VW Cross Polo (Shanghai)

I was hired to do this Making Of for VW China, while they were shooting a big budget TV commercial in Shanghai for their new model; VW Cross Polo. I was both director, cameraman and gaffer (for interviews) for this 12 minutes video.

2 days shooting (19 working hours the first day and 15 hours the second day!) and 10 days edit for this piece.
I used both Panasonic AF103 and GH2. 50%/50% of shot from both camera. AF103 was very useful for interview and time laps shot as everything is build in (micro XLR and time laps function).
AF103 was much better in term of handling White Balance (green screen) and GH2 was a very portable choice, but green mostly came out close to Cyan, despite all my set up trial.

I really enjoyed the potential of the scenery and lighting condition as this commercial was supposed to look like an adventure film shoot.
I got complete freedom on shooting and editing, which was very valuable for me. Production company, Agency are client were immediately pleased by the version A result and that ease a lot the editing for the final version you get here.

Client is from Germany and that helped a lot as local Chinese are often scared by originality and they are always asking to copy “reference” they dare to call “their idea”. I am thankful to VW China to offer me that opportunity to fully express myself. This video was for internal use for the company, and they finally asked for music title for copyright as they wanted to make it mainstream.

As I was busy, I didn’t shoot the HKG and Spain (post production) part. HKG was shot with a Canon 60D (in NTSC) and Spain with a small camcorder (NTSC too). My shot with GH2 and AF103 were all made PAL as China is PAL country and editing at 1080P 25fps was a real pleasure, thanks to Premiere CS5.5