Production Direction: Launch Promo Video and Photography Shoot

Background

Ahead of launching a new city for the Coast Bike Share product, a launch video explaining the system within the context of downtown was needed. Additionally, a new content-focused website was in the final stages of design, and specific photography was required to highlight the brand within the layouts of the pages.

Project Details

Goal:

Within a day, film and shoot the content needed to create a sixty-second promotion video while capturing required photography for a new website launch.

Challenge: 

There were many challenges that I needed to handle as director of the production ahead of and during the day of the shoot. Thankfully, I had a photographer and videographer that had worked together many times before and brought creative input of their own to the process enhancing the story further. Some of the challenges included:

• • Developing the visual storyline, which would have no narration.

• • Coordinate a diverse group of models, reflecting the various buyer personas of the product.

• • Location scouting, timing locations with the direction of the Florida summer sun.

• • Shot setup, outlining the number of shots to be captured within each location.

Solution: 

Careful planning had to take place before the day of the shoot to ensure success. First, meeting with the production team we finalized how the brand was to be portrayed, the story, and some of the targets we aimed to capture, particularly regarding the layout of photos. With the story in place, I then had to determine the best locations to achieve each of the messages, scheduling according to the sun. For instance, when discussing the use of bike share as a commuting tool, it makes visual sense to shoot that segment early, when the sun is low — picking a location that shot from the east and looked west best captured the sun and our targeted messaging.

Next, considering the length of our shoot, all day, and the need for a diverse demographic of models, I scheduled each group for one of our four main locations, keeping each for only 90 minutes. This maximized the model’s enthusiasm while keeping the budget low. Additionally, because we were shooting video and photography simultaneously, this afforded us to have additional shot setups at each location, each expressing a different message without time-consuming location changes. This stretched a four-location shoot to fifteen giving us more material to work with across the first year of operation.

Finally, on the day of the shoot, I kicked off each location with a quick brief outlining the goal of the shot, the various setups we aimed to capture, and how each person on my staff, film crew, and talent were to be placed to maximize shot time while minimizing stress on the models. With this coordination, we could wrap each location on time and sometimes capture additional shot setups beyond those planned.