Blackmagic Design announced that its Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K camera was used by director Yu Gang to shoot a series of "Three Body" themed web commercials starring famous Chinese actor Feng Shaofeng for the gf skincare products of Shanghai Jahwa, one of China’s oldest daily used chemical companies.
 
Inspired by the award winning science fiction trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” (aka “The Three Body Problem”) by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, in which the alien Trisolarans evolve to be able to hydrate and dehydrate their bodies to adapt to the harsh environment on their planet that is part of a stellar system with three Suns, China’s leading social creative company Verawom designed the commercials to highlight gf’s ability to retain moisture. Verawom trusted director Yu Gang with this project.
 
The series of commercials for gf were shot with director Gang’s own URSA Mini 4.6K, with which he has also shot promos for popular Chinese cosmetics brand Herborist and fashion brand Erdos.
 
“Before this project, my cinematographer hadn’t used the URSA Mini 4.6K camera. But by the middle of the production, he had found its latitude was so great that he didn’t have to worry about the possibility of getting blown out highlights. After the production, he and the assistant director, who often shoot car commercials, were convinced the URSA Mini 4.6K is a great camera for high end TVC projects,” said Gang.
 
All footage was recorded to 4:1 RAW. “I like the URSA Mini’s ability to record 4:1 RAW because it gives you great quality and much more freedom in postproduction, but the files are even smaller than ProRes 444. The footage looks clean without too much noise. If you want it even cleaner, a pass of temporal noise reduction in Resolve helps. The combination of the URSA Mini and the included DaVinci Resolve Studio is another strength of the camera,” said Gang.
 
Speaking of the URSA Mini and DaVinci Resolve Studio bundle, the director also mentioned “the slate feature in the URSA Mini is great for shot logging, which makes takes selection very quick in post because you can do it when you do transcoding and rough edits in Resolve, making the editor’s life much easier. For long form projects, the more information you log, the more organized in post.”
 
In the spots, there is a scene where the character floats in a spaceship due to zero gravity. It was recorded at 50fps in 4:1 RAW to simulate the absence of weight. “We didn’t have to use lower recording quality for high frame rate recording so the image quality is the same as that of other scenes,” he said.
 
All footage was transcoded on set with DaVinci Resolve Studio to 1080p ProRes 422 HQ for editing. When the editing was finalized, the timeline was rebuilt in DaVinci Resolve Studio with the original RAW footage for grading.