Driving a photoshoot
What does it take to plan, produce and art direct a photoshoot? In short, a village. In reality, a clear vision, a prompt deadline and a lot of energy. And we had that in abundance when we produced the Car Finance 247 Brand lifestyle image bank.
01. Plan, plan and plan again
We started the photoshoot process with the Car Finance 247 team by making sure we all knew the purpose of the project – to bring a sense of reality into the brand world. Primarily an online product, Car Finance 247 knew they needed to bring more people into their imagery, to sit alongside the mobile screens of the interface and car imagery a plenty.
Defining the vision was first up, what kind of imagery do we want to create?
Accelerating Joy was the back bone of our thinking, we wanted to link to the feeling of being able to get finance on a new car and how that felt.
Working with photographer Ross Jarman, we presented a few visual routes we could take and settled on an approach. Once we had the vision, we could then begin to plan the intricaces these included:
– The location, what kind of home are we setting our scene in
– The family, who are we targetting and how can we show them in our imagery
– The look, what do they wear and what car do they drive
Essentially imagining a world of a family and building the imagery up of that in our heads. All of this fell into a shot list which would guide the running of the day.
An amazing external team with Face model agency and UK locations team helped to pull the home and family together for us.
02. Shoot day
On the shoot day, we had a full 8 hours to capture everything we needed. For those who have never been on a shoot before, the first shot always takes the longest. However, once we got ourselves in gear, we began to pick up pace and made amazing headway throughout the day.
On the day we wanted to convey a sense of fun and joy, one of my favourite shots turned out to be this. The play that comes with getting a family excited to go on a trip. Standing out from what you’d expect, and showing a life that comes with having the ability to go where you want to go.
03. Fine tuning and retouching
Over 1,000 images captured on the day, we then needed to whittle down the best images and deliver at least one image per scenario for Car Finance 247 to use, a selection document is always produced here. It‘s our job to give the team the best visual choices and giving them the foresight to select which ones felt right from our top options.
Only when we have a signed of set, we then go into retouching. Fine tuning the photos, colour grading, removing unnecessary elements, even brand colour matching. The final element meant bringing a soft purple glow into the imagery whenever we could to help anchor the shot back to Car Finance 247 and their brand.
04. Getting it out there
The Car Finance 247 team now have a full rounded suite of brand imagery which can be used on their website. A bank that they truly own, isn’t stock or AI generated. But instead a suite that defines what Car Finance Freedom means.
