The Gap Between the Shot and the Story

The basement doesn't look like a meeting room, and that’s because it isn't one.

Denni is shifting mats and folding tents when I find him; he’s clearing the studio to make space for a meeting about the campaign he just finished making. He's our Photographer and this campaign’s Creative Director. He conceived the campaign, directed it, held the whole shape of it in his head for months before a single frame was shot. Now he's moving tie-down points and backpacks so we have somewhere to sit.

This is how it works here. You don't wait for the right conditions; you just have to make do with the room you have.

I ask him about the shoot. He pauses, a tent pole in one hand, and starts recounting the previous week’s events.

Four days. Sixteen crew. Three locations south of Perth (city, crag, coast) spread across terrain that doesn't exactly cooperate with production schedules – whatever those are. And the fruits of that labour? Five hours of raw footage and more than two thousand photographs.

Two thousand photographs to make something that will look, to anyone consuming it, completely effortless. At least, that’s the hope.

That gap, between the making and the made thing, is the less glamorous part. The part that gets cropped out, colour-graded away, left on the proverbial cutting room floor. Most brands aren't interested in it. The mess doesn't fit the perfectly curated mood board.

But the mess is where the work actually lives.

Looking at the final images, you’d never know. You’d never know that Tim Miller, one of our product designers and a man who spends his days obsessing over warp and weft and zipper geometry, spent four days as the campaign's unofficial chauffeur. Or hero talent driver, I should say. A role nobody budgeted a title for, but without which the whole thing falls apart at the seams. Indispensable, some might say.

It's not glamorous. It's also not nothing.

Then there's the crew itself. Not flown in or sourced from some Sydney production roster. Pulled, largely, from within these walls. Colleagues who showed up before dawn and stayed until the light was gone. Family members. Friends. Someone's dad's boat appeared. Or was commandeered. Either way, it was the kind of thing that doesn't happen in a formal pre-production meeting. That boat became a location. A location became a shot. A shot will eventually become the thing someone, perhaps you, sees on their phone and thinks “neat”.

This is how it actually gets made. Favours and improvisation and people willing to show up for something a little beyond their job description.

And the weather. We haven’t even touched on the weather yet.

In the days leading up to the shoot, the forecast looked less than ideal. Low cloud, possible rain, the kind of sky that turns a production schedule into a negotiation with forces entirely outside your control. Denni had planned for it. Contingencies exist for a reason.

They weren't needed.

What arrived instead - over Perth city, over the granite face of Castle Rock, over the climbing wall at Wilyabrup, over Prevelly where the Indian Ocean does whatever it wants - was light. Gorgeous, unreasonable, unearned light. The kind that makes a photographer go quiet for a second before they start shooting. The kind you definitely can't manufacture in post. The kind that, if you didn't know better, you might call luck.

The bags that were a secret in the shoot have now launched. You might spot one or two in this article. You will definitely spot them in the campaign materials that depict them in locations that look like they were always meant to be photographed - because four days of work by sixteen people made sure of it.

And they did it all for the love… possibly the free small-town bakery pies and local wines.

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