Rupert Sanders of MJZ directed this Ford Motor Company :30 titled “Proving Ground” from Wieden+Kennedy (W+K) New York. Lensed by DP Roman Vasyanov, ASC, RGC, the spot cuts through the high-octane blur of typical racing footage with “moving portraits” inspired by the paintings of Caravaggio. Using dramatic lighting and radical naturalism, the sport of F1 auto racing is slowed down to show the deliberate, gritty choreography of engineers and drivers fighting for fractions of a second.

The spot is part of an extreme racing campaign that marks the return of Ford to F1 and includes a “micro-docuseries” of spots which debuted on Apple TV this past weekend, tapping into Apple’s sequential viewing capabilities, running across the three days of the Australian Grand Prix. (Ford is the official F1 sponsor on Apple TV.) Instead of interrupting the coverage, the “micro-docuseries”--directed by Behemoth (the W+K New York creative duo of Zak DeLange and Andrew Congleton)--tells stories during what would normally be ad breaks. The series of :15s star real Ford Racing engineers as parallels are drawn between extreme racing and how that engineering innovation makes it mark on Ford vehicles for consumers.

Also slated to debut during college basketball’s March Madness is Ford’s “The Off Road to Greatness,” a film--directed by Sam Pilling via production company Magna--which takes a relentless, unforgiving approach to capturing the spirit of off-road dirt racing, focusing on the visceral physical toll the terrain takes on both machine and driver.

Here is the Sanders-directed “Proving Ground”: