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.
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. They hope that their service can promote clean and renewable energy, as well as improve the quality of living for communities around the globe.
During the planning and preproduction phases, Craig’s role was crucial as he remotely organized the dates and budget. He also 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 also had to be a detail-oriented planner and relayed all the expenses back to Craig. This way, Craig could work on the leasing between the client in the US and the Ford Team in Thailand.
In addition, Nicolas prepared a basic camera setup. He used a battery-powered flash and knew it would be a busy day of running around. There wouldn’t be much time to set up ‘studio’ style portraits or elaborate lighting.
Getting model release forms signed for all the people in the images posed the biggest challenge of the production. 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. They needed to document several different volunteer work sites at the school. 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 loved the images. They put together a few pictures for a poster used for the promotion of Ford volunteers.
The best part of the project for Nicolas was witnessing the students playing in their new playground after completing all the work.
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 has finished, but he has heard talk of eventually producing a video showcasing the philanthropic work of Ford in Thailand, and he would love to capture this work in motion.
See more of Nicolas’s work on his website.
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