Company employee photos with a twist

Our employees at Label A are the corner stones of the company. They design and build the products for our clients, and together they make up our company DNA. Which is why we wanted our employee photos to be more than just static photos, we wanted something different.

Also, we love to ‘tweak’ things😎

So we introduced… 3D interactive employee photos. As you hover over our employees on the website, they’ll follow your cursor. On mobile devices it works by tilting your phone.*

*This feature currently only works on iOS and Safari. After the upcoming sprint it will work in other browsers too!

While brainstorming about how we were gonna do this, a lot of crazy ideas were pushed forward. Metal frames made out of curtain rails to attach the camera to, toy trains with cameras, robots circling around our employees…🤔

Then we figured it would be easier to let the person spin, and not the camera! Which is where the swivel chair came in. We will show you in a second.

“Trust me, I’m a developer. Just give me some rope, some duct tape and a swivel chair. I got this.”

Equipment

If we do something, we do it right. And this starts with good equipment. We basically turn our office into a complete studio every two-three months. If you are looking to create something similar, this would do the trick:

• A DSLR camera with a 35mm lens (We used a Nikon D500 in combination with AF-S DX NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G lens)
• Light panels for perfect lighting
• A tripod
• A swivel chair

Setup

The setup is extremely important. First of all, we want the background to be exactly the same in every picture. Second of all, everyone needs to fit in the frame in the same way, even though we all have differents heights and postures. Also, not all photos are shot in the same session. We repeat this process every two-three months to shoot new employees, which is why thorough documentation of what goes where is important. So we created this graphic, which of course has a legend to it that tells us the exact measurements. To make it more clear, we keep pictures at hand, like the one on the right for example🤓

The setup

Of course, the chair doesn’t spin itself. So we solved this in the most ingenious way:

With some old fashioned man- ehm, woman power💪

We slowly spin our employees around while the camera captures them from the chest up. These videos are then cut so they are exactly 3 seconds long and the subject always looks straight into the camera on 1,5 seconds. These are then exported and added to our Wagtail CMS in .mov and .mp4 and our front-end developers make sure they move the right way when hovering the cursor or tilting the phone.

And there you have it! A good set of lights, a good camera, a swivel chair, a strong pair of arms and some tape! And of course some AV-designers that make sure every video has the same length and the same angle at the same millisecond. And then some developers to turn it into an interactive video!

And that’s what it takes to create our interactive 3D employee photos😎

Also wanna play with our developers? Go to our team page and have fun!