Now this for sure will be my most favourite project ever. The director of this commercial, is a French guy, by the name of Emmanuel Sapolsky, who found me exactly five days before the shoot of this commercial. The DOP who had to shoot this, had last minute change of plans. It’s February in Beijing and Chinese New Year is right around the corner. 90% of the people all have went back home.

I go to meet Emmanuel, who by the way is the most awesome guy ever, and he gives me his mood board and visual references for the shoot. He goes and tells me that I have exactly 3 to 4 days to make a lighting plan, find a rental house which is still working so to rent out the lights, find a camera rental place where I can get an ARRI mini with Cook S4 anamorphics.

Okay so I got on and I finished all this work and now we have one pre-light day and two days to shoot this commercial. We shot this commercial in a huge studio with four different sets. Now, we did not have the budget to rent out so much lights that we can light each and every set, so what we ended up doing was constantly moving the lights.

So one pre-light day and two production days equals 72 hours, for these 72 hours, we worked for 68 and slept only 4, but the end result was spectacular. Huge thanks to all the crew and people that were involved!

Director: Emmanuel Sapolsky
Producer: Xin Wang
Director of Photography: Yordan Yankov
1st AC – Chris McMillion
Production house: Drunken Dragon