Creating an Advert PART III - pre-production and production

After researching cigarette advertisements I started to think about how I can modernise them.
The first thing I did was search for the most popular brands of cigarettes now.
I quickly found out that the 40% of the entire smoking market is dominated by one brand - Marlboro.
Marlboro, besides the majority of cigarette market also has one of the most recognisable packaging in the world.
Wikipedia page about Marlboro


I wanted to create an alternate version of this product with a theme. The choice of theme was simple, since the Halloween is right around the corner, and as for the name I wanted to make a pun with ghost and Marlboro. After quick consideration, I named my product Phantoro, which is a wordplay between phantom and above mentioned cigarette brand.
I bought and measured precisely the cigarette package so I could design an alternate skin for it.
Knowing how popular flavoured cigarettes are among my peers, I wanted to make them Halloween flavoured. The choice was simple, after Starbucks's Pumpkin Spice Latte drink dominated the world, I knew that I had to make this flavour my choice as well.

Article about the popularity of Pumpkin Spice Latte



I created this final design in photoshop (It was an easy process which consisted of adding different shapes and texts, so I will not spend too much time explaining the exact process).

And this is what it looks like printed on the packaging.


I was pleased with the result. Now I had to plan my photo shoot with it.
An inspiration came to me from an unexpected source. A month back, there was a trend on a social media app, called TikTok, which matched perfectly with what I wanted to create. It is called a 'Ghost Challenge', you can view one of many videos of this trend below.

TikTok - Ghost Challenge

With all those things in mind, I started location scouting, and after I choose the perfect locations I was ready to shoot. I wanted the locations to reflect the feeling of Autumn and Halloween, which is why we shot the photos in very vibrant, orange coloured locations and on a graveyard. 

I did two photo shoots, one in daylight and one at night, so I could have a variety in choosing the mood for my ad campaign.

I ended up with approximately one hundred photos.


For each camera arrangement I shoot a 'blank' layer, which consisted only of the background (manual focus), and a photo with a subject (without changing the focus). This is a great technique which I always use, due to how it speeds up the editing process. In this photo shoot I needed that layer, so I could delete the legs of our ghosts and my hand holding cigarettes in postproduction seamlessly. 
I will talk about editing these photos in my next post.

___________________________
References:
Refinery29.com. 2020. It's 2020: Why Are We Still Talking About The Pumpkin Spice Latte?. [online] Available at: <https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/08/9984105/pumpkin-spice-latte-starbucks-trend-history-2020> [Accessed 19 October 2020].
YouTube. [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3mlO2bzHV8> [Accessed 19 October 2020].

Comments

  1. Zoe Van-de-Velde24 October 2020 at 19:18

    Good research and process here - for your contact sheet make sure that this is bigger so the process can actually be seen!

    ReplyDelete

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