Aerial cinematography for the winter road operation of a Spanish motorway concessionaire.
Scope of work
Photography & Creative Direction
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Deliverables
Flight planning & risk assessment · Aerial capture · Aerial unit for corporate film
End Client
Autopistas (Abertis Group) · Produced with: TopShot
Industry
Infrastructure
Every winter, Autopistas activates a full response operation across the motorways it manages — a fleet of plows, spreaders and specialized vehicles held ready from November through April. The company wanted to communicate the real weight of that commitment, and there was a problem built into the subject: at ground level, a fleet of plows looks like a row of trucks. The scale of the operation simply isn't visible from the ground.
The material had to work for a corporate audience — public administrations, partners, and drivers who pay a toll and want to know what it buys them. That meant footage that read as serious infrastructure rather than promotional gloss, and that could hold a screen while on-screen text carried the message.
The approach
We took the operation from above. The core of the aerial work is a set of top-down and descending frames that turn the fleet into pattern — vehicles read as a formation, marked out and aligned, the sheer count of them becoming the message. Where ground footage shows a plow, the aerial shot shows a system. Movement was kept deliberate and slow, so the reveal of scale does the work rather than the camera.
The filming happened inside an active operational environment, with heavy machinery in motion and public roadway in frame — flight planning, clearance margins and coordination with the ground crew mattered as much as composition. Flown as pilot and camera operator on the same unit, under current EU certification, with the shot list built around the light windows the production had available. The film’s aerial imagery was operated as part of TopShot’s aerial unit.
The result
The aerial frames carry the widest moments of the film — the ones that establish the size of the operation before a single line of text explains it. The aerial work supplies the scale they belong to, and gives a communication piece about winter logistics the visual authority the subject deserved.
Delivered as the aerial unit within a wider production team. Corporate aerial work of this kind lives or dies on preparation: the shots that look effortless are the ones planned on the ground the day before.
