FIAT sends a message that the big things and the little things in life are worth taking in and enjoying. It explores the differences and similarities between Chinese and Italian culture as part of their launch in China. The narrator, with an Italian accent and comedic delivery, advises China to slow down and see that it’s a beautiful life.

The timeline was the first issue: we had a fixed deadline to meet the opening of the auto-show in Shanghai.

Ralf applied a documentary-style of shooting in order to capture the authenticity and movement of the city.

We all arrived jet-lagged to Shanghai and started shooting immediately in public places to capture as much urban footage, which we only had one day, from dusk till dawn, in the city before heading to South East of China to capture a contrasting Chinese rural life. We decided to shoot on the new (at that time) Nikon 4D because of it's small and flexible nature; perfect for this job as we had lots of fast traveling to do across the hectic city. We had 5 people behind 3 cameras. While we tried to checking for talent releases and gather all the info needed, we had the challenge of keeping up with Ralf's pace as he would run around locations in order to capture spontaneous real moments that give this film its essence; these moments happened in seconds time.

After Shanghai, we traveled to Sicily and Rome. In Rome, we used scooters and vespas as our only means of transportation because of the high traffic volume that would slow down our tight shooting schedule.

To meet the deadline, we decided to sacrifice sleep to begin the editing process, and flew the editor from Berlin to Rome to begin the footage selection.

After shooting, we send all the footage to Berlin to continue edit, and you can just imagine the amount of footage that had to be sorted through and selected from 3 cameras. Sleepless nights in Berlin became our routine for the following weeks, as we sorted through the footage with a historian from Italy and a historian from China to capture the authenticity of these two cultures.