Volvo: Recycled Roads
Part of the Volvo Visionaries initiative, Volvo Car UK and MacRebur – ‘The Plastic Road Company’ - unveiled a new recycled road in Leeds with the Brownlee Brothers.
As part of the Volvo Visionaries initiative, Volvo Car UK and MacRebur worked together with Leeds City Council to resurface a stretch of road, chosen by the Brownlee brothers, using 850kg of recycled plastic waste which is the equivalent of 170,000 supermarket plastic bags. Following our previous work with Volvo and the Brownlee brothers, Mediablaze asked us to help produce a short film telling the story of how and why this important initiative came about.
To produce these films with the challenges of COVID-19 and the Brownlee’s schedules, we shot remote interviews with both Alistair and Jonny Brownlee to build the narrative structure of the film, allowing us the maximum time on set to get striking visuals of both the road resurfacing process and see both the brothers and Claire Cashmore in action on the newly surfaced road.
The stretch of road was chosen as it’s part of the Brownlee’s regular training area and had a number of potholes. In the past 5 years, 250 cyclists have been killed or seriously injured due to poor road conditions, so not only was this project important to them for sustainability reasons; it was also vital for local cyclist’s safety.
The shoot day was packed with further interviews with the teams involved, plus also capturing all important shots from both the ground and the air of a fully electric Volvo car and of course the athletes making their way over the smooth new road. Director James Lovick, DOP Ruaraid Achilleos-Sarll and drone pilot Will Glover worked up against tight timescales on the day to produce some beautiful footage of this important project.
We were really grateful to be involved in a project where we can highlight exciting new environmentally friendly innovations and film with some of the UK’s top athletes.
