Belmor Incorporated, a major supplier of trucking aftermarket accessories, commissioned Stillwater Creative Group to create a large wall graphic which would show a wide selection of their products installed on a single tractor. With a very tight schedule in mind, we scouted a local truck dealership on Day 1 for two vital ingredients: the right truck and an elevated location to shoot it from. House of Trucks in Chicago's southwest suburbs came through with both, and the shoot was scheduled for the following morning.
Day 2, our shoot day, dawned bright and sunny (it would rain the rest of the week), and we pulled into the dealership with all our products ready to go. As luck would have it, though, the one truck we found that fit the bill had just been sold. Fortunately, the folks at House of Trucks were kind enough to allow us a couple of hours to photograph the red Freightliner before it was driven off to its new owner.
Working very quickly, we shot the truck overall from the rooftop vantage point we had found the previous day. The large size of the final print dictated that this part of the shot be done on good, old-fashioned 4x5 transparency sheet film. Of course, that meant setting up a good, old-fashioned view camera on the windy rooftop, but the resulting film (remember film?) was well worth the effort. Next, each product was positioned in place and shot on hi res digital so that its perspective and proportions would match the big truck shot.
Postproduction work commenced that afternoon and continued through Days 3 and 4, with the film being hi res drum scanned and one additional product (the round quilted tank cover) being shot in studio to match lighting and perspective of the rest of the shot. Much layering and hand work later, this was the finished result--a solid yet transparent truck showing eight different Client's products to best advantage. Total elapsed time from first phone call to delivered file: four days.
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