Nowness, the platform for creative excellence in storytelling, linked up with luxury car brand Mercedes Benz to create the short film ‘The Moment Before’ targeted at the China market. The Director Tom Hardiman, A.K.A. Dear Mr Quistgaard, wanted to explore the dynamic comparisons between future thinking engineering and the exacting movements of elite synchronised swimmers.

Aquabatix synchronised swimmers XiXi Wang and Yixin Zeng started synchronised swimming together in Guangzhou back in 1998. After fifteen years apart, the childhood friends both found themselves in London and were reunited to swim together again with this project, that depicts two bodies moving perfectly in time.

The story follows their day in training. From waking up in separate homes, but at the same time, to leaving for training in their Mercedes, to being in the pool together training. A special camera was used that allows the viewer to see what is going on both above and beneath the water, seeing two sides of the performance when normally you only get to see what is going on above the surface.

The short film was shot on location in Copenhagen, Denmark. Both XiXi and Yixen not only spent a day in the pool being filmed for the water content, but also driving brand new Mercedes cars around the city and being filmed in two different apartments. XiXi jokingly said “ I was not nervous at all driving a brand new Mercedes in central Copenhagen just a few weeks after passing my driving exam in the UK on theleft hand side!” Yixin, hasnot got a driving licence, so the production team had to make it look like she was driving. Yixin said “the talented production team made me a fake wheel and have me fake drive on the passenger side and then flip the image.”

The routine was specifically choreographed for the film, with Aquabatix spending a day in London rehearsing the sequence with Director Tom Hardiman, making sure the sequence was working to his vision and brief and his ideas of how to film the routine matched that of the movements.

The film is currently hosted on the Nowness platform. The production team behind ‘The Moment Before’ was London based Somesuch.

Please contact info@aquabatix.com for all underwater production enquiries