BTS: Boy Smells x Moodelier

Hi everyone! How’s it going? Anyone gone crazy yet? I may have… Just a little lol. In all seriousness, I hope you are staying safe during this shelter in place. Can you believe it’s been about a month already? I swear it feels like time is going either really slowly or really fast. I think we can all collectively agree that we’re going to get through this no matter what but for now we just have to adjust to this new normal for the time being.

Personally, I am finding small ways to create structure for myself because I suck at working from home big time. More importantly, I’m seeing this weird situation we’re going through as a huge life pause. We’re always going at 1,000 miles per hour in this country all because of this dumb hustle culture that we feel we have to adapt to but in the end we find ourselves burning out. Not to get preachy but we have to take care of ourselves.

It’s ok to not get everything done. It’s ok to have days where all you do is just binge watch Tiger King on your couch and wonder if Carole Baskin really murdered her husband (she probably did lol). What I’m trying to say is, have a lot of compassion with yourself during this time. It’s not every day that we go through a pandemic. It’s not about doing everything or about doing your best, it’s about doing what you can and that is perfectly enough. Self-care, you feel? 😊

Anyway, most of you are probably like, um get to the point of this BTS post. I’m sorry but I always have to start out my blog posts with some sort of check-in with everyone because again, we’re also trying to do our best during this situation and while we try to plan our blogs as best we can, sometimes life gets in the way.

So our apologies in advance, if we take a little while in between posts haha. In the past few weeks, we’ve released several blogs relating to our current situation. For a roundup of COVID-19 resources you can check that out here. Read this post for ways to grow your business during this downtime. And lastly, if you’re new to working from home, check out this post for best practices when using a computer or laptop for extended periods of time.

Let’s get into this behind-the-scenes shall we? Our girlfriend Claire Xue is a total genius and we are so obsessed with her and her work. She is an experiential designer based in SF that works in a variety of mediums including immersive experiences and brand photography. Check out her Q&A from a while back here.

Last December, Claire had announced her new creative venture, aka, Moodelier. It is every creative’s go-to source for amazing props to help bring their visions to life from pop-up events to store displays. Of course, we were all over this when she first told us about it. Elle and I are always looking for beautiful and unique props that we can use for client shoots and we’re beyond excited for when she launches Moodelier. Go ahead and click on her name to subscribe to her newsletter so you can be the first to find out when it’s all live.

Like we’ve mentioned in this post before, we are big believers in shooting for fun because that’s the only way we’ll continue to build our skills and create new work for our portfolio. We had already been wanting to do a fun shoot with Boy Smells candles from their Chromesthesia collection and so we were very excited when Claire came to us and let us know that she had finally got her hands on her first round of small props.

It was actually really cool to have Claire there during the shoot because it provided an additional creative mind to help push some of our ideas. Our main goal for this shoot was to create one image for each of the 3 scents we chose to photograph and a few group shots as well. Cameo (rose), Damasque (wine red), and De Nîmes (blueberry) were the three candles we chose for this shoot.

Each had it’s own glass container color and scent notes that we took into consideration when sourcing props. For the majority of our sets, we used our particle boards which thankfully were already painted with acrylic matte paint in pink and nude. As for our lighting setup, we used our strobe Profoto lights with our zoom modifier for a hard light look with fun shadows by placing our lights directly above and slightly to the side. And of course, we couldn’t shoot without using our favorite tethering program: Capture One. Read this post here for why we can’t work without it.

For Cameo, we focused on using some of Claire’s pinky nude shaped props to really bring out the candle’s color and some pink roses which is one of the scent notes. We also used this weird pink foam material that we purchased from the hardware store a while back to add some fun dimension at the top since it felt very heavy at the bottom.

It was kind of a fun coincidence that it matched the candle’s color exactly. We also realized that the pink foam material was creating this really funky shadow on the background that we didn’t totally love so we adjusted the light and took another shot so that we’re able to composite those two shots together later in post. I know this sounds kind of weird in writing but just stay put, we’ll link our IGTV that we put up on our Instagram at the end and it’ll make more sense when you see it.

For Damasque, we chose to use apricots as the scent note prop and accented the scene with this red furry material that just gave it a whole mood. It was kind of funny because we’ve held on to this little red fur fabric for quite a long time not knowing when we’d use it and finally we made it happen haha. That really just goes to show that sometimes keeping certain items may prove to be useful in the future. Of course, don’t go hoarding everything but you know, you never know when you’ll find the perfect use for a prop until it comes up. For this scene, we used one of Claire’s super unique round ladder shaped props to really elevate the candle along with some accent props in the back.

Lastly, for De Nîmes, we focused on the elegance of the midnight blue colored candle. We draped this beautiful royal blue satin fabric in the background and used our nude boards for the top and bottom. Using Claire’s fun pastel blue columns and shapes, we got to play with levels and height. A couple of the scent notes for this candle included blueberries and almonds which we placed in the shot in a very accidental way.

For our group shots, we simply played around with all the fun shapes that Claire brought with her to compose two playful and whimsical scenes. We’re just obsessed with how the shapes look in the images and we really appreciated that the props weren’t shiny or reflective. That could have been a really big problem but thankfully they just had a slight sheen which wasn’t really noticeable at all. We also played around with placing some cellophane material in front of the lens to capture some colorful aura-like effects on the images.

We had such an incredible time planning this fun shoot and while there were a few troubleshooting moments, we made it work and it was really fun to see it all come together. The last time we shot with Claire, we were in the city photographing her and this really cool backdrop that she created. So it was really interesting to work on a more product-focused shoot with her this time. I truly feel that using Moodelier props really brought the whole vision to life.

I couldn’t have imagined it any other way and I’m so excited to share the final images in the coming days. We shot these back in late February but of course, our client projects suddenly took all my attention away and then this shelter in place happened so it’s been quite the whirlwind. I will get these images done, I promise haha. (Holding myself accountable lol) Well if you made it this far, click here to watch our behind-the-scenes IGTV on this shoot. Make sure to follow Claire, her business Moodelier, and be on the lookout for her launch. Stay v tuned for these final images as well. 😊

Is it the weekend yet?
Arabela