Mercedes AMG A35
“The other director was Tommaso Pizzamiglio of T2Films, who I’ve worked with before. But I think the person who made it such a great commercial was T2’s editor Matteo Vigani. He really was the secret weapon on this project.”
“The challenge for me was to shoot the Merc racing through the streets at night, with only street lights. However, the biggest downside to this production was how small the crew was - only two directors and our producer Isabel Moretti! No AC to pull focus, no gaffer, no crane, nor car-rig and no hair and make up. We had to do everything ourselves, and with very little time. It was a totally hands on.”
“The story-line to the commercial was to feature this famous dancer moving around the car in an impromptu dance. His dancing was a metaphor for ‘creating perfection from inspiration’. This project was a complete fusion of all of these different movements, which made the shoot super interesting.”
“By the time I landed in Frankfurt from the US, I was a full day ahead of the T2 team who were driving up from Italy. And so I spent that day, scouting different streets and public carparks where we could begin shooting the next day. Frankfurt is such an amazing city to shoot a car commercial in, because it has everything from slick modern buildings to older style architecture. And most importantly, it has some wide streets where the traffic drops off late at night.”
“On the first day of production, we spent it scouting and playing around with camera moves and setups. When the traffic lessened that night we finally started shooting some of the street scenes inside the car. But I wasn’t very happy with what I was getting. The bumps in the road and the sports suspension of the AMG, really messed with my shots.”
“So when we were shooting the dancer scenes in the studio, I also had to recreate some of inside car scenes from the night before. Fortunately, I had far more control in the studio where I could focus on the quality of the images. I had two Astera wireless led light tubes, that are just amazing. They were awesome for moulding light to the shape of the car. I was also able to make them pulse above the sunroof like passing street lights.”
“For this project I was using the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. It is not the camera you would immediately think of as A camera on a car commercial. But the BMPCC 6K can shoot in dual native ISO, which was incredibly important when you are shooting at night and also in a dark studio. Everything had to be sharp, so I needed as much flexibility with the ISO as possible.”
“With Astera tubes you can be super directional with your key-light. And because the BMPCC 6K is so good in low light, you don’t need all that much light to get a great shot. So for the shots across the back of the car we could shoot as low as ISO 160. We also played around with the shutter angle, staying at 180 degrees for most of the shoot. But I did drop back to 90 degrees to create some choppiness to the dance scenes in front of the car.”
“For most of the studio shots the ISO was between 160 and 400, shooting on my 35mm Leica for the close ups and my 90mm for any longer shots. I also used a polariser on the lenses because of the reflections that were coming off the car body.”
“Our game plan with all of the shots was to keep them all super short, at a couple of seconds, instead of the usual 4-6 seconds. Matteo our editor wanted to dynamically edit all of these super quick clips into something that was fast paced. By choosing to edit this way, we could be incredibly efficient with the way we shot this commercial.”
“Having the dancer interacting with the car meant he was constantly leaving body marks and finger prints. Which is usually a nightmare because it means more time cleaning with a bigger crew and longer shooting time. By keeping each clip super short and being clever with our light placement, meant that we could hide all of these marks.”
“After six hours in the studio, we were then into our final night of street scenes. We had a van to chase the AMG through Frankfurt, so Lorenzo (also gimbal operator) could easily hang out the door shooting off a gimbal. With no lighting department or even an AC to focus pull, it was pretty much down to us.”
“The first thing I noticed when shooting the AMG is the LED headlights are incredibly bright and that the rear lights are super bright red. The contrast between the lights and the color of the car was insane. Fortunately the BMPCC 6K shooting in Blackmagic RAW, has plenty of range for this sort of night shooting.”
“The BMPCC 6K features dual native ISO. So to keep the car sharp in this sort of crazy lighting environment I needed to shoot at f 4.0. So managing noise in this sort of low light is super important. I found shooting at ISO 1000, and sometimes as high as ISO 1250, gave very little noise. But at 1250 it does clip the highlights, which is why shooting in Blackmagic RAW is important. While we were sacrificing a bit of the highlight roll off for cleaner shots, I could then recover some of the highlight range in DaVinci Resolve.”
“Where my clips were super short, and the highlights were more important to me, I could simply flip to ISO 2500 to get the shot right. The thing I like about this camera is the way that Blackmagic RAW behaves in DaVinci Resolve. Because I am a colorist and cinematographer, it’s like having these two really powerful tools to keep you out of trouble.”
“I was never going to be able to match the rear light color to what I was getting in the studio. So I had to rely heavily on Blackmagic RAW to capture as much detail as possible. By shooting BRAW instead of ProRes, I could easily tone down the external lights in DaVinci Resolve while pulling up more detail in the car body.”
“I also shoot a lot on the Blackmagic URSA 12K, which is the size camera most DPs would have picked for a car spot. But for this shoot I needed to be super nimble working quickly around the car without rigs and lighting. So the success of this commercial came down to how well the BMPCC 6K could work in this sort of challenging low light environment. Having this smaller camera package and being able to pull your own focus, is truly a game changer.”
