Typically an editorial portrait shooter, Paris-based photographer Antoine Doyen was excited when his agent Rachel Pham brought him a new commercial opportunity. The agency Venise/Hemisphere Droit found Antoine’s style appealing and approached Rachel about commissioning Antoine for a “fun-to-shoot” web commercial for furniture giant Ikea. Eager to show how well he could shoot what he calls a “proper commercial feature,” Antoine happily accepted the assignment and got to work on the production.
Antoine says that he was not only excited for this project because of its high profile client, but also because it would give him a chance to work with professional models—instead of “real people”—for the first time.
I always shoot editorial or corporate where the people are always “actual” persons, not characters per say. It was very appealing to me to shoot models. I believe every assignment I’ve ever shot contained a part of unpredictability, something like an “obvious-risk-of-failure”… but not here, for I could control almost everything.
Setting up shop at Paris’ Studio La Plateform, Antoine began preparing for the shoot. The assignment was to shoot models from above on Ikea mattresses and bedding, and the images would ultimately be used to create a web ad. For Antoine, the one major challenge was that the photos were to be used in an animation,
I had to keep everything at the right place, from lights to models. It was actually a bit difficult because the bedsheets were very bright and I had to keep a good balance between skin tones and fabrics… a bit tricky when using white sheets. But since I was working in a very controlled environment, I decided to go with La Plateform Studio’s strobes, a set of Profoto lights. Though I was working in a unusual way (from above, firing through the computer rather than the camera), I decided to use the flashes exactly as I normally would: two strobes, one with an octabox, the other with a smaller bank. Then, I added two strobes for more details on some part of the image… sort of a fill-in light.
It’s a wrap!
Once all the images were processed, the agency took the photos and compiled them into a short animated commercial for Ikea.
See more of Antoine’s work on his Instagram.