Emirates Float Glass: a corporate film for a Dubai Investments company

At a glance

The client

Emirates Float Glass (EFG) is the UAE’s leading float glass manufacturer and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dubai Investments PJSC, the diversified investment group listed on the Dubai Financial Market since 2000. Its plant in ICAD 2, Mussafah, Abu Dhabi, covers 320,000 square metres and produces 600 tonnes of glass a day, and its glass is on buildings such as Emirates Towers, Dubai International Airport and The Residence at Burj Khalifa.

The brief

EFG needed one film that tells the whole company story, from raw sand to the skyline: the plant, the coating technology, the export reach, the sustainability work and the people who run it. The film had to work on the large LED wall of the company’s exhibition stand, in meetings with architects, developers and investors, and on the company’s own channels.

Behind the scenes: five days next to a furnace

Float glass is made around the clock. The furnace is never switched off, the ribbon never stops moving, and the plant does not pause for a film crew. Every shot had to fit into the rhythm of a line that has been running without interruption since 2009, from positions the plant’s safety team agreed with us in advance.

Day one: the hot end and the cold end

We started where the glass starts. Raw materials go into a furnace that runs at over 1,500 degrees, and the molten glass flows onto a bath of liquid tin. October in Abu Dhabi is still well above thirty degrees outside; next to the furnace the heat comes off the brickwork in waves, and the operators work in heat-protective gear. We filmed in safety boots and gloves, kept the cameras out of the hottest air between takes, and checked every hall light for flicker before rolling, because industrial lighting that looks fine to the eye can pulse on camera.

The cold end is the opposite: a long, bright hall where robot arms lift the finished sheets off the rollers and the warehouse stretches further than the eye can follow. To show that scale we flew a small drone inside the hall, low over the conveyors, with the plant team clearing the route. The control room, where the whole line runs on a wall of screens, was filmed without stopping anyone’s work.

Day two: quality and the people on the line

Quality control, where every sheet is checked against the specification under inspection light; the engineers and operators who keep the line running; the water treatment plant; the exteriors at golden hour; and the construction site of the second float line next door. That last one needed care: the film shows Line 2 as what it is today, a site under construction, and not as a line already in production.

Day three: the management interviews

The interviews were recorded in the managers’ own offices with cinema cameras, controlled light and lavalier sound, with time after each interview for the B-roll of the same person at work: meetings, walk-and-talks in the corridors, the sales and technical teams.

Day four: the coating facility in Dubai

The second site, in Dubai, is where clear glass becomes high-performance glass: solar control, low-E single and double silver. The sputter line, the performance measurements and the glass samples were filmed in one day. Here accuracy mattered as much as the image: the coating technology in Dubai is different from the pyrolytic glass made in Abu Dhabi, and the film shows each where it really happens.

Day five: the general manager

A few days later we came back for the interview with the general manager, once his schedule allowed. Same light, same look, so it cuts seamlessly with the interviews recorded on day three, and it became the voice that carries the film.

In total, five shooting days on two sites and more than 900 clips, recorded in log so the grade could bring out the heat of the furnace and the clean light of the coating hall. The stills on this page are frames from the finished, graded film, plus behind-the-scenes phone footage.

What the client received

We built the film around the interviews, with motion graphics for the key figures, licensed aerial footage of the UAE skyline, a cinematic grade and a full sound mix. The client received four versions: a seven-minute 4K master, a 2304 × 960 cut for the LED wall on the company’s exhibition stand, an English-subtitled version and a version for the meeting-room screens.

Why it matters

An industrial company is judged by engineers, architects and investors who know what a real plant looks like. The film had to show the real line, the real people and the real numbers, at the image quality of a brand film. The same standard is available for any factory, plant or headquarters in the UAE: see corporate video production in Dubai and photo and video in Abu Dhabi.