Two campaigns
One shoot day.
Two campaigns.
You have already paid for the location, the build, the talent and the crew. Usually that day goes home with one finished thing. It does not have to.
However you book me, the day can produce the other thing
The call sheet usually says unit stills, or on-set photography. The client says behind the scenes. What I actually do is come embedded: attached to your production and on your schedule, with my own deliverable. Sometimes that means working your setups after the main camera clears, sometimes building my own, and some days we split to cover different talent. That gets decided in prep, off what the deliverables need.
Behind the scenes and advertising are different licenses →On a Bacardi campaign built for the VMAs I was embedded for stills and motion. The interviews went out on their live stream and the stills went to social, PR and the site.
01
You booked the film
I come as the stills camera. On Chumba the crew shot the star, stepped back, and I stepped into the same setup with my own angles. None of it was called behind the scenes.
02
You booked the stills
I come as the motion camera, beside the photographer or on setups of my own. Most of my fashion work runs this way: seasons of Lilly Pulitzer and Zenni shot beside Ben Watts, and years of Victoria’s Secret beside their photographers.
03
Either one
Sometimes I am not covering your film. I am making a different one. Timberland put me on a commercial week in Colombia as a department of one. Nobody asked for 26 minutes, and nobody asked for it to be cut like a dance piece to an original score. The agency’s owner said it stood level with the commercial itself.
What it saves
| What changes | The usual way | With me |
|---|---|---|
| Shoot days | 2 | 1 |
| Talent and location bookings | 2 | 1 |
| Negotiations and invoices | 2 | 1 |
| Finished campaigns | 1 | 2 |
I am not a second crew. I am one person, plus an assistant when the day needs one. Some setups run off your package, some off mine. One lighting plan and one show LUT built in prep, so the film and the stills look like they belong to each other.
Three proofs,
ten years apart
The booking
Director and cinematographer, beside the campaign photographer
↓
What came off it
Two product lines in two days on the water in Malibu. I shot the film off Ben Watts’s setups, his bounce and his diffusion, so nothing was built twice. Film and stills ran across paid social and the Zenni site.
Zenni · Portfolio One→
The booking
Product stills inside someone else’s production
↓
What came off it
The day ran behind, so I directed their social package too. Nimble licensed the work and kept the client.
Capri Sun · Nimble Content→
The booking
The making-of unit on a series finale
↓
What came off it
Five days of footage in Havana and a custom show LUT, for the first American scripted series to film in Cuba since 1959.
Showtime · Refugee Productions→
On an IBM campaign it was the photographer, Christian Stoll, who recommended me. I ran motion beside him, and on the shared setups we built the lighting to work for both. A photographer putting your name forward means you are easy to stand next to.
See the IBM campaign →