Expanding on the launch of the newly styled Fiesta that we reported on a few weeks ago, Ford has crated a new interactive online site - this-is-now.co.uk - featuring a host of fashion, photography, music and movies. We caught up with one of the contributors, photographer and film maker Tom Dean, to find out what inspired him to shoot 360 Polaroids in a single day.

Working out of recently opened prod co Neon Films, Dean was commissioned by News International to shoot a film inspired by Ford's new Fiesta. The brief was wide open - make it look cool - and that's exactly what Dean's done, shooting a stop-motion style spot made up of a series of Polaroid shots that work on the zeitgeist theme driving the campaign.

What was the concept behind the film?

I was originally thinking about making a short film - probably some sort of rite of passage story. But I didn't want to make a film that looked like an ad - we didn't have the time or money to do something like that. So I decided to go the other way and skip narrative altogether. I just took the two concepts - car and fashion - and came up with an amalgamation of the two.

The image of the car on the turntable is from the car show, the Polaroids are a fashion icon, and the model is what links the two. So shooting on Polaroids was integral to the idea from the start. We did think about abandoning the Polaroid aspect, particularly as the technical difficulties became apparent, but I felt it was important to keep the two ideas balanced. And I don't think there will be another opportunity to do this, as Polaroid has gone out of production. I love Polaroid film and I'm going to miss it.

What was the main challenge on the project?

There were two big challenges. One was getting the animation right; timing the moves for the model and the camera, that was tricky. The other was lighting. We wanted to use constant light, but the Polaroid film and camera are limited in their capabilities - the camera has no manual controls at all and the film is slow, so we had to rig a system with flash and film lighting. It was probably the biggest production I have done, and the most technically challenging.

Because nobody had done this before, we had to come up with our own methods of working and protocols. It was an exhausting day. The film is essentially one long shot, and we only had time to do it once through, but we used up quite a bit of stock in testing and experimenting.

To view the film click here.

Behind the scenes footage can be seen here