Transcripts
1. Introduction: Honestly, what's not to love about what I do? It's just amazing. I get to see and do different things. The trust of my subjects is something that I take very seriously. Hey, what's going on? My name is Aundre Larrow. I'm a Brooklyn-based visual artist. I specialize in portraiture, art direction, and videography. Today we're discussing those very things. What are my strategies to help you deliver a successful photo shoot? My photo experience is really varied. In college, I worked at my student paper, and after college, I worked at start-ups, collaborated with big brands, and made things with local businesses that I love. As a commercial photographer, it's important to me that the first time I work with a client, we get on the same page of their vision and their visual language. Today's class is all about the process, understanding which soft skills you need to deliver that photo shoot, and to make sure everyone you work with on the project is as excited about it. The lessons are to identify your stakeholders, describe the stakes, communicate with those stakeholders, and then deliver to those stakeholders. At the end of this class, you should leave with strategies that help you understand how to communicate what your visual language is, what your marketing needs are, and make sure your stakeholders are happy. Student should be more comfortable creating a detailed mood board and deck that speak to the project's original goals and deliverables. The goal of this class to make it easier for you to deliver high-quality content and art for your company. You're going to make a detailed brief with amazing visual examples. Go ahead and put that in the project gallery so that I can give feedback and you can ask any questions that I can chime in with answers. Let's get started.
2. Identifying Your Stakeholders : This lesson is about identifying your stakeholders. Whose budget are you working out of? Who is most invested in your success, and most importantly, who is being measured by the work that you do also? Identifying your stakeholders allows you to understand who are the primary influences for your project and your deliverable s. Obviously, what you do impacts the entire company, but a small number of people are most impacted by that. Those are the folks who are measuring your work and being held accountable for it. When I worked at Walker & Company, I was a creative associate. This was 2015 to 2017. My primary stakeholder was our creative director. I had one on ones with her every week, and I'd go over our ongoing projects so that she not only understood what was coming up, but also what my plans and goals were for each thing. But my stakeholders weren't just the creative director. My stakeholders were the product designer, and the web designer, as well as the content marketing lead. My photography touched all three of these groups. The content marketing lead used my photography to get more customers into the funnel. The product designer used my photography for boxes and for things that customers are going to physically touch and experience. The web designer used those images for social media, as well as the overall brand experience. Each one of these folks had different needs, not only in terms of images and feel, but in terms of crop, in terms of just overall content, and so making sure that they understood with each project, that I needed to come to them and explain what I was going to do, then I could listen and understand what they needed from it. No matter what company you're at, identifying your company goals is important. It starts with understanding what your mission statement is. All art is a reflection of reality, and what you're creating, the content, the marketing materials, the art, should be a reflection of how your company sees the world. When I was working at Walker & Company, our goal was to make health and beauty products simple for people of color. That was our mission statement. If you pull out the words, health, beauty and simple, it can be easy to start to understand what the goals are and how they should be translated. How can things be simple? How can they be reflective of reality? How can they be beautiful? How can they be aspirational? How can they show that they're part of a healthy and healthful lifestyle? Each company goal touched more than just me or my creative director. It touched an entire team, and it also impacted the company as a whole. You're not identifying stakeholders to find people to tell you what to do. You're identifying stakeholders to figure out the most effective strategies for your visuals to sit inside of. I'll say that again. You're identifying the best strategies to utilize your visuals. That way, you're not spending extra time, extra money, and extra effort in ways that you don't need to. You can focus on things that are the most helpful for you and for the company. For example, when I'm talking about the product design, when I was at Walker & Company, the more detailed shots I had, those worked really well on physical products, on boxes, and things like that, on posters, versus on socials sometimes, it was really effective to have the entire lifestyle the image portrayed. The difference is, the lifestyle maybe draws people in on social, they want to see something that looks like their life, but when they're choosing to purchase, they want to see how this product will impact their life. That specific delineation between product and web was something that I learned by working with my stakeholders and collaborators frequently. A good result, at the end of a creative project, is for your stakeholders to not only be excited about the output, but to feel that they were a part of the process. A good result is them seeing their vision, merged with yours, yielding something new. A good result is, after discussing with the product designer, and they say, ''In the future, I need images that look like this.'' If they say, ''Maybe the images you took last time were too wide, and I need more detail'', being able to deliver that, and for it to fit within their goals, that's a good result. Being a commercial photographer now, and working in-house before, I see both sides of it. Generally when I start a new project now with a client, we have an intro call where we'd speak to all the stake and sometimes it can be overwhelming. There's five, eight, or 10 people on the call, but it is so important, and so valuable that you do this now, versus later. I think someone who can really speak to that is a recent collaborator of mine, Alex Hunter from Burrow. We just finished working on some interior photos that I captured during the pandemic, of what it's like to live with Burrow furniture in my home, as part of a larger program they've had to help gather more content that feels very Burrow, but is still COVID-safe. How did you identify which stakeholders are the most important, and then how did you communicate with them? Did they have any feedback on this initial thing that you made? Yeah. I'll say the most important stakeholders on our team, at least for this project in particular, are the digital marketing team, our e-mail lead, and then of course, our CMO. The folks that are really going to be using the assets, alongside organic social, does not even talk a lot about it. Burrow is 360 marketing, so everything we do, how can we apply it across all of our channels? This is a great example of, its social first, because we're working with folks that we're finding on Instagram, or maybe Pinterest, or whatever. But then how can we utilize what they're doing, across every single one of our marketing channels? I'm sure as you're watching that you are already like, ''Okay, I know who my stakeholders are.'' That's going to be a theme all throughout today. Slow down, and take a second. For your student action for this lesson, what I want you to do is to write out who your primary stakeholders are, and if you've a second, just ask yourself what are their primary goals, and how does my work intersect with theirs? That way when we get to our next lesson, we can understand once you describe those stakes, what sort do you need from those stakeholders to make it successful for you and for them?
