USA – Blackmagic Design today announced that Brazilian audiovisual production company Chroma Films relied on Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K digital film cameras to capture the latest commercial for CCV Chevrolet, a prominent Chevrolet dealership group in Brazil. The commercial, was finished with DaVinci Resolve Studio editing, photo editing, grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio post production software.
Founded in 2014 in Curitiba, Brazil, by Jack Cotlevski, Chroma Films produces commercial advertisements, music videos, documentaries, branded content and narrative projects for a wide range of clients.
“As a film director, DP, editor and colorist, I’ve always been very involved in the complete filmmaking process, and Blackmagic Design has been a crucial part of it,” said Cotlevski. “This latest project with CCV Chevrolet was very exciting as the dealership has history in Curitiba since it was established in the 1980s, and the concept behind this commercial gave us the opportunity to connect that history through the vehicles themselves.”
The CCV Chevrolet commercial takes audiences through different periods of time, including a transition from the contemporary dealership into its past, and then returns to present day, which opened a very interesting visual challenge for Cotlevski and team.
Cotlevski’s approach was to keep the live action cinematography as the foundation of the commercial as he photographed cars, people and locations, and then used techniques to extend environments, reconstruct another period and create transformations that would have been extremely complex to produce conventionally. With two days to shoot the commercial and a week for post production, Cotlevski knew he needed reliable and efficient gear to deliver his project, so he turned to Blackmagic Design.
“I chose the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K and Pocket Cinema Camera 4K because we could get the image quality and flexibility we needed while keeping the camera package compact,” he explained. “We were filming dealership interiors, exterior locations and shots that required us to work very close to the cars or inside them. At the same time, I knew that some of the footage would go through significant post production and the live action images needed to remain strong enough to serve as the visual reference for everything we would later build around them.”
He continued, “As we shot the commercial, we were dealing with reflective automotive surfaces, interiors, daylight exteriors and images that would later be integrated with extended or transformed environments. The cameras captured the footage neatly in those different conditions while keeping a consistent visual language. Most importantly, the real photography gave us references for lighting, perspective, movement, texture and color.”
Cotlevski noted that one of the main challenges during the shoot was knowing that even though the material was captured in different spaces or times of the day, it would eventually need to feel like one continuous visual world.
“The Pocket Cinema Cameras gave us a strong photographic base when capturing the footage, and that gave me much more freedom in post production. Instead of trying to create every final visual element during production, I could concentrate on capturing the real elements correctly and then develop the final visual continuity in DaVinci Resolve Studio.”
He added, “A key sequence in the commercial begins inside a contemporary Chevrolet Captiva. As the camera moves outward, the Captiva becomes a Chevrolet Monza, and the contemporary dealership transforms into its historical 1980s version. The historical dealership environment was created, but the Monza itself was filmed as a real vehicle.”
To bring the story back to the present day, Cotlevski filmed a real Chevrolet Equinox near the Ferris wheel in Balneário Camboriú, capturing the actual angles and movement of the vehicle to later use that material together with the Monza footage and construct the transformation between the two cars.
“DaVinci Resolve Studio is where I brought all of those elements together,” he explained. “I used Resolve for editing, color development, shot matching, evaluation of the transformed material, image finishing and final delivery.”
Cotlevski said, “The biggest benefit for me was having editing, color and final image evaluation all in one platform. On a project like this, a transition can work technically but still feel wrong visually. The contrast can change too much, the color can shift, the image density can feel different, or the timing of the transformation can reveal the effect. Being able to move between the edit and color pages made that process much more fluid.”
“It was incredibly important on this commercial that all combined footage and images looked consistent and visually cohesive, and I believe we did a great job doing that,” he concluded. “Like many other projects I’ve worked on, Blackmagic Design has been my go to gear and I’m excited for what’s ahead.”
