ambitious commercial featuring a group of young people enjoying a swim at night with their Ford Rangers was shot almost entirely at the Buftea Studios in Romania. Their 50m x 25m x 5m deep water stage was the perfect location to create an underwater lake complete with several tons of gravel and rock, replete with real water lilies and flowers. After the set was installed, and all the gravel washed, it took more than one week to fill the tank!

Working with director Adam Berg from Smuggler, and DP Joost van Gelder, McLeod was tasked with the underwater cinematography. Due to the size of the space, more than 150 Arri Sky Panels were installed overhead, and special LED lamps had to be customised by McLeod for underwater use, to recreate the headlamps of the Ford Rangers. McLeod used a Hydroflex housing for the Arri Alexa Mini LF and Master primes to create the balletic camera movements with the actors.

Produced by US based production company Iconclast, this environmentally themed commercial from the directing team Megaforce cleverly uses cross cutting to simultaneously tell the life stories of a fish and a plastic bag, from “birth” to when they finally meet in the ocean.

Working alongside DP Greig Fraser, Andy was tasked with photographing the underwater scenes at the Barcelona Aquarium, and in the sea just off the coast of the city. In the aquarium, Andy and his team had to share the space with a number of large sharks, which helped to keep them alert during the tough 10 hours the team spent underwater.

The underwater footage was captured on Andy’s RED Gemini camera and housing.

Andy McLeod is a well-established Underwater DoP and an HSE registered dive supervisor with more than 20 years’ experience. He also supplies underwater equipment and crew for commercials and movies that require sequences to be shot underwater, either in tanks and studio or in the open ocean.

This includes housings for cameras from RED, Arri and Sony as well as underwater communications, monitoring and physical effects. Based in the Canary Islands, Andy and his team have travelled the world, from Antarctica to Zanzibar, working for directors such as Jonathan Glazer and Megaforce and DPs like Darius Khondji and Greig Fraser.

For this complex commercial, Andy McLeod worked alongside director Jonathan Glazer and DP Darius Khondji to shoot a live action sequence of actor Adam Driver swimming with a horse. To achieve the real-life shots, five horses were specially trained in Madrid and then shipped to the location in Tenerife.

To control the horses, the team used ropes from two jet skis that guided the horse towards the camera. It took all of McLeod’s 20 years of diving experience to get the camera in close to the action, without being injured by the horses’ powerful hooves.

For the sequences of Adam Driver swimming, McLeod was projected backwards by a complex series of ropes and pullies, allowing him to keep up with Driver’s explosive swimming. The spot was filmed on Arri Alexa Mini with Cooke S4i lenses.