3. Describing the Stakes: You've already identified your stakeholders. But what are the stakes? What do they invested in? What is your visual project focused on? What are your goals and how do they fold into your company's greater vision? This lesson is all about describing and understanding what the stakes are and how they translate visually. A strange thought, what does your company or your brand feel like? It's not really like the fashionable person you went to high school with. What your brand feels like is an effective way for you to communicate with your customers to the point where if they see something from you. Even without your brand name or logo, they expect that this piece of photography, this videography, this illustration or whatever it is, speaks to what they believe about themselves in you already? Part of the reason why you communicate the way you do as a brand is because you understand that it's the most interesting way or the most effective way to communicate with your customer base. You've already identified that. Now it's important to continue to speak to them in a way that is not only effective but reflective of your brand, whether that's honest, dynamic, exciting, approachable. There's a lot of different ways to do it, but once you set it, it's important to have consistency. That consistency usually helps breed customer trust. Your toolbox as a creative is immense. Here we're really honing in on what you use in your process before you ever pick up a camera, a pencil, anything like that. Your first line of defense is a moodboard. What is a moodboard? A moodboard is a collection of images, words, illustrations, visuals in general, that show what your vision is. That means your moodboard should include what the light should be like, what the expression should be like if it's a lifestyle campaign, or how you want the product to be styled. It should be what the image feels like, what colors are most effective. For example, if your brand colors are generally maybe blue and yellow, but it's Valentine's Day and you're working on something different, it's important that your moodboard shows ways that you can showcase that product in a different light than it's used to being seen. We're all visual people, so the best way for me to introduce what a good moodboard is like, is to show you. Obviously this is a physical product and some of the products that you work on, might be physical, might be digital or they might change and vary in size. But it is important to understand how the product is being framed, how it should be captured, what the light should be like, and how you want it to feel. When you start these moodboards, you're essentially establishing parameters for your project, for what it was going to do visually, where it's going to go, and how you wanted to translate. Your stakeholders are reading this and they're trying to understand what are we releasing this budget for and why? To do that, you start with general tips like make it pop, embrace natural light, and how to style. These are reflective of the brand mission and goals that you already have or we talked about earlier. The next thing I think they do really well is they mix adjectives with great image examples. Why? Because adjectives are subjective, that's their entire goal. The word inviting or the word relax might be different for you versus somewhere else. For here, relax might be a couple of people enjoying a nice glass of adult [inaudible]. Being able to mix what your brand goals are, what those words are like we talked about with Walker and Company when we are trying to find, make health and beauty products simple for people of color. That meant that the images we're going to have people of color, they were going to be beautiful and aspirational, simple so that they weren't overly styled or are wild, and then in the health aspect, making sure that they're as close to reality as possible. Here they do a great job of showing different ways that people interact with furniture, which makes sense because it's a very open and inviting product. Now the next thing that I think they do really well is they discuss shortlist. Back to the idea of being a qualitative employee in a quantitative world, being able to say here are our goals and here's how we translate our product, and then being able to describe them, number them, and show examples is so helpful. Because what you think might be a wide or a type might be different for another person. Just like we're getting back to those stakeholders, they should understand exactly what you're going to be delivering in terms of the framework, so that when you get there, your creativity can speak for itself. But they still need those quantitative things so that they can deliver what they need. Lastly, you can just see each one of these deserves its own page. Even people has more than one, casual, colorful, approachable, genuine. A lot of these words are synonyms of each other, but giving those additional examples is a really helpful way. Just to give folks room for their imagination that fit in and expensive for you to be able to make stuff, props, products. There's just so many visual examples here and they're guided, they're not loose. Here, you're just showing the why and the how. Then obviously it has a delivery specs. These are helpful depending if maybe some of your stakeholders are designers or marketing people, having the specs as part of your moodboard is a really good way for them to understand what will be delivered and how they can use it. I recently worked on a project with my friends over at Borough, a Brooklyn based furniture company, and they sent me an excellent mood board that showed examples of how they wanted their product to look, what their goals were, and how to style it. Let's check it out. A lot of furniture brands, they have really beautiful lifestyle photography, but it's like super clean. It doesn't necessarily feel lived in and true to real life, and that's where we want to be a little bit different. We like our photos to feel super authentic and they're capturing a real moment in someone's life. Whether that's like a blanket tossed to the side or like a pet roaming through like you see here, we love those little moments that feel really relatable. Here's just a little bit about our moods, like authentic, inviting, real, relax. We like things to feel lived in. We like images with people in them. You don't see that on every single brand's website and just feel like we're invited into your home and just getting a little snippet of it. I think often when moodboards are created, folks are like, I'm going to show 20 photos and I'm going to put four words and we're out, and I think it's really important when you use a word like even inviting, that you show examples of it. Yes. It was really important that we were providing some details to our partners or some direction. They had a clear idea of what we're looking for. I think even this slide is a great example of like we want some product focus, but then we also want lifestyle. Just make it really clear that there can be people on the images, but then some of them we want to just hone in on the actual product. This expands on that. The idea was, how can we get as much from our partner as possible, as in like, how can we really push them to try different things and maybe shoot in a way that they're not as used to. Which is funny because when we talked about it, you were like under you give me a million of these, I need wides, and I'm like wides, wide? This is just an overview of that shot list, so that mix of wide, medium, detail and then lifestyle. Once again, just providing some examples of each and getting a sense of what kind of shots we need. People slides. These are just going through more examples and more of those words. But like approachable is another word that we use a lot and like genuine, we like things. I'm saying this again, like things I feel really authentic, lived in, and they're just capturing a moment in a life. This is another thing we want to give a lot of examples of. We love when people have a lot of plants like you did, you have that, you have some beautiful photography in your home, obviously, your cameras. I think personal hobbies have been a really cool thing that we lean into. Then this was just about the actual delivery. I think something that's unique to us is that we prefer raw images a lot of the time, unedited. I think this is very dependent on the partner, but a lot of folks use heavy filters for their own feeds. That's not something we necessarily want. Just because, especially with furniture, it's so important that the color is as true to real life as possible. Then please don't crop. I think that's another thing that some folks will go in and change the image the way they would want to present it to their audience. The idea for these slides was just walk through the different products in our assortment and say, this is how we prefer for it to be shot, because that's going to give our audience the best idea of what it really is, and I think other than the different product slides, that's a deck. What I want to show you now is a mood board that I created for a small shoot that I did for a company called Bandits Bandanas. The project they hired me for, was a highlight of New York artists that they collaborated with to make these really specific bandanas. They needed someone to capture what an urban explorer in New York looked like. After speaking with them and looking at their moodboard, understanding their deliverables and where the images were going to go, I went around the Internet and looked at some images that I thought embody the spirit of their brand. This is just an example of like, I don't want you to think as we go through this class that it's only about stakeholders, only about previous stakes, you still have room to be creative. I just want to show an example of a way that I made a mood board and showed back to them and said, "This is the energy that I'm looking for". Looking at it right now, I knew that when I think about a carefree urban explorer, which is how they define their primary customer, I thought about those times when I first moved to New York and I could go anywhere. You'd call me and be, "I'm in Jackson Heights and I'd like run over there and take a two-hour train just to hang out and experience the city. That level of carefree, and this is what I was looking for. When I was looking at images, the images I was trying to capture, these are for some of my favorite artists, Chris Hanusa, [inaudible] , Benjamin Keith, Jessica Solomon. I went and tried to grab images that I thought embody the spirit of carefree nest. People jumping in mud, people running around, and just enjoying life for itself. I used these when I was photographing as reference point throughout the day to say to myself, am I capturing this spirit? I know the deliverables. I have a stylus, I have other people there to make sure the product looks good. Am I still chasing that creativity that I want? Before we end this lesson, I want to make sure you know, that this is not about robbing creativity or making it beholden to anyone, it's about framing it properly so that you don't have to spend more time, effort and company money to go and re-shoot something after you've captured it. You get to be asking, where did you find all these photos? It does help I'm a professional photographer, One one thing I will say is who you choose to follow on your Instagram, your Pinterest, your Tumblr, Twitter, friends app, whatever you use, is really important because that influences your visual style. When you are searching, what I would just tell you is take time. If you know that you have a new visual project coming up in two weeks, just spend part of your work time, getting lost in work that you think is cool. If you have an artist that you really love, check into their following or who they've collaborated with. Pinterest is actually a really fascinating place because it tags images so well. If you search something really simple, you can easily get on this train of finding pieces of inspiration that you didn't know you needed. If this is your first time working on something in house or this is your 20th time. Take time to see who he worked with before and use some of their images as sourcing for things that you can use here. I think it's helpful just to understand what you've done before as a brand and then using that as a jumping off point to find further inspiration. You've been an active and engaged student, but I wouldn't be a great teacher if I didn't give you an astute an action. For this example, I once again, I'm sure you can guess what it is, but I want you to make a mood board. I want you to incorporate what you saw from the Bandit's example of understanding mood and the Borough example of understanding deliverables, and how to translate your brand vision to stake holders. With the mood board you make, I want you to focus on three things, what your brand vision is, what the deliverables are, how they'd be used, and lastly, what you want the mood of this visual project to be.
