Behind-the-scenes on a campaign for MUSTO

Musto are the official suppliers of apparel, luggage and footwear for the GB Olympic sailing team and were looking for some hero, studio based photography to showcase their SS20 collection. We’ve worked with these guys before, the team at Musto are fantastic, our shoots with them are never ordinary and this one followed the trend. The difference this time was that we’d be shooting athletes from their Olympic programme.

As with all Ranch projects, after our initial conversation with Musto we set about putting a treatment together starting with the tag line ‘Legends Start Human’. The client already had intentions of how they wanted the shoot to look and feel, it was our job to come up with a creative concept to do their vision justice. The brief for the shoot was focused around heroes and legends, the photography had to be dramatic and make a real impact.

We knew, working with Musto that we could push the boundaries of our creativity with this shoot. We met with the team and tabled some initial directions in how we could approach the campaign. We always have a series of meetings with our clients before approaching any project to get a really clear understanding of their expectations and vision. Once we have a good idea of what we need to achieve, our creative team start brainstorming concepts. The overarching theme across our ideas on this project was to use texture and lighting to achieve a dynamic look.

We worked in partnership with Musto to choose the perfect concept, once this decision was made it was all systems go for the Ranch team to get the shoot organised within a tight timescale. There were a few challenges with this project. Firstly, we needed to bring to life our idea of building a concrete backdrop, with an inch of water on the ground, so we drafted in pro set designers for this.

Lighting needed to be direct, to mimic the sunlight across our models. The idea behind the concrete backdrop was to represent historical innovation and to add texture to the look of the shoot. We also planned to use clear perspex and have our models stand behind it whilst we spray it with water. These ideas were pretty ambitious but we’re always up for a challenge!

The second hurdle was finding a large studio space, willing to let us build this set and play with water! Luckily we found ‘ The Field Studio ’ in West London who were really flexible and helpful in helping us achieve the look.

We shot the project over 2 days. We were shooting 2 different looks and behind the scenes footage with 6 models and the client on set, that’s a lot to achieve in 2 days so we got the whole team involved. The shoot was one of our favourites or 2019 as we got to flex our creative muscles, achieved a couple of astounding looks and got to work with some awesome athletes.

We worked in close collaboration with the client on the edit and retouching process. Once the selects were chosen, the client marked up their retouching requests and we sent them to our highly skilled retouchers for review. We increased the contrast, added a touch of sharpening for drama whilst maintaining natural skin tones.

We then took those final assets and created some 2.5D animations for some creative social posts.