BTS Anecdote Candles

Oct 5

Hi everyone! Hope you've all had a great Tuesday. I'm back with another fun BTS post featuring one of our clients, Anecdote Candles. If this is your first time hearing about them, they're an amazing candle company where each of their scents are inspired by stories and life's moments. One of my favorite candles is their "Bottomless Mimosas" candle where the description says "smells like good vibes and fresh gossip." Haha, they're just too good. Well, we've actually been shooting with them quite a lot these past several months but this one was our most recent shoot where we got to photograph their new fall collection and a few of their classic scents.

When it came to the art direction and set design, Elle worked her magic! She ended up creating a lot of fun backgrounds for this set including a checkered board, a grid board, and an older set design she created for Anecdote in the past. You might recognize it in the main photo above (the 3D orange grid which was originally a cream color from our first shoot with them.) We used our Moodelier columns and blocks once again to bring height and add levels to our images. Most of the images were either banner shots, Instagram images, or GIFs.

We did come across a few different challenges when it came to this shoot. The first challenge was actually a sourcing issue. Elle ordered mistletoe for one of the shots but it arrived dried and basically shriveled up. Therefore, we actually had to shoot on two separate days so that we could make sure we had fresh mistletoe to shoot with. Another challenge, or hiccup I should say, included a wine glass (that we had leaning on a block) falling over and spilling a ton of red wine. Not the best time and although we should have secured it with putty in the first place, we managed to get back on track after cleaning up the mess. Another challenge we had was with one particular GIF that included one of the holiday candles "skiing" a snow mountain. We ended up using a large snack bowl as the base, making sure it sat on top of a few transparency pages so we wouldn't mess up our backdrop, and placing all this fake but very real-looking snow that we got from Amazon. We used a large wooden dowel to tape the heavy candle onto it and used it to drag it along the "snow mountain." We messed up a couple of times trying to get the motion and movement right. Elle was a bit worried that the snow would look off place for each frame but I made sure that in post I would mask out only the movement of the candle. I don't even know if I'm making sense here but once we're able to share the final GIF, I'll be happy to show you guys what I mean. ☺︎

When it came to the post-production, I did have to do quite a bit of work on all of the sets since they obviously can't be made to perfection. Therefore I worked my butt off to fix all of the imperfections. If you are in our Sunday level group, my latest Edit With Me video shows you exactly how I go about fixing a checkered backdrop so that it looks even/smooth on all of the edges. I also had to do a bit of compositing for some of the shots but overall, this was a fun project and we honestly can't wait to work with them again! Check out the behind-scenes images below as well as some unedited photos. Elle and I totally failed to take more BTS images of this shoot but we promise we'll have more for the next one! Enjoy.