Most TVs and tablets have one job in a commercial: look bright, saturated, and impressive. NXTPAPER is the opposite. TCL designed it specifically to look like paper — matte, soft, low-glare, easier on the eyes. Which means the entire commercial production playbook for “shooting a screen” goes out the window.
Here’s how we approached it.
The brief: don’t make it look like a TV
The first conversation with TCL was about what NXTPAPER isn’t. It isn’t a vibrant gaming display. It isn’t an OLED. The whole point is that the screen surface diffuses light the way a sheet of paper does. If our spot looked like every other tablet ad — high-contrast, glossy, oversaturated — we’d be lying about the product.
So the lighting plan, the camera, and the grade all had to be tuned around making the screen look matte, organic, and tactile.
Lighting: kill the reflections
On a glossy screen, you fight reflections constantly. On NXTPAPER you can almost do the opposite — light it like paper. We used larger, softer sources at oblique angles, no direct sources hitting the screen, and let the surface do its job. Polarizers stayed in the kit. We didn’t need them.
For the shots where we wanted the device to feel like it belonged in a real environment — kitchen counter, café table, airplane tray — we matched the practical light that would actually be there. Window light, a warm bulb overhead, ambient room. The screen took those sources and absorbed them like paper would. That’s the entire selling point.
Camera: ALEXA Mini LF on Cooke S7s
Spherical glass, not anamorphic. We didn’t want lens character pulling attention to “the look” — we wanted the product to feel honest and the framing to feel close to how someone actually uses the device. Lots of macro work, lots of hands on the screen, fingers tracing across e-reader text and color illustrations. The Cookes gave us the warm, slightly soft falloff that pairs well with NXTPAPER’s matte surface.
The hardest shot: the side-by-side
Every product spot like this has the comparison shot. Glossy tablet on the left, NXTPAPER on the right, both displaying the same image. The trap is making one look obviously worse — that reads as fake. The honest version: light both fairly, let the difference show itself. The glossy one reflects the room. The NXTPAPER one doesn’t. Done.
What we didn’t do: blast the glossy with a hostile glare, which would have looked staged. The product is good. It doesn’t need a helping hand.
The grade
Warm, low-contrast, organic. We pulled a stop out of the highlights so screens didn’t blow, gently lifted shadows so the matte surface read as soft rather than dim, and stayed away from the punched-up saturation you’d normally use for tech advertising. The grade ended up looking closer to a lifestyle spot than a tablet ad — which, again, is the whole idea.
What we’d do differently
If we shot it again, we’d build in even more handheld coverage. NXTPAPER is fundamentally a tactile product — the paper feel is the story — and the moments that landed best were the ones where the device was being held, used, lived with. The locked-off product hero shots were necessary, but the BTS-style usage shots are what sold it.
Have a product that breaks the normal commercial playbook?
Those are the campaigns we like the most. Send us the brief and we’ll figure out the right way to shoot it.
