If you have a product – or a range of products – the chances are you’re pretty proud of them. You might even want to show them off in an engaging product video so everyone can see how great they are. We can help.
At Square Daisy we’ve become experts at creating professional product videos. From a glasses case to a sofa, from technology that examines diamond to a machine that extracts fat from waste water – we’ve made it look sexy.
There’s a lot more involved in a product shoot than most people expect – to get that high-end finish there’s a lot of planning involved and a lot of kit to set up.
Let’s take our latest clients as an example – XPECT are a furniture hire company and they wanted to add videos to their product listings on their website. The brief sounds simple enough – they wanted 20 of their products to turn 360° against a black back drop.
First things first – how are the products going to spin?
We have a 80cm turntable that has a maximum load of 150kg and is controlled via a remote so we can control the speed and the direction it turns from behind the camera.
But hang on – some of the items of furniture are wider than 80cm or heavier than 150kg. This is where our gimbal comes in. We move around the item of furniture with our stabilised handheld camera, adding elegant and dynamic motion so that the product can be celebrated from all angles.
Now for the back drop
This needs to be wide enough to comfortably fit a 3 seater sofa, shot from a wide angle, with plenty of clear space around the edges. It also needs cover the floor so that in the wide shots you can see the feet. The edges between the backdrop and floor also have to be seamless.
We have a 4 metre panoramic background, and extra black material to cover the floor. This means we have a full studio infinity cove that packs down into a holdall.
BTS – XPECT Furniture from Square Daisy on Vimeo.
Now that all the kit is in place, we need to make sure that everything looks as good as possible through the lens of the camera. We use a shallow depth of focus so that any join between the backdrop and the floor is blurred and the product in the foreground is nice and sharp. For a black background, we focus the lights on the product so that it stands out. Throughout the shoot we make sure that the fabric is clear of dust and any creases are flattened out as much as they possibly can be.
Checking that all the set-up is working is essential, so we grab some test shots and bring them into Adobe Premiere to make sure that we can achieve the high-end finish we promise to all our clients.
After the shoot is completed, it’s time to edit.
In Adobe Premiere and After Effects we can make that black backdrop really black by adjusting the colours and adding an adjustment layer to blur around the product and even out any imperfections in the fabric.
The end result is really quite something!
Soft III – Grey.mp4 from Square Daisy on Vimeo.
XPECT Furniture – Product Video from Square Daisy on Vimeo.
We can do all this against a white background too, but the troubleshooting is slightly different.
With a white background you have to make sure not only the product is lit, but the backdrop needs to be evenly lit too so that there’s no murky grey areas or hot spots. Instead of dust problems, any dirt shows up straight away!
When we filmed the Hydrocyclone Grease Removal Unit we decided with the client that a grey lino floor would be the best option as the unit needed to be plumbed in to demonstrate its features and so a wipe clean surface was a must. This also worked well to represent the commercial kitchen setting where the product would be installed in the real world.
FOG Fellow Product Overview Video from Square Daisy on Vimeo.
The ideal finish in either of these approaches is to give the impression of an endless void, with the product at the centre – you’ll have seen this approach many a time on television advertising, but it’s not just the big ad agencies who can pull this off!
Next time you want to show off your product range, come to Square Daisy to see how we can make your product look even better using a mobile studio setup.
