How I Made this HARLEY-DAVIDSON Commercial (5 Camera Tips)

Published on July 28, 2021

Cinematography & Filmmaking

Camera, commercial, harley-davidson, product video

Lighting Vehicles

Vehicles are large objects and thus not so easy to light. However, there’s one very good trick to get beautiful lighting on cars and motorcycles. You simply place a large softbox above the vehicle.

You can do this either with a scrim or by hanging an actual softbox from the ceiling. This will roll-off the light, highlighting the curves of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as in our example.

Camera Movement

Now you’re ready to shoot! Camera movement is going to be a very important factor. There’re multiple ways to create movement. Even with a fixed camera and moving the light, you can interesting moving reflections.

When we think about camera movement, we learn towards gimbals, sliders or dolly systems. However, going handheld work just as good, if not better!

The problem with handheld movement is camera shake. To reduce that share, we need to move the camera faster. Luckily a vehicle is a still object, so we could shoot in slow motion. Making fast movements in slow motion still gives us a couple of useable seconds per shot.

Fiverr & 3D Animation

Big thanks to Fiverr for sponsoring this video! For a part of the commercial video, we worked together with one of the freelancers from their freelance marketplace. They made a very cool 3D animation of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle getting assembled.