Photographer/Director Clay Cook has experienced some pretty complex and harrowing shoots that have sent him across the globe. So when an 12-day studio project for Tempur-Pedic and Tempur-Sealy came across his desk, he didn’t necessarily expect it to become one of the more complicated and formidable productions of his career.
He was given a spreadsheet with roughly 30 products, spanning pillows, mattress toppers and bed-in-a-box mattresses, along with references and priorities that would eventually need to be captured, selected, retouched and delivered. Some of the photography would be clean product imagery silo on white, some would be styled-bedroom without talent, and some would feature talent in that styled-bedroom. Then within those categories were multiple compositions. When you add it all up, Clay were photographing thousands of individual images across a fairly rigid set of requirements. Did we mention the 12 days?
When a more conventional one-camera approach looked like it could require somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 days of production time which equated to hundreds of thousands of dollars in crew fees, talent fees, studio time and equipment rental, Clay shifted to a five-camera setup.
On his blog, Clay goes into detail about the final setups, the calm environment on set, creating different environments for Wayfair and Walmart respectively, and even welcoming a new family member during pre-production (congrats, Clay!). Ultimately, Clay walked away in awe of how a simple spreadsheet turned into a community of talented people. “By the time those rows and cells became photographs, dozens of people had brought their experience, judgment and craft into the room.”
For more of Clay’s work, visit his Workbook portfolio.
Represented by Tiny Island.
