One of our in-house photographers DarkDaze saw a band a year or so back at The Great Escape and offered to shoot a promo for them, they got busy, he got busy, all kinds of stuff happened. But then recently they got back in touch and we set up a meeting.
DD wanted to work on an idea that wasnt a traditional promo, something that was more in line with what he was regularly shooting. The band already look great, both on and off stage and we needed something that was show their prescence and style, but also hopefully encourage people to go check them out… We had a brief meeting where we were pretty much given free reign to work some magic, which is great for us, and the band were very willing to really work with our ideas.
2 days before the shoot, option number 1 was abandoned due to some potential set-build nightmares, and after a lot of rambling at Emma Sandham-King, one of the shoot stylists, DD decided on an all grey set, all grey styling… to kinda play on that horrific selective colouring that still plagues screens all over the world, and combine that with a fashion shoot aesthetic.
DD threw the idea over to M.Halls with a list of things that would look good painted grey, such as Flowers and sofa and carpet etc. Using our easy-erect-set©GS09 the night before, we got a living room in place, a very simple set- with hopefully enough attention to the details to pull it off. Matt had tracked down a Bureau, a Fireplace, picture frame etc, gave them a quick dust over with the paint gun and we were already for the next day.
Stevi and Emma of www.opheliafancy.com had been given the task of styling the band, sourcing as many grey variations as possible on what the band would normally wear - we can provide stylists for any promo shoot- its an extra cost but well worth it in our opinion, hopefully a good promo will be around for at least 6 months, but normally longer. But a skillful stylist will build on your own image, we dont do ‘make-over’ approaches to this kind of thing…
Tash and DD set about getting the lighting right for this, ideally we wanted a fairly natural soft, directionless and underexposed light into the room, so we sat the softbox on a boom, dropping it over where the ceiling would be. To even this out we had a smaller softbox pointing straight onto the set, slightly left of camera to even this overhead light. On camera left we bounced a wide-angle refelctor into a white board back into the set. (you should be able to see this in the second image below.)
Heels Catch Fire Promo
We then worked on adding some highlight to each band member to bring them out of the flat set- we used a technique that we normally use on our fashion shoots and used a mixture of snoots and barndoors to bring lines of light. We spent ages killing every shadow in the set- but it somehow looked too artificial so we dropped the height on some of the heads and ended up with some fairly deliberate cross lighting again….
There was a lot that went into this shot, from the initial ideas, sketches, set design and styling, to the lighting and shoot day itself….. if you would like to book or discuss a promo with us then please just drop us a line at we can work to most budgets and as you can see you’ll end up with a promo that can grab a lot of attention and help your band identity.
