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Press Release

Blackmagic Design announced that European cultural television channel arte has commissioned a new series of travel documentaries exploring the vibrant colors and cultures of the former Indochina region, shot exclusively on the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera.

Berlin based Story House Productions developed five programs, in which a small crew travelled across each of the countries that previously formed Indochina; Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. The production crew chose the Pocket Cinema Camera as it would enable them to capture beautiful images, while retaining a ‘backpacker’ look that would be the overarching theme for each of the standalone documentaries.

The challenge for Story House was how they would translate not only the physical beauty of the region, but also the essence of the country and what it is like to actually travel there. “To achieve that feel of backpacking through a country, we relied on traditional public transport throughout filming. Each of the documentaries also offers a glimpse into the lives of eight locals,” explains Christian Schidlowski of Story House Productions.

Christian directed the first two programs set in Vietnam and Cambodia. To ensure consistency, workshops were held with the two other directors, and DoP André Götzmann was present across all five shoots. The majority of filming was done handheld, and the team used the Pocket Cinema Camera’s film mode in order to access the camera’s full dynamic range and bring a real vitality to the footage.

André was extremely impressed by the image quality that could be achieved by a camera with such a compact form factor. “The Pocket Cinema Camera’s size was incredibly important in allowing us to film very natural scenes. The smaller the camera, the faster people forgot its presence, which enabled me to stay in eye contact with the protagonists and get physically close to people without disturbing them. I picked up the camera in the morning and didn’t put it down until evening; it became my constant companion. I captured so many little spontaneous things along the road, in a way I’ve never been able to before. The camera let me literally soak into the country.”

“Whatever we shot with had to be capable of producing both stunning landscape shots, for example, shooting wide angle to demonstrate the idyllic beaches across the region, but also needed to give us stunning detail in the close up portrait shots that we used when interviewing local people. As we were traveling with such a small crew, our lighting options were extremely limited, but we knew that wherever we were shooting, we would always capture great looking images with the Pocket Cinema Camera.”

From a director’s perspective, Christian was extremely pleased with the rich color scale that the Pocket Cinema Camera captured, for example in the marketplaces in Thailand, which are a whirl of bright fabrics, street food and streets packed full of people. “As we finished in DaVinci Resolve, the footage has been fantastic to grade. It was incredibly simple to import the footage into a timeline, and apply an overall grade to each of the films to make the vivid colors of the region really pop out. We knew from the start that the camera would be the right choice for our objectives, and this remains the case, now that post production is completed.”

The Asia From Above documentaries will be shown on arte, which broadcasts in France and Germany later in 2014.

Press Photography

Product photos of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and DaVinci Resolve 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 film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, 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 stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check www.blackmagicdesign.com.

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Press Release

Blackmagic Design announced that award winning director Derek Yee purchased the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K for his production team and to provide footage for his new film, “I Am Somebody.”

As the chairman of Hong Kong Film Directors Guild and a film director known for his critically acclaimed works including “Protégé”, “One Night in MongKok”, “Shinjuku Incident” and “Triple Tap,” director Yee was no stranger to Blackmagic Design's products before his purchase of the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K, as many of his films were graded on Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve.

When preparing for his film “I Am Somebody”, which tells the story of small time actors working as extras in Hengdian, the world's largest film studio, Yee wanted a portable compact 4K cinema camera. Chi Ying Chan, DP of the film, best known for his work on “The Man with the Iron Fists”, “DOA: Dead or Alive”, “Finding Mr. Right” and “Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame”, recommended the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K for its compact size, lightweight, ability to record 4K RAW and easy to use Blackmagic post workflow.

“It is a good camera for us since it has enough resolution and dynamic range for our film projects and the detail is quite amazing. We tried the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K to key out some blue/green screen footage and the result was satisfying, which means it could be used as a great CG source camera as well,” said Chan. “Its menu design is so user friendly that you can quickly locate the setting you want to adjust on the built in touch screen and it’s also good to see what you are shooting and have shot on the screen.”

“Due to the documentary nature of our film 'I Am Somebody', Mr.Yee thought that the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K would be extremely useful as the compact design of the camera would allow us to conceal the camera very nicely and would be able to capture some unique shots of real interaction between the actor and the people and environment around them, making our movie extremely authentic,” said Douglas Chang, coordinator of Yee’s production team.

