BTS Blue Bottle

Happy December! The end of the year is really flying by isn't it?? I want to give you guys a little update that we'll be moving the community portion of the club over to Slack soon. It was the most popular option when we asked for a vote, and we're hoping that it helps make the community even more accessible and helpful! We're still working out the kinks of it and trying to figure out if we'll be able to upload the content we had in Discourse so it may take us a little longer but stay tuned. 

In other news, we want to share the BTS from the shoot that we did with Blue Bottle Coffee for their holiday campaign. Honestly this shoot was tough, mostly due to communication issues and we had no idea if it would actually come together, but we're happy with how it all turned out! 

When Blue Bottle approached us, they had a pretty specific vision in mind, but they also wanted us to be able to have some creative freedom. Most of their imagery is pretty stark with lots of white, but for this campaign they wanted it to be much warmer and cozier. The theme of the campaign was Winter Blooms and they wanted to incorporate florals by Sayaka Wada, the extremely talented florist who creates installations for all of their Bay Area cafes. 

They really loved the work that we did for Saint Jane Beauty as well as the images we created for our first Moodelier Course with Lo-Fi products. I took some inspiration from those images as well as a series of photos that they took of Sayaka's installations. I've mentioned before how we often take inspiration from architecture, and this shoot was a perfect example of that. When I was looking through their brand guide, there was a huge focus on their cafes and the architecture and interior design that they incorprate into all of them. These became my inspiration for all of the sets. 

Most of their cafes are pretty clean and simple, and they use a raw plywood in a lot of their designs. I decided to incorporate this as the main texture and then layer brown, cream, and terrazzo as well. I thought that these components would create a good neutral yet still interesting base to let the florals and products really shine. 

Here are a few of my pages from the shoot plan that I created -

As you can see, I didn't include the floral details in the sets, just written examples of what I thought could work. This was one of the most challenging parts of the shoot. I had images of what installations had been created as examples for the campaign, but because of some communication issues I wasn't able to speak with the florist directly prior to the shoot was was a pretty big issue. I had communicated that this was something that I needed to the client and unfortunately it didn't happen so I designed the sets the best that I could, and thankfully they ended up working out. 

I wish I had taken a few more images of the creation portion, but I was pretty stressed out at that point haha. Here's a few that Arabela snagged.

That large textured background I created by gluing large dowels onto a piece of particle board and then spray painting it. It was a process similar to the grid background that I showed in a video posted to the Saturday and Sunday level members a little while back. All of the shapes I cut out using my jigsaw and then painted. The stripes that you'll see in some of the images were created by laying down painters tape and then painting with a roller. I left the stripes unpainted so that the plywood would show through. For the striped set with the angled walls, I had to set up the walls and then mark the stripes so that I could be sure that the stripes would all line up correctly. 

Here's some shots from the day of the shoot:

As you can see, the florals were the main prop, but we also used Moodelier pieces which I spray painted in cream, brown, and white to create hight when needed. 

Even with all the issues leading up to the shoot, it ended up being a really fun project and we're really happy with how the final images ended up. They're not on our site yet, but we'll be putting them up soon so keep an eye out!

Is it the weekend yet?
Elle