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Since 2005, The Ford Motor Company‘s volunteer participants have worked in 48 countries to perform community service projects. Ford’s volunteers do everything from painting to building refurbished homeless shelters, orphanages, schools, and hospitals. Their hope is that their service can promote clean and renewable energy, as well as improve the quality of living for communities around the globe.
Wonderful Machine Executive Producer Craig Oppenheimer contacted Cambodia-based photographer Nicolas Axelrod to shoot with Ford in Thailand for their Global Month of Caring. Ford was looking for strong images of their staff volunteering. Ford’s staff built infrastructure and performed maintenance work on a small school in Rayong, which is a few hours drive from Bangkok. The goal of the campaign was to promote Ford’s volunteer work and to produce an ad for an Automotive News Spotlight.
During the planning and preproduction phases, Craig’s role was crucial as he remotely organized the dates and budget, and communicated with Ford to keep everything on schedule. On Nicolas’s side, he worked on the logistics in Thailand which included organizing transport, living accommodations, and finding two assistants. Nicolas had to be a detail-oriented planner and relay all the expenses back to Craig so that he could work on the leasing between the client in the US, and the Ford Team in Thailand.
Nicolas prepared a basic camera set up with a battery powered flash because he knew it would be a busy day of running around without much time to set up ‘studio’ style portraits or elaborate lighting.
The biggest challenge of the production was getting model release forms signed for all the people in the images. There were 200 Ford staff members plus teachers and students at the school.
In many of the images, there would be several students or staff that were recognizable and the assistant that was charge of getting the forms signed stayed very busy chasing people for consent during and after the shoot.
During the shoot, Nicolas had to move quickly. There were several different volunteer work sites at the school that needed to be documented. While his assistants managed the lighting and chased people around to sign model releases, Nicolas had to cover a fair bit of ground in a short amount of time to capture everything.
After the shoot, Ford was thrilled with the images. They put together a few pictures for a poster that was used to promote the volunteers of Ford.
The best part of the project for Nicolas was seeing the students get to play in their new playground after all the work was done.
The students were let out from class shortly after the volunteering was complete and they rushed to the infrastructure to see what had changed. They immediately started playing games, swinging on the tires and having blast. They even stayed after school for ages just to play on the school grounds.
At this stage of the project Nicolas is finished, but he has heard talk of eventually producing a video showcasing the philanthropic work of Ford in Thailand and would love to capture this work in motion.
See more of Nicolas at nicolasaxelrod.com.