NANO・UNIVERSE ANTI SOAKED
TC COMMERCIAL SHOT WITH URSA MINI 4K

Tokyo, Japan - January 30, 2017 - Blackmagic Design today announced that URSA Mini 4K was used to shoot popular Japanese fashion company and retailer nano・universe ’s “Anti Soaked” TV commercial. Color correction for the commercial was also done with Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve.

nano・universe is a Japanese clothing shop who sell their original brand clothing as well as selected other items that match their style, and have a number of shops all over Japan and an online shop. nano・universe is also one of the rare apparel companies who owns their own video team for movie and web productions in house. Their online site contains not only their fashion items for sale, but also original “Lifestyle” content for their customers.

The new commercials shot on the URSA Mini 4K are for the company’s new "Anti Soaked” original sweat stain proof T-shirts. Shuichiro Makino, a director/editor at the company’s Web/visual group directed, edited and color corrected the commercial. He picked freelancer Shohei Namitani as DP for this project, and Keigo Nakamura, a cameraman from the nano・universe production team.

“In the past, we had been mainly shot with DSLR, but after a couple of tests of Blackmagic cameras from a rental house, we were convinced that its cost effectiveness was way better than other cameras. From there we decided to purchase URSA Mini 4K as our main camera and most of the movies we produce now are shot with this camera,” said Makino.

For the “Anti Soaked” production, the URSA Mini 4K was used with a 30mm–105mm Canon lens, as well as with other prime lenses. Namitani said: “30mm-105mm is quite large lens, but the URSA Mini is so well built that it gives steadiness even holding such large lens. Also, it is so easy to use that it can be customized based on the shooting circumstance. For this project, I mounted the camera on a RONIN on location, and mounted on a DC slider to use like a crane shot in the studio. In such situations, I removed most of the accessories, such as a top handle, to make it as light as possible and used just the camera itself.”

Namitani continued: “There are scenes shot in a studio and on a beach in the commercial. Most of scenes were shot in high speed. I also used a Black Promist filter, which is often used for film shooting to make the light source look softer, which gave more cinematic effect.”

The footage was sent to nano・universe for post production, where they used DaVinci Resolve Studio for color correction. “I did not want it to look too advertising like, so I decided to keep the tone down for this commercial to make it less splashy. More like a European film. So, I did not do too much heavy grading. Rather, I took advantage of the camera’s original tone and did simple color corrections,” said Makino.

“We also shot in log, which gave us more freedom for color correction, however we could still pursue the color we aimed at with minimum color correction. Not only for this commercial, in general we, nano・universe , tend to prefer less a saturated look. So I like the look of original footage from the camera,” added Nakamura.

Nakamura also said: “Blackmagic Cameras are easier to use as they have simple setting menus. After the new camera OS update, Blackmagic’s camera are now even better. Other cameras have too many settings, which is troublesome for us to deal with on set.”

Namitani added: “We don’t want to waste a second when shooting. Especially for this project, the weather condition was really unstable. So we had a lot of pressure to finish up the shooting as quickly as possible. In that kind of circumstance, the menu setting’s user friendliness and fast start up of the camera saved us.”

“I’ve used many Blackmagic cameras and I feel the URSA Mini’s monitor is very good and easy to see. I usually shot with an external monitor attached on the URSA Mini 4K, but when I had to set it in tiny space, I took all the accessories and just used the monitor for both focus and color check. The URSA Mini is very useful for a small production shoot like this project,” Namitani concluded.

PRESS PHOTOGRAPHY

Product photos of the Blackmagic URSA Mini 4K, DaVinci Resolve and all other Blackmagic Design products, are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/press/images.

ABOUT BLACKMAGIC DESIGN

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.

