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Ford film features Sheffield Forgemasters

Car giant Ford has chosen Sheffield Forgemasters’ mighty arc furnace as a centrepiece location for its latest Ford commercial vehicles advert.

The advert was shot over the course of one day, following the engineering company’s steel melting programme, as raw metal was converted into high-grade steel through its 90 tonne primary electric arc furnace and secondary vacuum arc degassing units.

It is the first time a large scale commercial has ever been filmed at Sheffield Forgemasters and the company waived its location fee, allowing the money to go to a local charity in memory of one of its former employees who sadly passed away earlier in the year.

Brendan Kendrick, sales and marketing director at Sheffield Forgemasters, said: “We receive numerous requests to film at our plant because there is simply no other facility like it within the UK, but the logistics of facilitating a film shoot mean that we agree to relatively few.

“We could see the importance of an association with a company like Ford and put measures in place to help them secure some spectacular footage, which places the latest Transit right in the centre of fast-paced melt shop activity with molten steel being created, something that has never been done before.”

The advert is now being aired in the UK and shows the latest Transit and other commercial vehicles being used in a wide variety of situations, but with a major focus on the positioning at Sheffield Forgemasters, which included molten steel featuring in most of the shots.

Kendrick added: “The process of looking after a large film crew, ensuring that they remained safe at all times, while protecting our own employees and ensuring that productivity did not suffer was extremely complex but it has enabled the film producers to secure footage that hasn’t been seen on TV screens before, other than through CGI.”

A location fee of several thousand pounds was donated by Sheffield Forgemasters to Weston Park Hospital Cancer Charity in memory of Nigel Hobson, a former refractories manager at Forgemasters, who retired in July 2018 and passed away in February this year.

Kendrick said: “The production team secured, what for them, has been some of the best footage they have gleaned in years of film making. The plant is incredibly spectacular and we were delighted that everyone worked so hard to make this happen.

“We are also delighted that the agreed location fee has been put towards such a meaningful local and charitable cause.”

The melt shop at Sheffield Forgemasters supplies all of the company’s steel to highly technical material characteristics required for castings and forgings which go into components for civil nuclear power, defence, offshore oil and gas exploration, materials processing and petro-chemicals industries. www.sheffieldforgemasters.com