Volition Beauty Shoot: Concept

A few months ago we worked with our friends at Volition Beauty on social media images for their Snow Mushroom Water Serum. They needed enough images to post for two months, and wanted them to all be shot within one studio day. Because these images would be posted relatively close together, they needed to be a mix of different settings and ideas while sticking to their aesthetic so they would feel similar. We decided on a mix of flat lays, hero shots, lifestyle images, and model shots. 

Volition gave us a lot of creative freedom with this shoot, but said that they wanted shots with the ingredients, shots with the mushrooms, and a shot that involved water. We started planning by doing a brain dump and writing down as many ideas as we possibly could. We then went through those to choose the best ones and then organize them to be sure we had enough ideas for each type of shot that we needed.

After finalizing our list, we looked at inspiration images and created a mood board. You can read more about our mood board process here. From our mood board and idea list, we created a very detailed shot list in the order we would shoot with all of the props that would be needed for every shot.  

One of the ideas that we had was to use paper cutouts to create a few different environments. While this is time-consuming, it is a cost-effective way to create a really beautiful image that has impact. Since the snow mushroom is found in the forest, we decided to use white paper to create a forest scene that the bottle could stand in.

We found several outlines of trees in different sizes and printed them out to use as templates. We then traced around them onto thick card stock and cut them out. The hardest part was not bending the paper where the branches were really thin. We used an exacto knife to cut out the middle areas that would be impossible to cut with scissors.

We added tabs to the bottom of the trees before we cut them out so that we could bend the bottom and hot glue the tab to the poster board. Some of the trees stood up fine on their own, but for several of them we had to hot glue wooden skewers to the backs of them to keep them in place.

Here is an image of the final product. While I'm pretty happy with it overall, in the future I would leave a lot more open space to let the background come through. I feel like the trees kind of blend together too much making it hard to tell what they are in some places. When we were creating it, it felt like there wasn't enough branches so we probably should have done some test shoots against the background color to avoid that mistake.

We also created some paper cutouts of leaves that we used as props with the bottle as well.

For the water shot, we kept it really simple. We used earthquake putty to hold the bottle in place in the bottom of a clear plastic container. We then filled the container with water and used a blowdryer to create the waves.

Here are a few other BTS images from the day.

Overall we learned a lot from this shoot. It was definitely our biggest shoot as far as props go. It was challenging to come up with so many different ideas and keep them organized and consistent. We learned that testing props and sets before the shoot will help you to see potential problems and make changes ahead of time. We also learned a lot about communicating with our clients. Because there were so many shots and ideas, we probably should have had a more through run-through of the day with our clients ahead of time to ensure they were getting exactly what they wanted. 

Is it the weekend yet?
Elle