Vince Penman is a commercial and advertising photographer, director/producer and interactive art director who lives in Austin Texas, with his wife Rachael Penman and children.
This blog is a mixture of professional, personal and everything in between. Life is more than just about work.
Just finished doing the post work for this image for an ad and thought you’d like to see it. I had way too much fun making the jet pack for the shoot. We shot this on Saturday, just two days ago. We were also supposed to shoot video for the TV commercial part of the campaign, alas, Texas was receiving MUCH needed rain all weekend (worst drought since 1950) and we couldn’t shoot outside. We are scheduled for Tuesday to shoot the commercial, so keep your eyes peeled for something early next week. As promised I will have a blog post dedicated to some behind the scenes action as well.
Here is some close-up on a little detail:
Also what the ad will most likely look like for the print campaigns:
I am really, really excited. No, this is not equipment to build a bomb, so no need to inform any authorities. I am working on props for an upcoming photo shoot and television commercial production. I spent a couple of hours at Home Depot, possibly one of my most favorite things to do, and carefully selected items for a, hopefully, impressive prop. I also spent a little time at the Salvation Army too. I forgot about the cool little finds you can get there. Anyways I don’t want to give away too much, as I am hoping to make a cool production video out of the whole process.
Here is the game. Try to guess what this pile of second hand junk and Home Depot items will be.
Clue: Napoleon Dynamite meets Empire Strikes Back.
I forgot to post something about this shoot earlier, but I just remembered that I wanted to talk about it. I did a creative portrait session for the restaurant chain Dave and Busters a few weeks ago. We shot their employees for their advertising and marketing materials. Everyone evolved was great to work with and we had a great time. I bring up this shoot only because of the fact that they requested raw untouched files for the final product. I have to admit, I had a really hard time doing this. Not because I don’t trust anyone else to touch my files, but because I am so used to working a lot in post production with my images.
Typically with the images I produce for advertising, we have a look we want to achieve and I know what to do to achieve the image. Usually I take several shots and combine multiple images to get the look I or the client wants. But what about raw images? RAW. Photographers, imagine if you weren’t able to do anything with your pictures in Photoshop. Does Lightroom cut it for a lot of you? Do you stop after that? Or do you, like me, work a lot in Photoshop afterward. Is it a crutch?
I don’t believe there is a right or wrong answer. We have long crossed the faded lines of computer art and photography. Manipulated images are so common place that we don’t even think twice about seeing or making them. Colors have become so saturated and unnatural, that when we don’t see a photo that has a lot of contrast and or saturation, we think something is wrong with the photo.
I know I see the world a lot different than my camera. Maybe that’s why ten years ago, I was producing images like these:
Anyways, back the the thought provoking question. How easy would it be for you to give someone your untouched files?
For the past month, I have been doing nothing but making commercials, at least it feels like it, and for the most part it is true. I am actually working on yet another one as I write this. Total protonic reversal. That’s not the name of it, that’s just how I feel. I told you the line between photographer and video producer is thinning.
The latest commercial I did, which was approved today from the client, was an absolute blast to produce. And I am going to fill you in on how I did it. But first the spot:
I wanted to have a feeling of constant movement in each of the shots. In order to achieve this I needed to use a Steadicam. Well, the Merlin Steadicam costs $800 and no one rents them nearby. Since we have a set, and rather low I might add, budget for these spots, any money we spend is less we make. So I decided to DIY it. I will spare you photos of my shoddy machine workmanship, but I will just say it worked fantastically… once I got the hang of it. I basically followed the plans from this guy. After a couple of trips to Home Depot, I was set. (I might do another post and show how I made the thing with pictures and all I just don’t have time right now)
For the coloring of the spot, I wanted something really different. We have Magic Bullet Looks, and I LOVE that plugin, don’t get me wrong, I just wanted a little more punch. So I thought about doing it in Photoshop. Yes you can edit some video in Photoshop, but I wanted even more control than that. So, once I got the spot edited to where I wanted it, I exported the footage as a psd sequence. What that means, is I exported every frame to a Photoshop file. Then I could control each frame how I wanted, just like any photo in Photoshop.
A lot of people know I am not a big fan of actions. In fact I get fed up with all of the paid actions that people sell online. Don’t get me started, really. There are some actions, however, that I think are totally worth the money. The actions from Totally Rad Actions. Seriously. This isn’t a plug, but I truly think these are possibly the most worthwhile actions that anyone can buy out there. The rest, don’t even bother. Create your own.
So what I did was to create a “recipe” of several of the actions. Then I ran a Photoshop batch on all of the 900 images, and voila. I re-imported the frames into After Effects and bam, that was it.
I know it sounds like a lot of work, but I think it was well worth the effort. I even tried to recreate the effect with Magic Bullet and couldn’t pull it off.
If there are any TRA users out there, here is the recipe for kicks:
So, this spot is a complete gem. We needed a new concept for a BlackBerry campaign, and Matt, the copywriter, suggested the headline Sweet, Juicy, Blackberry, and my mind went wild. The first thing I thought of was a BlackBerry getting covered in Chocolate with a Barry White voice-over. Boom. So, here it is in it’s five seconds of fame. I say five seconds because that’s about how long it lasted on TV. Well maybe a couple of days. This deserves an explanation.
Companies have branding guidelines. Some companies are really crazy about them, ie Apple, HP and, of course, RIM the makers of the BlackBerry. Technically I should be typing it as BlackBerry®. Anyways, advertising in Alaska gets overlooked by the major companies. There are only 600,000 people in the entire state for Pete’s sake, why would they care. Well, we got this account from a competing agency. They have been bitter to say the least. Did you know that in BlackBerry branding guidelines, the BlackBerry Smartphone cannot be covered by any object when shown in a sales manner. Yeah, didn’t think so. No one knows that. Unless you do their advertising. You know who you are, so I won’t mention any names. Well, they ratted us out to BlackBerry. No longer can this be run on broadcast television. Not to worry though. We are salvaging the spot and will follow their guidelines, it just won’t be as cool. Jerks. We are not in trouble or anything, it is just lame how good ideas get stifled because of bureaucracy.
This was a fun spot to create. We didn’t want to ruin a perfectly good BlackBerry, so I made a fake one. I pushed the phone into PlayDough, then filled the space with plaster of paris. I let that dry overnight then painted it with green acrylic so I could green screen it. Then I just poured chocolate sauce all over it. I shot it with our new 5D Mark II. I love that hunk of machinery, most of the time. Here is a little video of the making of the ad:
I know, I know, this image is nothing new. But it keeps popping up everywhere. I have been featured in several photo variety blogs lately (not trying to toot my own horn, seriously) and this is the picture they use. Why? Out of all of the pictures they could choose from, why this one? I admit I do like this image, but it still seems strange to me. I wish they would have featured one from the AK Native section. We need more publicity about the book.
Still, many kind words have been spoken about my work. For that, thank you very much.
So last month was my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. As a gift, we took pictures of my parents and all of my siblings and their spouses and children and made a personalized coffee table book titled “Joy in Our Posterity.” We gave it to them on the anniversary last month and they love it. I meant to post something on my blog about it, but we left to Texas for that week and I forgot to post it when we got back. The picture you see above was the back cover.
I made a new section on my main website called “Family Ties” to show off the work. If you would like to see all of the pictures (minus the people that couldn’t make it to Alaska) click on this link or go to vincepenman.com and click on projects/family ties.
