The Challenge
SNCF Gares & Connexions asked us to film the exceptional restoration of the great passenger hall at Paris-Austerlitz station. Opened in 1867 and the second largest hall in France, it is undergoing a rare heritage restoration: 200 craftsmen, 7,700 sqm of glass roofing and 8,000 sqm of framework. Filming a worksite of that scale raises a problem easy to state and hard to solve: showing the sheer size without crushing the gestures of the people doing the work.
Our Approach
We arrived in the middle of the worksite, at its most telling moment: half the hall already restored, the other half still under scaffolding. We built the film on that dividing line, the before and the after held in a single frame — blackened framework and opaque glass on one side, the light back on the other. Filming was fast, in a station open to the public, without ever interrupting operations or passenger flow.
The Deliverable
A film that conveys the scale of the worksite, the technical skill of the teams and the new light given to a historic landmark. It strengthens SNCF Gares & Connexions communication with the general public and institutions, and leaves a record of the hall during its restoration — an archive as much as a communication tool.
Project images
