Northern Hours

Nordlicht wanted to be seen as more than turbines on a hill. The brief: show the work behind a kilowatt-hour, without a single statistic.

One 90-second hero film for cinema and online, four 15-second cut-downs and a set of stills for the annual report.

The hero film had to work twice: in a dark cinema, with the sound up and nowhere else to look, and on a phone, muted, between two other posts. We cut it for the cinema first and built the online version from the same takes, with the first frame carrying the whole idea.

Each of the four cut-downs follows one person through one hour of the night. The stills were taken on set between takes, by the same light, so the annual report looks like the film rather than a separate shoot.

We spent three nights with a maintenance crew on the coast, shooting only by the light they work by: head torches, warning beacons, the first grey of the morning.

There was no lighting truck. We rated the cameras for the dark, shot wide open and let the crew's own lamps decide where the frame went. When a beacon swept across a face, we waited for it to come round again instead of asking anyone to stand still.

The aerials were flown at dawn on the last morning, the only hour the wind allowed it. In the grade we kept the blacks deep and the warm light small, so that every lamp in the frame reads as someone at work.

The film opened the company's anniversary evening and ran in cinemas across the region for six weeks.

The crew we filmed sat in the front row at the premiere. Several of them saw their own night shift on a cinema screen for the first time, and the applause after the last frame was mostly for them.

Online, the cut-downs became the company's most shared posts of the year. The film is now part of every site visit Nordlicht hosts, and the stills from the annual report hang in its control rooms.