The road is calling for Road Safety Scotland
Fight Gravity director Richard Paris Wilson turns the Scottish Government's road safety brief into a dark Highland dream.
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The Scottish Government's new motorcycle safety campaign opens with a ‘voice’ of the road itself.
In The Road is Calling, made with agency Leith and production company MBP for Road Safety Scotland, the road itself speaks to riders, seductive one moment, threatening the next. And in Dream Road, director Richard Paris Wilson's extended cut of the film, that voice gets room to cast its full spell.
"Chris had thrown around the phrase 'the road is calling,' " says Wilson, of Leith copywriter Chris Watson. "I loved the idea that it wasn't the destination or even the journey, riders were often drawn to the road itself. The logical endpoint of that is the landscape fades away, leaving us with the asphalt and the white lines."
The film drifts through red-soaked dream sequences, a sleeping rider, a portal of colour, smoke swallowing the road. "The red of a sunrise carries him inside, bleeds into his dream, and the red of the smoke snaps him back," Wilson explains. "And then we end with the landscape falling into nothingness, which leads to its own mystery." The campaign film's most talked-about image, the tarmac coiling into a snake, was a survivor of a much wilder early treatment. "The original approach was full of ideas in that vein. There's definitely some unexplored territory there," says Wilson. "But we kept that snake moment because it's a shortcut to the feeling of unease."
Credits
View on- Agency Leith/London
- Production Company MBP
- Director Richard Paris Wilson
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Credits
View on- Agency Leith/London
- Production Company MBP
- Director Richard Paris Wilson
- Copywriter Chris Watson
- DP Piers Deseilligny
Explore full credits, grab hi-res stills and more on shots Vault
Credits
powered by- Agency Leith/London
- Production Company MBP
- Director Richard Paris Wilson
- Copywriter Chris Watson
- DP Piers Deseilligny
Shooting Scotland's most photographed landscapes, Wilson and DoP Piers Deseilligny set one rule. "Pretty is cool, but pretty is everywhere," says the director. "There were pretty mountains everywhere, but Piers and I were both fighting that instinct. We wanted to rip the postcard up and find ways of filming that felt unique to this project, fast, distorted, reaching for the poetic."
The production took place over four days: two on the A87 and roadside, two in the studio. On the road day, police-managed stop-and-gos gave the crew roughly five-minute windows to send bikes through smoke-grenade-lined bends before traffic resumed "a real Rubik's cube," Wilson says. At the centre of it rode Ally Johnson of Police Scotland's motorcycle unit. "Nobody else in the world was more qualified to be at the centre of this."
The hardest shot was the closing aerial, an FPV drone swooping past the rider at 50mph to hang dead centre over the road nailed, Wilson says, by Notion Aerials' Jordan Tiernan in a break between rain.
Dream Road is Wilson's tenth project in Scotland, he got married in Glen Etive, and the affection shows, right down to the shoot's strangest tribute: a local spotted the red-lit night unit and reported on Facebook that the military were transporting a UFO.
"It felt like we were all on an art project together, chasing shadows, capturing light trails in the dark, experimenting with smoke grenades," says Wilson. "And yet at the heart of it was a real purpose. It was intended to help. Not every piece of work can and should do that, but this was special."
