swiss watch video.

The time on the dial is not a creative decision

Watch imagery has shown 10:10 since the 1950s: the hands frame the logo, clear the sub-dials and draw a smile. What is less widely known is that every maison has its own exact value.

To the second. In stills, that is a matter of patience. On film it means the seconds hand must be stopped or driven for the full duration of the shot — a shooting constraint in its own right, decided in prep, never on set.

Sapphire reflects twice as much

Sapphire has a refractive index of roughly 1.77, against 1.50 for common mineral glass. Applying the Fresnel relation, that gives close to 7.7% reflection per interface, against 4%. Across two interfaces, an untreated crystal therefore throws back considerably more stray light. That is the physical reason anti-reflective coating exists — and why a piece without it turns a set into a contortion exercise.

Depth of field collapses

A case is 40 mm across. What gives it its value — the bevelling of a bridge, the grain of a sunray dial, the edge of a hand — measures between 0.05 and 2 mm. So we work between 1:1 and 5:1, where the effective aperture is no longer the one engraved on the barrel.

Stopping down destroys resolution through diffraction and costs two to five stops of light. The only ways out: tilt the plane of focus per Scheimpflug, stack focus frame by frame, or write the shot around a focus point that travels.

What each frame rate buys you

• 120 fps — the balance wheel is legible, the escapement is still a blur.
• 240 fps — around 30 frames per vibration: enough for amplitude and rhythm, not enough to freeze the impact.
• 1,000 fps — 125 frames per vibration. You see unlocking, impulse and drop. This is where the film stops illustrating and starts demonstrating.

A tourbillon, by contrast, turns once a minute. It isn’t filmed fast — it’s filmed sharp, and that is an entirely different problem.

Flicker, and why it kills a shot

Above 100 frames per second, how your sources are powered becomes a subject in itself.

• Tungsten — safe from 5 kW up thanks to filament inertia; run on DC it does not flicker at all.
• HMI — high-frequency ballasts at 300 Hz or 1,000 Hz, which allow up to 1,000 frames per second with no beat.
• LED — cinema fixtures do not flicker as long as you do not dim them. The culprit is pulse-width dimming. We control exposure with distance, diffusion and ND, never with the dimmer knob.

A constraint nobody mentions: heat

At 1,000 frames per second the exposure lasts one millisecond. The light output required generates heat — and a running movement is a thermally sensitive object: the oil, the balance amplitude and the expansions all react. On our sets that translates into high-efficiency cool sources, lights killed between takes, and a watchmaker on hand.

• Lighting passes. One pass for the dial, one for the crystal, one for specular metal, one for the background, one for the flags. Recomposited, they produce an image no single setup can give. At 1:1, a two-tenths-of-a-millimetre discrepancy between two passes is visible.
• References. A campaign is never about one watch, but about a range: steel and gold, three dials, two bracelets. The same move replayed identically produces a strictly homogeneous library. That is where the machine pays for itself — not on the hero shot.
• Matching to 3D. Because the camera move is known numerically, there is no tracking to solve: the virtual camera is imported as is.

Light: you don’t light a watch,
you build what reflects in it

A polished surface has no colour of its own — it displays an image of its environment. Lighting a watch therefore means building the environment that will reflect in it, which is why a watch set holds more black card and diffusion than it does fixtures.

The gradient across a dial, that signature of the sector, comes from a large soft source placed very close, at a grazing angle, cut by a flag. Black is as active a tool as light. Cross-polarisation removes reflections, but pushed all the way it renders 18-carat gold dull and dead: we take it a few degrees off alignment.

And there is the least glamorous part of the craft. Budget half an hour to an hour of cleaning per piece before the first frame. Diffuse light is flattering but does not render material; direct light renders material — including dust and micro-scratches.

CAD describes manufacturing geometry, not surface states. It contains neither the bevels, nor the polished chamfers, nor the real geometry of Côtes de Genève. Everything has to be re-modelled, then the materials built: anisotropic reflection oriented to the brushing direction for satin steel, a multi-layer material for a lacquered dial, a thin film with its colour shift for the AR coating, a measured complex index for gold.

The right split is simple: 3D for what is physically impossible — the explosion, the assembly, the cutaway. Live action for everything that has to inspire trust: real material, real light, the watchmaker’s hand.

Generative AI cannot display your charter’s time

Ask an image generator for a watch showing 2:45. It will produce 10:10. Its training data is saturated with that position, and the researchers who documented it admit they do not know how to correct it short of full retraining.

It is an amusing test, but it says something serious: a generative model guarantees neither the fidelity of a logo, nor the geometry of an applied index, nor a bezel engraving. Which is exactly what a maison cannot delegate.

The market has already ruled. In December 2025, an AI-generated video published by Valentino — clearly labelled as such — drew hundreds of hostile comments. Getty Images research shows consumers judge a generated image as less valuable, and that transparency is not enough to win them over.

We use it for scouting, storyboarding and versioning. Never for the final product image.

Below CHF 10,000, motion control does not fit

A robot with its operator alone costs between CHF 4,000 and CHF 5,000 per day in Switzerland. If the budget sits below that, we shoot differently — on a rostrum, with manual passes and more compositing. The result is different, and we show you the difference before we start rather than after.

These are not global campaign figures

An international campaign with a signature director and worldwide rights runs into hundreds of thousands of francs, and it will be produced by an agency in Geneva or Paris. We do the same technical work — the same macro, the same motion control, the same demands on metal and sapphire — without the structure that comes with it. That is our proposition, and we prefer to state it rather than let you guess.

• Vertical is shot, not cropped. A 16:9 macro shot cropped to 9:16 loses the bracelet or cuts the case. Either the move is written for vertical with a 16:9 extraction, or we shoot two passes — which motion control makes almost free once the machine is set up.
• Pieces arrive insured and leave counted. Certificate of insurance before handover, secure transport, photographed inventory in and out. A representative of the maison is present whenever unreleased pieces are involved.
• The NDA is signed by the entire team, freelancers and post-production included. No personal phones on the product set, encrypted storage.

• A flawless piece costs less than a piece repaired in post. A scratch on a polished lug is not retouched once: it is retouched one hundred and twenty-five times for five seconds. And if it sits in a moving reflection, no tracking tool will propagate it. That is a line item, not an adjustment variable.
• Approvals take the time they take. Marketing, product, legal, management. We plan for three to five rounds and schedule them from prep, so they do not eat the release date.
• Swiss made is a legal commitment. Since 2017, the label requires at least 60% of manufacturing costs to be incurred in Switzerland. A manufacture film that suggests an origin commits the maison — which is why legal reviews the voice-over and the end cards.