Horse Power - The story of the Shell Ferrari Technical Partnership in the build-up to the 2014 Formula One motor racing season.

2014 is a new dawn for Formula One, the blue riband of motor sport, as new rules mean the engines have to last much longer and they must complete a race distance using much less fuel than before. It’s the greatest technical challenge the teams have faced in the past 20 years.

Fuel economy and hybrid power are the hot topics in the motor industry right now and Formula 1 is leading the way. In 2014, victory in F1 demands finding the maximum power using the minimum fuel and engine parts need to be protected better than ever. We identified this brave new world as the perfect opportunity for Shell to highlight its longstanding (fuel and oil) Technical Partnership with Ferrari.

Horse Power tells this unique story giving unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to Ferrari and Shell’s technical teams in the build up to the first race of the 2014 Formula One season. It’s a story of science, passion, brute strength, precision, speed and engineering… but above all of a partnership between Ferrari and Shell.

The production process began two years before filming actually started.

It was essential that trust from Ferrari was earned as quickly as possible, so a conscious decision was made to keep our film crew as small as possible. Three key personal pulled together to achieve this. Working in rotation as a single man crew the team filmed over a period of a year across five different countries. In order to create a cinematic look the documentary was captured on the new Sony F5 camera in S-LOG.

Whilst filming was over the course a year in reality the deadline for delivery was very tight. With the narrative only coming to an end ten days before transmission it was imperative that the post production solution was as smooth as possible. This meant the edit was taking place whilst filming was still in full flow and the story was still evolving. All 4.5 terabytes of data - some 75 hours of rushes were mirrored across three RAID protected drives allowing the team to work on the edit at the same time in different locations. This was essential for the mass of media generated and the tight deadlines whilst working online with Final Cut Pro 7.

The documentary was given its finishing touches with a full audio dub, sound mix via Pro Tools and colour grade using DaVinci Resolve.

The production process was completed by producing 15 different versions allowing for varying durations, markets specifics requests, broadcaster restrictions and foreign language sub-titling.