Benefit Cosmetics BTS Part 1: Production

Today we're taking you behind the scenes of one of our favorite projects yet - our shoot with Benefit Cosmetics! We decided to break this up into two parts since theres a lot that we want to share, so today I'll be talking about the production process, and later this week Arabela will share more about the shooting and post production process. 

When Benefit reached out to us, they wanted to create images and gifs for their holiday gift sets, but they wanted to make sure that the images were evergreen and not holiday-specific. I was super excited about this since I'm kind of tired of holiday-specific shoots haha. They didn't have a ton of really specific direction, and we ended up creating a series of images that were loosely based on the idea of a pink, playful carnival. Here's a peek at our overall mood board that we included in our shoot plan. 

The carnival inspiration came from the "whack a mole" image on the second line. We knew that we wanted to create a gif with the products popping up like in that game. Benefit has a pretty strict color palette that we had to stick to, and we took inspiration from their packaging and the carnival theme for the patterns that we created. 

Here's another page from the shoot plan. It has a mockup of what the shot will look like, a brief description and some of the inspiration images that applied to this specific image. 

Once the shoot plan and mockups were approved, we got into production. I painted boards using the methods that I talked about in this post. I created one with a checkered pattern and one with a diamond pattern using painters tape to create the lines. We're releasing a set design course soon that will go into a lot more detail about this process so stay tuned for that! 

I also created some plain pink boards in different shades that would be used for plain colors as well as a base for a distorted grid that we ended up adding in post production. I drew out the lines in advance when creating the mockup, and was going to paint them, but we both decided it would be easier to just create them in post. To do this, I created a png with these lines and Arabela applied them to the final gif in photoshop. 

This was actually the shoot where I discovered Easy RGB that I talked about in the post on particle board. I really wanted to match the paint colors as close as I could to the Benefit company colors since they were really specific and had to be exact. Arabela still had to adjust them in post a little, but I was able to get them much closer than I would have with just my eyes.  

Here's some BTS of painting the boards:

When creating checkers or alternating diamonds like this, you have to tape the boards off for one shape, paint a couple coats, wait for the paint to dry and then re-tape the boards for the other shapes and paint those as well. This process isn't exactly quick, but it turns out so well! 

As you can see, the patterns are not perfect, and Arabela had to do quite a bit of cleanup in photoshop. I've recently switched from Scotch painters tape to Frog Tape and I think it helps to get even cleaner lines. 

To create the "whack a mole" gif, I had to create cutouts that the products could rise out of. We thought it would be fun to create irregular stars (kind of like you see in comic books) instead of circles. I had the products in hand so I could measure and trace out the stars onto the particle board with the actual products. I then cut them out using a jig saw. To cut out a shape in the middle of a board like this, you have to drill a whole in the center of the shape and then cut from the middle. This took me several tries to get right, and I wasted a bunch of boards but I finally cut them out exactly how I wanted them. 

I painted the board pink prior to cutting out the shapes, and in hindsight I should have just painted it after since some of the paint chipped during cutting and I had to repaint it. Once the shapes were cutout, I drew an outline around each one and painted it hot pink. 

Once all the backgrounds were painted, I spray painted our Moodelier pieces in the colors needed for the shoot and then we were ready to go! Check back in later this week to hear from Arabela about the actual shoot and post production. 

Is it the weekend yet?
Elle