Hamil Bros shoots the latest Champion Xpress advertising campaign with Blackmagic

Pocket Cinema Camera 6K and DaVinci Resolve software Blackmagic Design were the core technology of the filming of the latest Champion Xpress spot, a car wash that opted for the production services of Hamil Bros.

Jacob y Ross Hamil, accustomed to challenging productions, found a new challenge upon receiving the order from the advertising agency Flint Avenue Marketing to create a series of advertisements for your client Champion Xpress Carwash. After contacting the director of photography William Hellmuth, the Hamil Bros worked tirelessly developing a series of concepts for the spots, which would require a finish of first level in a certainly challenging environment, given the purpose of the announcement.

Hellmuth, accustomed to filming with Blackmagic Design cameras for years, opted for the model Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K since he sought to achieve a “cinematic appearance” with a “reduced” depth of field. The director of photography filmed the different spots in Blackmagic RAW at a constant speed and a 5:1 aspect ratio throughout the project: "I have not found another codec that I prefer over Blackmagic RAW. It is efficient, takes up very little space and preserves a huge amount of data and quality."

All advertisements carried certain challenges, but the titled Hard Work (Hard work) was the hardest. Set on a ranch, the crew began filming before dawn to capture the critical shots needed. The team had to deal with some days with winds of more than 48 km/h, as well as important creative challenges: "We shot a shot from inside a pickup truck, looking out through the windshield. During post-production, I had a hard time figuring out how to tie the ranch footage into the car wash footage, and I suddenly realized that Champion might have branded car air fresheners for cars. (...) Using a portable green backdrop, a C-bracket for lights, and a couple of spotlights, we set up the Cinema Camera 6K in the garage and let the wind blow over it. air freshener for a moment. We had the good fortune that its movement coincided with that of the vehicle, and no one noticed the difference,” commented Ross Hamil.

Post-production with DaVinci Resolve

Ross y Jacob They shared the editing and editing tasks, a task for which they opted for DaVinci Resolve Studio: "We know the performance of Blackmagic RAW perfectly. We know what to expect with the workflow, and having a limited deadline of one month, we knew we could trust this format and DaVinci Resolve to be as efficient as possible," says Jacob Hamil.

One of the keys to your production process is your decision to work in parallel in order to optimize processes and arrive on time to reduced delivery dates. The possibility of being able to work in Blackmagic Cloud is of great help: "I could be editing the 15-second ads, while he edits the 30-second ones. Then, he can be in charge of reviewing the shorter ones, and I can go into the master timeline and work on the graphic animations. This dynamic surpasses the previous ones, where the project hierarchy involved editing billions of XML files and then grading them to make sure that the editing changes had been taken correctly, in addition to other inconsistencies that could arise. "

"We completed the majority of the work in 28 days and we owe it to the collaboration on Blackmagic Cloud and DaVinci Resolve. Both platforms allow us to work extremely efficiently. Without a doubt, this is the most complex project we have ever worked on, but from the beginning we knew that we had the right camera and non-linear editing ecosystem to meet the deadlines, concludes Jacob, making post-production balance of the advertisement.

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