Sunday Spotlight: 10/16/11

Sunday October 16th, 2011

Sean at APA Midwest

Tuesday October 11th, 2011

by Sean Stone

My trip to Chicago began as these things often do—very, very early. A train and a plane later, I was riding the fabled “El” from Midway to downtown. The experience started out much like the subway in New York or Philadelphia, until a panhandler boarded and demanded everyone’s attention. “Come on…” “This guy again!” “Every day for two years…” passengers grumbled to each other. I was blown away. Not by this guy’s bold violation of Chicago Transit Authority’s “No soliciting” policy, but the fact that these strangers were speaking to each other. What? That’s right, people get friendlier when you leave the east coast, I forgot. Then there was a not so friendly interaction between the solicitor and a businessman, which made me feel more at home. But wait! After the guy changed cars, once again, these strangers started talking about what a crazy thing had just happened. How very unexpected!

Still intrigued by the Chicagoland friendliness, I headed over to the Intelligentsia coffee shop to meet up with David W Johnson, who had just finished a shoot in Millennium Park. David may not be much of a coffee drinker, but he has good taste in coffee shops. We had a great chat about the Chicago market, his recent projects, and his experience with Wonderful Machine. We’ve been helping him schedule quite a few meetings and he told me he’s been very pleased with the results. We walked through his portfolio and I gave him a few pointers.

David W Johnson

From there, I headed around the corner to The Gage for a lunch meeting with the delightful Patti Schumann. Patti has years of experience representing outstanding photographers, including WM members Terry Vine, Saverio Truglia, and Joe Wigdahl. She was very familiar with Wonderful Machine and our roster, but had plenty of questions about the extent of our services, our relationships with clients, and how we work with reps without stepping on any toes. We had a pretty lengthy lunch as she’s very easy to talk to. It was interesting to hear her perspective on estimating, branding, and photographic vision, among everything else we covered.

After lunch, I had a few minutes to kill, so I spent them wandering the park in search of that big shiny bean I’ve heard so much about. It proved harder to find than most big shiny beans, but when I finally found it, it was worth the hunt. It’s pretty amazing!

The big shiny bean.

From there I headed over to the Old Oak Tap, where I had the pleasure of meeting up with Matthew Gilson, Carlos Moore, and Beth Rooney. We talked about the usual—parenting, camping, surviving a move from The South to a freezing northern city, beer and wine, travel, and so on.

Carlos and Beth.

From there it was a quick jaunt down the street to the main event, the APA Midwest Portfolio Review. The review went by quickly, as usual, but I had the pleasure of looking at plenty of great work. Most of the shooters were from Chicago, but a few came from neighboring states just to talk to me…and maybe the great group of reps including Patti Schumann, Melissa Hennessy, and Katie Swanson, among others. I was especially interested in the lifestyle work of event organizer and APA Midwest chair Callie Lipkin, food by Simon Griffeth, and portraiture from Clayton Hauck.

The review. Photo by Ashlley Duarte

At the end of the event, I said my farewells and bedded down before my early morning flight back to Philadelphia. After my adventures with Craig and our extra day in Toronto, an on time departure and arrival has never felt so good. See you next time Chicago!

Saverio and the Flower Girls

Monday August 15th, 2011

Recently, Saverio Truglia took on a fun project with the brand revitalization agency, Woodbine. Woodbine describes itself as, “a sherpa, a defibrillator and an incubator to brands,” with their latest project focusing on bringing back life to the flower bulb industry. They planned to introduce bulbs to a new generation of gardeners through the creation of the Anthos Dig.Drop.Done Education campaign. Dig.Drop.Done aims to, “introduce flowering bulbs to a new generation of potential gardeners and demystify the bulb-growing process, while reminding avid gardeners of the low-maintenance, returning beauty of bulbs.”

For the campaign, Woodbine created three characters — Marcy, Juliana and Evelyn — to represent the brand, entertain consumers and educate potential gardeners about the ease and fun of bulb planting. Woodbine then hired Saverio to bring these three women to life.

Woodbine wanted Saverio to create print and video for their marketing plan. They handed Saverio loose print concepts and video scripts and let him take it from there. The creative freedom excited Saverio and even though he was told the videos could be simple, taking head pieces, he decided to go above and beyond with the project. “I felt there was an organic opportunity to tie the video more closely with the print. So I brainstormed with them about their three characters and what I wanted to tell about their unique lives.”

After deciding to take the videos to the next level, Saverio got to work,

First, I fleshed out the visual characteristics and narratives of the print (i.e. Evelyn should be nude in a bubble bath drinking a Cosmo and reading a romance novella) then worked backwards to develop six motion storyboards that could fit into our production timeline and budget. (i.e. Evelyn is now seated  rubbing lotion on herself talking about her hunky gardener, Roberto)

One of Evelyn’s video:

Saverio found that exploring the characters and coaching his actors into them to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of shooting the videos.

My style of directing print is similar to how speaking actors must be directed. I find it easiest to direct them from a place of motivation rather than how I want them to look. This allows for more authenticity.  So weeks out, I began a phone dialogue with each of the actors to exchange ideas and nuances we could bring to the character. We met again in person when we arrived for the production. By the time we were shooting, a trust was built and I understood what each actor needed from me to give her best performance. I found each actor needed something different.

Something true about shooting video is that its time intensive. When you have time for just a handful takes (rather than  400+ still frames) you really need to have it well pre-visualized and the larger experimentation out of the way. These six video’s, like the print, were to have a slice of  campiness, so I aimed for caricature acting and the actors were well prepared going in.

One of Juliana’s video:

When the actual shoot day arrived, Saverio and his team got to work creating three unique videos,

Each of three characters were shot on one day at a large, dark, furniture photography studio. We started at noon with print using strobe. By the time the studio had closed and the stage was silent, we had reset with hot lights and were rolling sound by 6:00pm.  After the print ad and videos wrapped, we shot still portraits on a sweep for web assets on a separate stage. It was a very long day that tested everything down the the freshness of the flowers we brought in from Europe. But I feel the results worked to my client’s advantage.

You can view all six Dig.Drop.Done videos here or see more of Saverios’ work on his website.

- Maria Luci