Chang also noted the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K was great for location scouting because location scouts could take it to a remote location easily and capture some rare weather changes there, such as heavy snow, clouds, strong winds and storms, so they would not have to make a second trip back to the same remote location with heavy production equipment. “By bringing a lightweight portable 4k camera, we are very versatile and able to shoot whatever we like during the recce, which gives us a lot of time and cost saving advantages,” said Chang.

According to Chang, Yee wanted the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K for underwater shoots as well because Yee was an avid diver and underwater cinematographer. “As soon as he heard that the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K is able to produce film quality imagery with minimal accessories and manageable size, he asked his friend, who is the owner of the underwater housing company Nauticam, to produce a housing that fits the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K,” said Chang. “Mr. Yee does have several upcoming projects that will require underwater shooting. Purchasing the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K will give us a good chance to do tests and experiments.”

“The affordability of the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K means more talented people now could get their own high quality 4K cinema camera at a much lower cost, which would move the whole filmmaking industry to a higher level,” Chi Ying Chan concluded.

Press Photography
Product photos of Blackmagic Production Camera 4K 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 film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, 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 stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check www.blackmagicdesign.com.

Press Release

Blackmagic Design announced today that its Pocket Cinema Camera and DaVinci Resolve were used on a new ad campaign by SanDisk, one of the world’s top brands for memory cards.

“The World Is Memorable” campaign was produced by the Tokyo based Taiyo Kikaku production company and took three directors around the world to capture everyday life around the themes of life, passion and color. One of the directors, Eiji Tanikawa, and his DP, Senzo Ueno, used the Pocket Cinema Camera to capture footage as they traveled through India and France over the course of a week.

”Everybody carried a camera to shoot people they saw at each location,” Takao Inoue, Taiyo Kikaku producer, said. “They constantly shot anything interesting to them, and as a result, they captured enormous amounts of footage. Twenty seven hours of it.”

“I don’t think we could have achieved this job if we used big cameras. Carrying bigger equipment on locations makes the scale of the production bigger, which requires more staff. It also means a higher production cost. Bigger cameras are easily noticeable, so we would have to get permission for shooting everywhere we went. On top of that, even if we had enough budget to handle a big production and use big cameras, we wouldn’t have captured such great expressions from the people we shot with the Pocket Cinema Camera,” said Senzo Ueno.

“The Pocket Cinema Camera is the best camera for documentary or documentary like projects, which capture real people’s everyday lives like this SanDisk campaign,” explained Eiji Tanikawa. “It is nice, as the camera allowed me to shoot the subjects without them getting nervous. Usually, when someone has a camera pointed at them, they will feel tense, however when it’s over, they will relax. Our trick was to mimic the action of pressing the shutter button. People thought we had just finished taking a picture and became relaxed, but we were actually filming the moment.”

“The Pocket Cinema Camera has 13 stops of dynamic range, and I love the tone that the camera captures. When we finished filming, we edited the footage in our office. Not only that, but a colorist came to our office with his equipment to grade our footage. Since we shot ProRes, we could keep our workflow very simple, which allowed us to finish this project all in house,” said Ueno. “The edited timeline contained shots from various cameras, and the lighting conditions of each shot were different, so we had to make a consistent look for the entire timeline. With DaVinci Resolve, we could easily archive to balance out all the shots using a wide range of toolsets.”

After shooting, both Tanikawa and Ueno personally purchased Pocket Cinema Cameras because of the camera’s benefits. “Even if I am not working, for example, if I travel to New York and shoot something with the Pocket Cinema Camera, the footage can be used for my work, it’s so high quality. I couldn’t have done this before. The camera is very useful to film your own personal stock footage,” concluded Tanikawa.

SanDisk “World is Memorable”

Three leading directors in Japan traveled the world and captured irreplaceable moments. Watch all ten movies at: http://www.sandisk-jp.com/memory/

About SanDisk

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, is a global leader in flash storage solutions. For more than 25 years, SanDisk has expanded the possibilities of storage, providing trusted and innovative products that have transformed the electronics industry. Today, SanDisk’s quality, state-of-the-art solutions are at the heart of many of the world's largest data centers, and embedded in advanced smart phones, tablets and PCs. SanDisk’s consumer products are available at hundreds of thousands of retail stores worldwide. For more information, visit www.sandisk.com.

Press Photography

Product photos of Pocket Cinema Camera and 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 film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, 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 stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check www.blackmagicdesign.com.