As
the fashion world revolves more and more around social media so creative
directors like Graeme Montgomery have cut their cloth accordingly. As one of
the world’s leading photographers and moving image makers for luxury brands,
Montgomery create high end, product focused social media imagery for clients
including Graff, Harvey Nichols, GHD, Missguided and Primart from his
London-based Gramco.studio.
Shoe designers Manolo Blahnik have
taken to Instagram in particular with campaigns that showcase their chic but
quirky image.
Delighted with Montgomery’s
creation of a series short films for Instagram based on a circus theme, the
brand invited him back to help them promote this season’s new collection.
“I’d just shot a huge production
with a Phantom FLEX 4K camera for Essie nail varnish which was the first super
slow-motion project I’d done, and I wondered if we could do something similar
but on a fraction of the budget.”
He explains, “The Phantom FLEX
4K is a terrific camera but it’s expensive to rent, you need loads of lights
and a specialist operator. Since the Manolo Blahnik campaign was for social
media we needed to achieve the same high production value they’d expect for any
other media but without a massive production budget.As he was casting around for options, VMI invited Montgomery to an open morning
workshop all about the Phantom VEO 4K-PL.
“I often get my kit from VMI so
myself and my DP Joe Dyer decided to go along and find out more. It would be
far cheaper to rent but would it work for our project?”
“It was great,” he continues.
“They showed us the camera and went through its use step by step. The VEO
immediately felt much simpler to use than its big brother and we came away
thinking we should just go for it.”
Montgomery
came up with the concept of games for the new series of vignettes showcasing
various shoe designs worn by a model interacting in colourful and funky ways
with scrabble, hoola hoops, jenga, playing cards and Connect 4.
“The trick is to find a concept that
you can hold together for six or seven quite different looks. We felt the games
idea could accommodate different styles of shoes and a mix of storylines that
would be stylish, fun and quirky.”
They shot 4K at 500 fps, the
oversampled resolution useful for cropping into the frame in post.
“If we shot 1000 fps, for
instance of knocking over the scrabble board, the clip would be too long and
boring when played back so 500 frames is about right. We played around with it
in the edit, speeding the clip up and using the super slo to keep it
interesting. We also looped most of the clips back so that they can play as
long as the viewer wants.”
Montgomery says he found the
Phantom VEO itself easy to operate. “You just have to remember to cut as soon
as the end of the action happens in order to stay within the camera’s memory
buffer but that’s not hard to do with a touch of practice.
“You get everything that you’d
technically get with the higher end Phantom but I’d say be aware that the
workflow is quite a lot slower because instead of downloading as you go, you
need to allow time to download the data. That doesn’t matter so much in still
life photography or product shoots such as this where you don’t have that
pressure of time and talent on set that is costing you a lot of money.
Montgomery
edited, added audio and finished the series on Final Cut Pro.
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