CASE STUDY
CAF Italia
Inside the Nave 2 Rail Depot, Rome
For CAF Italia, one of the international leaders in the design and supply of comprehensive transportation systems and a leading supplier of rail vehicles to Rome's transport network, I produced a corporate film documenting the expansion of the company's railway maintenance operations in Rome. I filmed inside CAF Italia's active Nave 2 depot in 2024 — the facility where trains for Rome's Metro Lines B and C undergo intermediate and decennial overhauls.
The brief covered two parallel stories: the transformation of an existing industrial structure into a fully operational rail maintenance facility, and the human side of that development — the engineers and technicians who built it and now run it. The film needed to hold both, the industrial and the personal, in a single coherent piece.
Concept and Narrative
I structured the film around the transformation itself. What CAF Italia's engineers describe is not just a building project but a step up in capability: technicians extending their expertise to second-level maintenance, an old warehouse redesigned as a working railway depot, specialist equipment brought in to raise the facility's technological level, and a more distant depot closed so the operation could consolidate and gain from working under one roof.
The engineers speak plainly about the difficulty of it — finding a space with the right potential, drawing a layout that fit the constraints, and doing it with limited resources. I kept the film centred on their own account of that challenge rather than on corporate messaging, letting the people who did the work carry the story.
Visual Language
I approached the depot with a restrained, cinematic aesthetic that respected the scale of the space without dramatising it. The technical problem was coherence: the on-camera interviews needed controlled, naturalistic light inside a large industrial hall, while the operational footage had to feel live and uncontrived, shot around maintenance work that was genuinely happening.
I lit the interview positions for clarity and presence, kept framing deliberate and composed, and let the observational material breathe with the real texture of the depot — the bays, the equipment, the facility floor — so the two registers read as one film rather than two.
Production
I filmed inside a working depot, which meant coordinating closely with CAF Italia's engineering team to move around live maintenance operations without interrupting them. In pre-production I planned controlled interview setups within the depot for the on-camera testimony, then worked between the maintenance bays, equipment areas and facility floor for the observational footage.
On location the priority was a calm, concentrated atmosphere in which the engineers and technicians could speak precisely about their work, alongside the flexibility to capture the operation as it actually ran. I shot, edited, colour graded and finished the film in-house.
Deliverables
A corporate film for CAF Italia's corporate communications and internal documentation, presenting the company's operational development and technological investment in Rome.
Impact
The film gave CAF Italia a clear, credible record of a significant operational step — the creation of the Nave 2 depot and the expansion of its rail maintenance capability in Rome. By holding the industrial transformation and the people behind it in a single narrative, it documented not only what the company built but the expertise it developed to build it. The result serves both as internal documentation and as a piece of corporate communication about CAF Italia's technological investment in the city where it supplies and maintains a substantial part of the metro network.
For more of my corporate and branded film work, see my other case studies.
