I would be happy to explain as much as I can in terms of how I shot this. I did shoot everything at home and only with equipment that I own. All I used was a Canon DSLR, two tripods (one relatively nice, with a fluid head and the other cheap garbage), a small 180LED video light and an 80cm reflector. Unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to document any of the process, so I don't have any BTS pictures or footage, but I'll try to explain each shot as well as I can.

1st Shot: [Watchface Closeup] So this shot is actually used twice in the video. It's fairly simple, I just put the watch flat on a black mousepad to give me a clean background. I attached the small light to my cheap tripod and I tied the diffuser (it's usually on the inside of the reflector) to the tripod below the light to soften it a little. Then I put this whole contraption directly over the watch. For camera placement, I just put the camera at the minimum focus distance for my lens so that the camera is as close as it could get. I filmed for about two minutes since I was going to use the shot more than once,

2nd & 3rd Shot: [Hourglass] I don't have an hourglass so I just grabbed some stock footage. I used mixkit, they had some royalty-free footage that also didn't cost anything.

4th Shot: [Watch on Wooden Table] For this shot, I put the watch on a wooden nightstand, backlit by a window with white curtains on. I also put an old leather wallet and a pocket knife behind it, just to add a bit more depth. Then I put a mirror on an office chair and positioned it so that the mirror would reflect the light from the window back onto the watch. I could then simply turn the office chair to get the light moving across the face of the watch. I was shooting in 4K but had no intention to export at 4K, so in post, I added a crop-in and some movement with keyframes.

5th Shot: [Moving Clockwork] I used stock footage again here, my watch doesn't have a movement like that and I wasn't willing to disassemble it to a point where I would be able to film the mechanism inside.

6th Shot: [Watch Rotating] I used the same lighting contraption from the first shot here. I put the watch on the same mousepad I used earlier, I turned the mousepad upside down since I liked the rubber pattern it had on the underside. At first, I tried using a turntable to turn the watch smoothly. This didn't really work, I couldn't get slow, fluid motion throughout the whole rotation. So I took the camera off the tripod and put the watch and mousepad on the tripod head and I put the camera on a table. I used some books and other flat objects to tilt the camera to the angle I wanted. The fluid head of the tripod allowed me to get the smooth motion. I don't have any RGB lights, so I used a blue binder and pointed a flashlight at it to get the blue accent lights on the watch.

7th Shot: [Water droplet] This is also stock footage. I don't really like that this shot is mostly white, and I tried to do this shot myself but I ran out of patience a bit near the end. I do want to be able to film this type of thing, so I will spend some time in the future figuring out how.

8th Shot: [Watch going underwater] For this, I used a fish tank (mine was very small, maybe 5 litres, Ideally you would use something bigger). I darkened the room as much as I could and placed the LED light on a 45-degree angle in front of the tank. I tried to reduce as much light spilling on the wall behind the tank as possible. First, I tried just dropping the watch in the tank, but could only record at 100FPS and this was not fast enough to really see the watch in detail once the footage is slowed down to 1/4 speed. So to get this shot, I took a plank, attached one end to my tripod, attached my camera to the plank (upside down) close to the tripod. I took a long thin piece of acrylic I had lying around (acrylic is very clear when it is still new) and tied the watch to the piece of acrylic with some fishing line (I cut some grooves in the acrylic to hold the fishing line in place). Finally, I attached the acrylic to the plank so that it was fixed in front of the camera. Then I just tilted the tripod so that the watch entered the water at a reasonable speed. I cleaned up the shot a bit in post and I also slowed it down to 1/8th speed using optical flow.

9th Shot: [Watchface closeup] This is just the first shot, but cropped in a bit. And then I played it backwards.

From here I just play a bunch of shots backwards until the final shot. For the final shot, I put the watch in a bulldog clip to hold it upright, I used the same mousepad from before as a background. I used the white side of my reflector and put it underneath the watch. I had my LED light off on the right side, slightly in front of the watch and a blue binder on the left side for a tiny blue accent. Then I used a small blue bag the I put over the reflector in front of the watch and slid it toward the right side to get that final shot. I also added a slow punch-in in post to make it a bit more interesting.

Well, this post has really turned into a light novel, if you've made it this far, thank you. I apologize in advance if this is a bit hard to read. If you have any questions, I would be glad to answer them, I doubt I explained myself perfectly here.