Featuring approximately one stunt every two seconds, the latest ad for Rexona deodorant is possibly one of the most action-packed commercials ever filmed.

Directed by Ivan Zacharias, Stunt City is a series of vignettes that depict men commuting to work, the only difference being that in this city it’s normal to perform outrageous stunts to get there. Cars careen by on two wheels, men jump off roofs onto moving buses and dangle from the landing skids of a helicopter, motorbikes smash through plate glass windows…Everywhere you look someone is performing a breath-taking stunt but, whatever it is, the important thing is that their deodorant doesn’t let them down.

Zacharias was keen to film as much in camera as possible, so The Mill’s Barnsley spent two weeks with the shoot in Australia working closely with the production and making sure that post could help that happen. Much of the later Flame work involved clean-up and de-rigging; removing safety harnesses and padding from the stuntmen, painting out the grips who’d had to push a car over onto its roof at a certain point and so on. “All in all we spent about a week and a half on it in post and almost every shot has had something done to it,” says Barnsley. “Some elements were retimed to choreograph better with the other stunts going on around them, while we also had to retime for continuity in the edit. In some scenes it would have been too dangerous to have three stunts going on at once, so they filmed them separately and I put it all together in Flame.”

Product: Rexona; Title: Stunt City; Agency: Lowe; Creatives: Simon Butler, Geoff Smith; Producer: Charles Crisp; Production Company: Stink; Director: Ivan Zacharias; Producer: Nick Landon; Editing Company: TVC; Editor: Filip Malasek; Post Production: The Mill; Producer: Helen Weil; Lead Flame: Barnsley; Flame: Adam Grint, Richard Betts; Airdate: 2nd May 2005