Citroen C5 AirCross 2023
My second year working with Citroen and being their ambassador, this was the first time I direct and be featured in the AD. The brief from the client was to showcase the car traveling all over Egypt with comfort. And it made total sense that my lifestyle fits the perfect character for the Car. So they asked me to bring up a creative story board and a breakdown of locations of the shooting.
So as a photographer you usually carry most of your gear and some camping gear if you will camp in a site, all in the car and start to hit the road to pursue the perfect storytelling images. So that was the whole concept of the video of my self camping in a site and starting to drive the roads of Egypt and photographing portraits of athletes and Bedouin people.
Equipments used : We usually shoot on Sony cameras and lenses as it so much easy for run and gun, but this time my DP Nader Makram wanted to go for the RED Komodo and Canon RF lenses, the RF lenses and Sigma lenses were the choice as he operates the camera on his own so RF lenses had some kind of auto focus but of course not as good as the Sony autofocus, but because we were only the both of us and we needed to move a lot in so many different locations, the gear was the right amount for to provide us the maximum quality.
Our First destination was the furthest and most challenging location, Siwa Oasis. Siwa is the largest Oasis in Egypt and its 60 KM from Libya. It took us almost 8 hours drive to reach Siwa, and it was really cold the time we arrived, the most challenging factors for me in Siwa was that most of the roads are un paved and all sandy, so the car always gets dusty which is a total nightmare and most of the roads were really hard to shoot.
Our Second location was the Sinai Peninsula, Sinai to me is my favorite place to shoot any AD, it has most of the beautiful terrains, starting from mountains, sand dunes, canyons and blue sea shores. It’s a bit tough to shoot there as there so many security in the area but still we were able to get stunning shots of the car on the roads, we also photographed the founders of Women in the Wadi which are located in Dahab, so it was another way of showing the car can enter tough terrain and making me able to photograph them while they rock climbing.
Lastly, we wanted the shoot a time-lapse in the white desert, the ending shot had to show the finale of the adventurous roads ending up in this white limestone terrain, letting the midnight blue color of the car pop up under the moonlight.
I scheduled this specific shoot when it was a full moon, and we wanted to have 3 angles of the car in one night. The moon will illuminate the whole scene but at the same time, you will be able to see stars in the sky.
So here I used my Sony cameras, Sony A7S mk3, Sony A74, and a Sony A7C.
I attached 2 of my cameras on my Kessler crane motion control and one on a static tripod
Left the camera’s roll and got amazing footage.
During the production while I'm directing and being featured. I also was taking photos for the campaign so here you can see a whole gallery of the Citroen C5 Aircross 2023 campaign
