In Tim White’s Journey Beyond for Clemenger BBDO Adelaide and Great Southern Rail, you can almost smell the gum trees.

Tim White’s career began much like any other creatives’, all slog and little reward. Then in 2011, STA travel took a punt on him and two friends. They were flown around the world for six weeks and made the Move, Eat & Learn films that achieved over a million views in their first day.

Suddenly, White was transported, he states perhaps too humbly, “from complete obscurity to moderate obscurity”.

More importantly, he was attracting attention for his own style of filmmaking. In 2013, Whitewas nominated for the Young Director Award in Cannes for his branded short film, Shaping History, Shaping Tomorrow for Keio University. The next year, he was nominated for his music video for DCUP’s (aka, Duncan MacLennan) Don’t be Shy, also filmed in Tokyo.

White and Melbourne production company, Plot Media, have just finished making Great Southern Rail’s ad for Clemenger BBDO Adelaide, for The Ghan and The Indian Pacific train holidays. He may well have just left any vestiges of obscurity in his dust.

White and his crew of six chased trains across Australia’s landscape by helicopter, chartered plane, car and foot to document the journeys of the two Australian trains. To White, the film shows off his signature style – combining fast-paced, intricately woven edits with original music scores.

“I was really interested in weaving a simple narrative throughout the commercial while maintaining the dynamic energy of their last ad, which I was a great fan of,” White said.

His audiences will be captivated (and perhaps, sold) by his evoking the experience of looking out the windows, by the train allusions he has dotted woven into his images, by the sense of vastness he has captured in the landscapes and the sense of wonder he has captured in the travellers, in his two minute film.

The young crew triumphed over remote landscape, long distances and a dozen locations in the nine day shoot.

“Shooting in outback Australia is always difficult as footage looks best in morning or evening light. We had to be up before sunrise to shoot each morning and travel great distances to capture the evening light at the next location,” White acknowledged.

Jamie Houge, Plot Media’s producer, was responsible for getting the crew from each outback A to B to maximise the commercial’s resources.

“Producing a large scale cinematic film involving talent, hectic schedules and coordination of big toys like trains, trucks and helicopters is always going to be a challenge, but we managed to maintain a very lean and cost-effective operation,” she noted.

The ad is being shown on TV, cinema and online. White is represented in Australia by Otto Empire.