Monster Product Shot
Going into this project I knew that I was keen to do a spooky crafty project that I could really test myself in. My other favourite thing besides crafts and spooky things is lighting, and as one of my passions I love intricate lighting set ups; I also had an expectation that it would be a complex set up. But with the help of Cinematographer Nick Paton I realised how little I had considered in the lighting and production design. I also thought that since I had put so much time into the props and preproduction work that the time required to shoot would only be an hour or so; so after our 6 hour shoot I was definitely feeling enlightened.
I began this project as production designer by designing a graveyard scene with the help of my cinematographer Mitch Hourington, we did a 3D draft of what we wanted it to look like and I brainstormed different ways of making the props needed for the project using twigs from my yard and plaster I made and painted 5 miniature trees and a base for a small hill with the assistance of my team.
After the workshop I realised that I should have used a matte finish acrylic paint instead of glossy on the trees as they reflected the lights a lot and I found myself spending time gluing dirt to the most reflective sides to avoid any unwanted highlights. I also underestimated the amount of dirt we needed to fill all of the spaces and the distance between the product and the background. The thing I was most proud of was my decision to keep the trees seperate to the base rather than nailing them into the set; this meant that with the guidance of Nick we could shift and move our trees to best fit the shot, even putting one on a C-stand to add to the foreground of the shot. This taught me a lot about the importance of great composition and how long it takes (2 hours).
I feel that my group and I planned more in depth in preproduction for this project than our other in class shoots, and it made all the difference. I put in the effort in preproduction so that we could have well done, polished look in post, even if it was made out of cardboard and twigs. I also learnt a lot about the importance of little things, keeping your workspace organised and clean; which is easy to do when working with dirt and water. Simple things like remembering to shot bag everything, mop up any spills and cover electrical chords in high access area’s; doing these made our project smoother and let us focus on making a good product, rather than being disorganised and messy.
Explain some of the creative/artistic choices you made in your project, and cite any existing TVC works (or photography works) that influenced you. Include how technical aspects such as lens size and depth-of-field factored into your decisions.

I was inspired by the spooky miniature scene, fog and hand made production design in the 1990 McDonalds halloween commercial and I wanted to take this concept and merge it with the lighting and mood of the 2016 zombie themed pepsi halloween campaign. Even though the pepsi image is clearly animated, the colouring, the trees and the dirt were the elements that really stuck out to me and influenced my production design style; which is especially important when aiming for a particular halloween aesthetic found in movies like “Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “Casper” (1995), and “Beetlejuice” (1988).
If we had a bit more time and resource’s on hand I think we could have expanded our halloween concept to make some miniature carved pumpkin heads and also having someone grab the can at the end “Unleashing the beast” wether thats a werewolf or zombie hand it would have fit the end nicely. In Post production working on some transitions to make it more seamless; possibly adding some lightning special effects and thunder cracks, smoke that fills up the screen fading to the next image, maybe some cgi bats, and also for the font at the end either zapping on the screen with lightning or ripping through the image so that it was more visually entertaining. Mainly making small tweaks and adjustments to give the product shot a bit more movement and excitement.
Overall I’m really proud of what we achieved and learnt from this project, with our set going on to be used in the SAE open day and receiving great feedback.
