Several months ago, Intermark Group called Columbia, S.C.-based concept photographer James Quantz Jr to see if he’d be interested in shooting a project for the University of Alabama’s bookstore: SUPe Store. James had worked with Intermark in the past, and their creatives thought he was the perfect shooter for their new quirky project. They knew they needed someone who could not only bring their vision to life, but someone who was proficient in post production as well. After hearing their pitch and the shoot’s concept, James was on board.
Intermark’s SUPe Store print ad concepts revolved around promoting what’s called the “Book Rush.” To do this, they came up with the idea to have students chasing a giant book mascot around the campus. In September, James and his team made their way to the University’s campus to scout and photograph locations. Then they hit the drawing boards, creating three scenarios. Soon after, it was time for the actual shoot, which they had to accomplish at first without the mascot, as he was still being built!
With roughed out concepts, we hit the studio on campus in mid-November where we proceeded to photograph the students. When photographing and building composite imagery, the students (models) really had to engage their imaginations in order to pull off what we needed in camera. With not much else to go on but instruction from Jason, Noah, and myself they actually did a fantastic job! We had fun trying to verbally describe the scenes to the students prior to taking their pictures. These kids were game and we had them flying onto mattresses, jumping off chairs, rolling on the floor, simulating repelling of a building, catching invisible books, etc..
As the day progressed, I was able to show the later groups some samples of our work on the computer screens to help demonstrate what we were after, but they really didn’t need it—except to maybe reassure them we weren’t completely crazy.
After a very full day of shooting, James headed back to the office to begin the laborious task of compositing the many images together.
We ended up have a very tight deadline so sorting, selecting and rough assembly was all completed in a matter of days. Another couple of days were needed for the final touches and changes that had to be made due to the thirty plus layouts that were needed for the full campaign. One challenge was creating images that could fit into nearly thirty different layouts. So I was tasked with delivering a few different options of each scenario.
An animation of one of the images coming together—it’s probably 16+ hours of work condensed into a few seconds! All of his hard work paid off though, with the final ads recently being rolled out. Intermark was very pleased with the images, but nothing can compare to how happy the SUPe Store and UA students were with their new campaign.
This concept and execution—and budget!—was something they had never come close to using previously. I think earlier campaigns consisted mainly of clip art and maybe some stock imagery. So they really trusted us to deliver and they’ve been real happy with the response. The cool thing is we used students that get a chance to see themselves all over campus now. I actually got this message from the client on my Facebook page: “Hey you! Everyone LOVES the photos/ads with our book. They are so awesome! Thank you so much for everything. Good times. (and Roll Tide!)”