by Maria Luci
After helping out their studio neighbor Fox Cities Magazine with a couple of shoots around town, Wisconsin-based conceptual photographer David E Jackson was given a full-page ad. Knowing it wasn’t exactly the right avenue to reach their target market, David and his team decided to have some fun. They came up with the idea of shooting a caricature of what it’s like being David’s studio manager/assistant. The final ad featured real assistant Adam carrying a large pile of equipment while David and his producer Trevor sit back with a couple of PBRs (their “beer of choice”). The shot turned out so well and was so fun to create, that the team decided to continue the project as a series of promos to highlight David’s skills and sense of humor.
The first concept had been fairly easy to come up with since Adam’s always slinging gear—but for David and Trevor’s shots, it was a bit harder to conjure up exaggerated tableaus. As David puts it, “holding a camera and working excel spreadsheets are not very funny concepts.” Eventually, David and Trevor were able to come up with concepts they were happy with and soon moved on to production.
There wasn’t much pre-production involved in these images, as each person was shot on white. I think it took about 15 minutes of actual shooting per person. Everyone was shot in my studio and then composited into the scenes. The desert background was “leftovers” from a client shoot that brought us into Death Valley earlier this year. All in all, I would say this whole series came together in my spare time over the course of a few days.
As for setting Trevor on fire and battling an elephant, that was all handled with a little post-production Photoshop magic. The elephant was actually sourced from a stock site, which was a fairly new experience for David, who rarely uses stock for his composites. But he knew this time around it would be both easier and cheaper to do than using a real elephant.
Once the photos were shot and the images composited, David got to work designing the promos. He handled all the graphic design himself while the illustrations were handled by friend Rob Dobi. The team sent out the final results as both print and email promos. David had a “lot of fun putting them together” and was even able to learn a thing or two, but most importantly, he believes that these promos were a great way to share his sense of humor, saying “we focus on marketing our personalities over everything. With the stress of the advertising industry, it’s really important for us to keep everyone in good, easy-going moods. With this, we’ve found clients tend to open themselves up to us and we create relationships more than just money-deals.”