The company I will be representing is a company I have enjoyed the
products of for more than a decade now, a company steeped in history and
digital entertainment. I will represent Nintendo and the product I will be
advertising is the Nintendo Switch console released 2017. I have chosen this product
as currently not only is it a product I use on a day-to-day business making me
fully aware of all its angles and exterior looks/functions, but I also can use
this product to demonstrate the ability of removing the shine from the glass of
the screen, a new image manipulation technique I learned recently. As for the
target audience, its children of course! Any child of the age group 8-12 and any
adolescent teenager from 12-16. Of course, the switch has other audiences above
these ages, but these are my primary target audience. I would expect to see
this advertisement as a banner of slides on auto-play on your typical website
reminiscent of the banner style advertisements one might see from CEX/ WeBuy.com.
I am going to use ambient indoor lighting to give the sleek and white-shiny
look to the console, perhaps dabbling in natural lighting from a cloudy sky
day. I also plan to use a silver reflector and a light diffuser. I will use my two
Nintendo Switches and six different coloured Joy-Con controllers (two grey, one
blue, one red, one green and one pink) as props.
After
starting off with taking photos of various Nintendo products to see if there
were any outliers outside the Switch I would rather photograph, I eventually concluded
that the Switch was going to be my focus. I tried taking photos of Joy-Cons and
my Nintendo DSI however the DSI proved to be a boring photo and the Joy-Cons did
not work with the reflectors and the bright colours they exhibited. I tried
photographing my Nintendo 64 from 1998 however the console was simply too old
and no matter what angle I was at there would be small inconsistencies I did
not want present in my photo such as dust in areas I could not clean and visible
wear and age. Upon beginning to take shots of the actual Nintendo Switch I was
pleased to find the console had enough going on where the photos were visibly distinct
enough to be interesting and they also allowed me to be creative with the
choice in colours of the Joy-Cons which are attached to the console. I was also
able to make use of the systems built-in foot stand to keep it upright with no
strings. I tried many angles such as ¾, birds eye view, the console lying its
back on the ground, standing up, I even tried to give it a Rembrandt portrait
lighting style which is funny to me at least. After all these attempts at shots
and the constant rebuilding of my white paper background, the constant changing
of my camera angles and the chance that my light could change at any time, I
settled on my final shot, a slightly raised ¾ shot of the console with blue and
pink Joy-Cons and a second console lying on its back with two standard issue
grey Joy-Cons, and a Dock present in the background of the image as well as a
TV. I settled on this shot as it showed the console from the angle a child would
see it on a store shelf, their altitude, I also chose the Blue and Pink Joy-Cons
to make it feel open to all individuals (Blue and pink being the colours associated with boys and girls) while also including its signature day
one grey joy-con look. After studying the previous attempts at advertising this
console I also included the TV and Dock in the background as that seemed to be
a template in which all earlier advertisements seemed to share.
Here is some of the roughwork and sketches from my notebook:
The final unedited shot:
The final edited shot:
Reflection:
My overall evaluation of this project?
Studio Photography is very hard to do at home... with a cramped space to work with and little to no form of lighting apart from the way i had my curtains allowing natural light in, a lamp and my reflector it was almost impossible to acquire the grade of lighting I wanted for this photo. If i were to do it all again, I would have a soft box on hand or change my product idea to a product I could have displayed outside, like a carton of milk with a farm in the background or something. I made the use of my lighting set-up and im prousd of what I could accomplish with what I had is worth a note however.
My research came in handy for setting up the lighting and position of props in the shots, mimicking that of one of the earlier 2017 Switch advertisements with the console on its kickstand and the dock next to it with the controller in front and an all encompassing TV in the background. I also know when advertising products with highly reflective surfaces such as TV's and screens the shiny or reflections are usually digitally removed and I tried my hand at the edited form, removing the reflection from the left switch screen, replacing the black TV screen with a Switch logo and doing the same for the tables reflection.
Successes include the positioning of the props, the reflection in the table, the cropping of the image, the golden tint applied to the product with my lamp facing towards my golden reflector and diffuser, taking the shot with an ISO of 800, aperture 5.6 and shutter speed of 1/3 and incorporating a camera stand to remove blurring and loss of detail. Also, the position of the light on the table.
Failures include the final image itself, the reflections heavily present from the products to the table they stand up on, the green background and the less than stellar removing of screen reflections from the switch on the left.
The process evolved from one image being taken over and over until I got one I liked to taking a lot of images with the same lighting set-ups, camera angles and camera settings, yet removing and moving products into frame and out of frame to see what they look like without reflections and then trying to use this information in the process of removing them.
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