West Coast meets East Coast.
I always knew one day that my work would reach a big stage, but I’d never guess this soon or in this way. One day you’re sitting playing Apex and then you get a phone call about a project that can land you in…TIMES SQUARE.
It all started with my good friend Caleb, founder and creative director of Nothing Easily Done, reaching out to me about an opportunity to do a photo shoot for a company based out of NY, Emrld. Emrld was planning to launch some new apparel that featured these trucker hats that incorporated the S.F. Giants logo and N.Y. Yankees respective logos. From that, it inspired the idea of doing a coast-to-coast photo campaign for the apparel. We had a week to make it happen. One shoot in San Francisco, one shoot in New York…one billboard. Oh yeah, and it needs to be shot on film…and there needs to be video.
Caleb and I live in the Bay Area, so taking care of the shoot in S.F. is no problem…but how do we get the shoot done in NY on time? That’s where the extremely talented Makenna Ruth comes in. Makenna is a photographer based out of N.Y. that Caleb came into contact with, so he reached out to see if this was something she’d be down for and she was all game. Now that our N.Y. photographer is locked in, Caleb went on the search for models and found some really great people that fit the lifestyle look we were going for. Next we needed to figure out the locations in the City (S.F.) that were going to really evoke where we were. We did some scouting and decided that were going to shoot at 3 different locations: Alamo Square, the trolley in the Castro and Fort Baker Pier. Once locations were locked in, I decided the best filmstock to shoot on for this was Kodak Portra 400. We communicated that with Makenna so that she could get the same film. I’d be shooting 35mm film and she’d be shooting 120 Medium Format.
It’s now shoot day and we run to go get my film before we meet with the models. It just happens to be one of the nicest days of the year so far, so God was on our side. One of the best parts of San Francisco is that when it’s nice outside, the city feels so alive. Everyone is outside with their friends or family, having a picnic at the park or riding bikes, all the colors pop because of the citie’s unique blend of urban landscape and nature, it really feels like you’re in a Tyler the Creator video. All of this added to the great energy we had shooting all day.
We started with our two models at Alamo Square, which is a park most famous for being home to the Painted Ladies. I had two rolls with 36 exposures and 3 locations, so I had to make my shots count. We found different spots within the park that looked beautiful and set up shop in those spots. The park happened to be packed to so we had a bit of an audience. We spent about an hour there before we had to move to our next location, the Castro.
When we arrived to the Castro, the plan was to get on a trolley and do some pics around it, that’s as San Francisco as you can get…but we made an audible. We parked at this baseball field, really to get away with free parking, but also it was close to the location we had slated. Once we got out and started going down the street, we decided the baseball field was a better fit. So on the way back we shot a couple shots on someone’s doorsteps and continued to the baseball field where we finished my first roll.
Once we wrapped at the baseball field, we made our way over the Golden Gate Bridge to the pier across the water, Fort Baker Pier. The idea was to actually shoot on the pier, but when we parked we found a cool area where you can get on the rocks sitting on top of the water. That area was also had the bridge in the foreground, so I knew we could get our money shot. Shoots are always more fun when you have a chance of slipping and falling in ocean water.
After capturing all the shots at the pier location, I still had about 10 exposures left on my last roll and we were trying to get as many shots as possible. Instead of wrapping at that moment, we went back to Alamo Square with one of the models and used up the rest of the roll. Shoot complete!
S.f. shoot
new york shoot
Once we got the photos and videos from Makenna in N.Y., we could now put together the billboard…sort of. After we got done shooting on our end and sat at my desk to edit, we realized we were kind of short on B-roll footage and needed more to really fill out the those measly 15 seconds. We reached out to one of the models from the photoshoot and another model who came in last minute to help us, and took our gear to Jack London Square in Oakland to capture the footage. This would end up being the footage that would make up the logo shot at the end of the billboard visual.
Now that we REALLY had everything, now we can stitch everything together to make this billboard. We sat for a whole night and just went through a bunch of different layouts, ideas and looks for the billboard. Considering we hadn’t done this before, Caleb and I were going through a bunch of refences and examples to help us figure how to structure the damn thing. We even sat and watched a livestream of all the billboards in Times Square. The biggest thing that we were forgetting in that moment, was trust in self. We decided the best thing to do is to not focus on how anyone else was doing their billboards, we were going to do it our way!
