Funny Advertising Campaign

A Pervy Realtor Wastes Time on the Beach

“Your agent talks about hot prospects”

“Your agent talks about hot prospects, but he doesn’t mean for your condo”. Funny advertisements are a tricky thing. The memorable ones require teams of creative artists and tens of thousands of dollars to execute, the budget variety can often fail miserably leaving the company that is advertising looking the fool. This is the beginning of a campaign and we wanted to set the tone of humor while retaining the decency of the company.

I was shooting for a tropical Norman Rockwell-gone-bad feel with this first shot on the beach. The agent had his computer mostly closed, he is obviously drunk from the discarded beer bottles, and his attention is directed elsewhere. I got the perfect model to play the agent, but the girl on the beach was a lucky find, and kind of random but perfect.

I wanted the lighting to be very subtle, so the majority of the flashes are positioned at 3:00 and directed towards the camera giving it a natural lit look from the axis of the beach. Flashes were set to full power as the difference in shade to direct beach sun is extreme. There is also a fill flash on camera aimed upwards to fill the trees and give some kick. This is a very delicate lighting balance as I wanted to retain the chiaroscuro effect from the hammock and the leaves in the tree. This was shot in RAW and pretty heavily processed in Photoshop to give a disturbing, overly sharp and harsh look.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Advertising and tagged with Advertising, advertising campaign, Advertising Photography, costa rica, funny advertisements, humor, lighting balance, photographer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.