Forgemasters Features Ford

Sheffield Forgemasters' 105 tonne arc furnace and melt shop operations have been used as a key backdrop for the latest Ford commercial vehicles advert.

The advert was filmed in one day, following our steel melting programme, as raw metal was converted into high-grade steel through the primary electric arc furnace and secondary vacuum arc degassing unit and featured the latest Ford Transit van.

It is the first large scale commercial to have ever been filmed at Sheffield Forgemasters and the location fee has been allocated to a local charity in memory of one of our former employees who sadly passed away earlier in the year.

Brendan Kendrick, Sales and Marketing Director, said: “We receive many requests to film at different parts of the plant because there is no facility like this within the UK, but the challenges of arranging and managing a film shoot mean that we agree to relatively few.

“We value the association with Ford and helped the film company to secure some spectacular footage, which places the latest Transit in the centre of fast-paced melt shop activity with molten steel being created, something that has never been done before.”

Footage of the Sheffield Forgemasters melt shop starts at 0:07 in the advert:

The advert is now being shown in the UK and shows the latest Transit and other commercial vehicles being employed in a wide variety of situations, but with a major focus on the positioning at Sheffield Forgemasters, which is one of the first main segments of the advert.

Brendan 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.

The melt shop supplies all of Sheffield Forgemasters' steel to highly technical material characteristics required for castings and forgings to make components for civil nuclear power, defence, offshore oil and gas exploration, materials processing and petro-chemicals industries.