4. Communicating with Stakeholders: When we started this class, I asked you to put your how on pause so that you understood your why. We have your why. We have your stake we have your vision. Now how are you going to make this? You've been patient, you've taken all the requisite steps. Now let's be even more granular and understand what does it take to get this done. To properly understand your how, you need to focus on three basic tenets, your production, your time, and your budget. We'll go in reverse order and start with budget, because we all know what that is. Budget is how much things cost. You start off each fiscal year with a budget, and so you have to allocate it per project. But if for some reason you have a very little budget, it might help you, depending on how the product needs change. Time is, how much time do you have? Can you spend a month on this project, a week, two days, and production. What else does it take to deliver this from a vision to reality? I'm going to give you some examples while showing you what the output and deliverables were for that Bandits Bandanas shoot. Since it's a really important for the product styling, you'll see a lot of these images show a single person with the product. There's some movement in the images, just like we discussed, that shows what that mood board show you and how people might move around the city. But before we get into the product, the final deliverable, we need to talk about how we got there. Behind the scenes of this project we had to think about the following things. Was there a stylist? How are the bandanas tied? How do the product look? The style is beforehand helping to select the clothing for the subjects so that it worked well with the concept of an urban explorer. I can tell you it took a while to not only find the models but get them approved, and then after they were approved, it took a while to get the clothing approved. Then to get the location approved, to then do a scout and make sure that everything worked properly. If you've a product that's used in the wild on something like a backpack or shoes or something you'd see every day, generally, it's important to showcase that value proposition of the product out in regular life. But maybe if it's makeup or a soft goods, something that folks use to improve their lives, the visual work that you might be focusing on might be done in a studio space. Does your company have one already? Do you need to rent one? If you need to do film components, is the sound space effective? Will there be things that are interrupting that? If you see something you like, what are all the ways that it can go wrong? Could it snow that day? Do we need to be inside? What happens if it's overcast? Do we have a contingency day? Is there someone there that can hold the equipment? All of these are production questions that you should bring up to your stakeholders early so they understand what happens if you might have changes or overdose in your budget. Once you add in production and budget, you then create a deck or a proposal. That's where we elevate and evolve what we're trying to do. As you're looking through these, you'll see that we got a lot of the urban explorer. We got like people surrounded in graffiti in the street, and to do that, the way that I find it out, I picked an early morning because in New York City it's always really busy. I picked an area that was slightly less populated and then I had scouted at a couple of days early and walk through the space at the same time that I was going to be photographing it. That is that pre-production, and that's stuff that you already know implicitly because you've done it, whether that's at the company or just whenever you make things in your personal life. The next thing I want to talk about his time. You can create a production timeline that says you will have the deliverables on this date, but also different dates with touchstones and deliverables that can show the progress of your project. That way you can make quantitative, measurable moments for your qualitative deliverable. Obviously, we're all worried about a work-life balance, and one of the first things I want to bring up that I learned in house is what happens with revisions. Revisions can be a great way to fix a problem, but without parameters, it can be a fast way for you to never finish a project and then get behind in all your work. I think it's important when you're presenting, taking your mood boards, taking your visions, and presenting them to stakeholders that you ask them how they want to deal with you revisions. Do the stakeholders want to be present while the work is being captured? If they are, how often can the interject? It's also helpful when you're establishing the mood board to establish what feedback you want and what's the most effective way to give it. What I mean by that is for someone who doesn't deal in the creative, they might be trying to communicate with you that this doesn't feel right for the project, and it's your job to read out what they mean so that when you're there capturing, whether they are there with you or not, you don't have to stop continuously and end up costing more money and your time. Your goal here in establishing a production schedule and making sure you stay on budget, and understanding what your time is going to be is to eliminate the guesswork, reduce your stress, and more importantly, give you the freedom day of to capture what you wanted to in the first place. You already understand all of the steps are, what I want you to do is be able to communicate it with your stakeholders so that once the stakes are established, they understand what it takes to get there. Being able to frame everything you need to do quantitatively will help you not only have a better reflection of your time but also yield a better budget. Or just an understanding with the folks that you're working with, which is really important. Before I worked at Walker and Company, I would shoot a lot of streets off photography and really embrace happy accidents. But once I had to start to replicate things so that they would work for company goals, I recognize that sometimes I can't just work based on happenstance, and you already know that. Being able to plan and being able to put things together is a great strength of yours because once you get to that day, you can breathe easy and just flow. You've seen an action for this is actually relatively simple. Make a shot list. Write out what you want the yield to be, and then under each one, write everything you need for that image to happen. So soon action shot list. Let's go.
