Today we have something a little bit different. Matt Workman a professional cinematographer, who recently created a channel called the Cinematography Database published a video dissecting a commercial featuring internet celebrity Casey Neistat video commercial for Samsung from a cinematographer’s perspective in terms of set, lighting and actual production.
First of all, if you didn’t watch the actual commercial – check it out. To be honest, when we first saw the commercial (we saw Neistat’s behind the scenes first) we were pretty surprised at how basic it was (that is a nice way of saying that apart from Neistat talking in an empty parking lot and a few bits of video from some online YouTubers – there is very little going on in this commercial).
Exactly because of that we were so fascinated by actually how much effort, gear and planing was required to shoot this video (which to many of you might look like something shot with an iPhone Galaxy).
While there are people who disprove of Neistat (or just flat out hate the guy) we actually believe that when it comes to telling a story there are very few people who do this better than Neistat. He also proves that you don’t really need too much equipment (or very expensive gear) to make good content. With that said, what we see in this Samsung commercial (which to be fair to Neistat he did not produce or shoot – just performed in) seems like a total overkill in terms of what it took to shoot compared to the actual result.
Still, Workman’s cinematographer’s perspective is very interesting if you are interested in the workings of a pro level video or commercial productions and how they work.
We will be bringing more of Workman’s video production dissections in the near future (he has quite a few of them – some of more visually interesting clips.