I shot a Whiskey Commercial using a Laptop

Published on July 7, 2020

Cinematography & Filmmaking

Cinematography, commercial, laptop, lg gram, Lighting, Practical effects

Creativity is key

Who said you can’t use a laptop to shoot a commercial?! Let’s prove them wrong!

A laptop can provide great visuals for backgrounds or can even be used as a light or projector to reflect visuals. We decided to shoot a small but epic commercial with just a bottle of Jack Daniels Whiskey, a small LED light (the Aputure MC), our camera gear and the LG Gram laptop.

This shows that you can use ordinary objects that you have at home to create super cool shots. All you need is a bit of creativity and some planning. We wanted to have shots of a glass spinning around while we were poring the drink in. But we didn’t had a rotating disk. So with a bit of creativity we took a spinning wheel and attached a plank to it.This worked out great.

Putting the glass on the laptop screen combined with some footage from Storyblocks gave us some amazing shots where it looked like the glass was on fire. We also worked with a lot of focus shifts and out of focus shots, this creates a mysterious yet artistic image.

LG gram

Working with the LG gram is great, it’s super thin and light weight which makes it the ideal laptop to travel with. It has a high resolution IPS display with vivid but natural colors. Great for video editing.

Now they claim to have a battery life of about 17 hours but you can take this with a grain of salt. In my experience you can go about 9 to 10 hours with just doing office work and about 4 hours when editing.

The downside of this laptop is that it hasn’t got a dedicated graphics card, which isn’t ideal for visual effects. But the latest 10th generation Intel CPU makes up for that. Basic editing in Premiere Pro goes smoothly, we were even able to edit our RED RAW footage without any problem.

Conclusion, it’s the ideal laptop for creators who travel a lot!