5. Delivering to Stakeholders: This is a lesson from the future. You've already completed your photoshoot, your video shoot. Whatever visual deliverable you have, it's done. Now this lesson is about how to deliver it to your stakeholders, so that they are thrilled with it, and they can really see how hard you worked, and understand the whole new breadth of content and art that they can use for marketing or whatever they need to. Just like you made that really amazing and beautiful and definitive deck, before you give them all of your images, what I think would be really effective is to pull out the images you had in your mood board and put some of your best images from that photoshoot or from that video shoot directly into the mood board and send it back to them. Let them see how the words that you all discussed for your brand vision, how that translated for the day of capture. It's a really simple and effective way to show that the work you made is really rooted in the company's vision and its success, and that your vision runs concurrently with that. No matter the size of the shoot, I think it's effective to take the images, take the mood board, and present them together so that folks can have a reference back. As I'm sure you know where you work at your company, you're constantly inundated with initiatives, with goals. It can be difficult to remember back what the purpose and the point of what you're working on was. You want to root and remind your stakeholders of what the goals were, so they can properly appreciate the work that you made. After they've seen the deck, they'll definitely going to want to see more. Provide a wide edit. Even if you know that these are your best eight images. If you photograph 200, give them 30 or 40. Because honestly all of us yearned to be creators. There's a Kanye West interview from I think 2013 where he's like, "Remember being a photographer was sexy or being a videographer was sexy?" The work you do is amazing. One of the best ways to show how powerful amazing it is, is to show a wider edit of all the things you made in this limited time. Now that they understand the production and they understand your time and the budget. Being able to say with all that, I made these beautiful things, it can really help further establish you in the space as the creative genius that you are. Have a great deck, after that, provide a wider edit and then be comfortable asking for feedback. It's important when you ask for feedback that you frame the feedback properly. If your production considerations are vast, like maybe you had to film something and where it was filming was super loud, or maybe when you needed to capture something, it was an overcast day. The dynamic light you wanted wasn't there. That feedback probably isn't all that helpful. But if you want to ask did I capture the spirit of the product like we wanted to? That can be really helpful. If you wanted to ask the Digital Marketing Lead how the images performed in space, that could also be helpful. You're asking for feedback, not only for your own edification but so that the next time you make a deck and the next time you deliver a visual project, you can incorporate in these solid expectations that you don't know until you tried something. There's that phrase you don't really know until you know and this is one of those times where your stakeholders might form an opinion differently that they didn't know until after something was delivered. The goal in asking for feedback and framing it as to show that you're an effective and excited collaborator so that the next time you do this, not only you do not need to watch this lesson again, but you can deliver even better the next time and the next time and the next time because now you fully understand what needs to be delivered, how your stakeholders view it, and how it sits in the pantheon of your company's history.
6. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. You have reached the end of this class. Thank you for spending time with me. Thank you for trusting in yourself and taking time make you better. The class project, as I'm sure you can guess, is to take all the things we made in this class; the list of stakeholders, the mood board, the shortlist, and to make a comprehensive deck or pitch for your next project at your company. Please feel free to share your projects, your questions, even granular updates to the discussion board. I'm so excited to see what you make and I'm just thrilled and thankful that you chose to spend time with me today. Till next time.
Aundre Larrow, Photographer
