How to Shoot a Commercial | 7 Easy Techniques on a Budget

Okay low key there some brand out that's going to watch and be like "Dammit!" Wait man those are ours! Just so you know I use these headphones like everyday. Oh that looks great dude. That looks great as it is. I think being a perfectionist with everything is just goes into like passion right? I think you can tell a lot by someone's work. What is going on Indy Mogul my name is Ted. Today we're talking about commercial product shots and how you can get this basically next to no budget and any camera so for this today I got my buddy Justin Jones over here This is Justin we've shot a ton of commercial products shots over a really long period of time so today we're gonna be doing this totally from scratch so Justin when you shoot product shots what kind of camera do you usually shoot? Usually it's like a RED Weapon or Alexa Mini -- Cool don't care here we go. You are going to be shooting with this camera. Okay, DSLR. 6D 1080p Mark 2, yep ok does not shoot 4k this is a consumer DSLR by most means it's a great DSLR don't get me wrong It does the job but you're gonna be shooting with this, have shot with this camera before? I have not. Cool using this we're gonna shoot a headphones ad let me get the headphones real quick let me find these where do we put the headphones? Is this it? I think these are this $18 headphones off Amazon. Are you ready to make these look like commercial footage? Yes I am. Good so starting off what is our first step when we're trying to light a commercial? So first step is finding a location and a backdrop that's gonna suit your needs for the actual product shot in this case we're gonna go for an infinite black setup so today we're here at my studio and we have a full black wall so we're gonna just go ahead and start with getting everything set up in that location. Sounds good so got a table over here we're gonna pop this open. So now the next thing we want to do is make sure that we have enough distance from our wall so we don't have light spilling onto it since we're going for infinite blacks. So we need to move this away from the wall. Okay sounds good. We need some kind of like really beautiful surface to actually shoot the product laying on top of so we have a black acrylic which is reflective but it still gives us that black infinite. What is that you got there? So this is our next secret so with the acrylic we're going to put that on top of a spinning lazy susan that way we can get our products spinning around and kind of capture all the details of it without having to move too much. And if you can't afford an electronic spinner I know in the Gear industry they like to overprice a lot of things you can find a lazy susan. Sure yeah the manual ones and you could also use camera movement to move around your item instead of actually using a Lazy Susan so next I think we should just set our product on there and then we're gonna go ahead and start lighting. How do you pose your products? Like that? Pose them in the most natural way that you would see a pair headphones right so not like that that looks like a face. Yeah looks this way we can see the foam and so we'll just place them and we want to get them directly on the center of the spin that way when they spin it's not off kilter. So talk to me first about where we're gonna place our camera so to kick this off we're going to need a tripod of course so we'll walk the tripod in and then we want to also get a little lower than eye level with the product and that's gonna help with two things. First it's gonna make the product feel bigger and second it's gonna help us kind of blend our black acrylic into the background. What camera settings are we gonna set to? So our aperture here we want to be able to see the product in its entirety we don't want to be too shallow on our depth of field so we're gonna be around like anywhere from like a four to an eight I think that'll give us enough range to be able to see the product and then if we do need to we can wrap a little bit. And generally speaking what people have told me is that uh when you shoot product shots you want to shoot a little deeper so you can see all the details of the product and things like that too. Yeah I agree with that. Next thing I want to do is I want to shoot this in slow motion that's gonna give us a ton of possibilities in posts we'll be able to do speed ramps and then it's also gonna be a little more majestic right the slow spinning of the actual product and it just gives you more options yeah more options that way you can speed it up if you want to and then you'll still have that really smooth slow motion yeah. And this is 60 frames per second frames so we're gonna click on that. Now that we're shooting slow motion we want to make sure that our shutter speed is double our frame rate and that just gives us the most pleasant motion blur and that'll keep our product from being too blurry or too sharp it'll give us the most cinematic look. Now that we've got our product set and we've got our camera set up what's next? The next thing I would do here is put up a light. On any product shoot I'd like to use a soft overhead light the bigger the source the better especially because of reflections right so if you can't tell it's a light yeah that's better. Get a big ol light oh boy right here cool sounds good so. We'll use the gobo arm here and we'll just kind of extend this up over the product. Gotcha so for everybody asking out there why do you need a c-stand versus regular standard say one of the most obvious reasons is you can do this you can actually rig a light out over something. Okay so already we're getting a really nice image what's the key to placing the top plate how do you know that you put it in the right place so I'm just I'm looking just for an overhead soft key that's just going to spill this beautiful kind of quality of light just coming down from the top it kind of mimics like the room you're in right so a lot of people like shooting in those little product boxes and the reason that's good is because any reflections just look like the room you're in so the bigger your overhead source like when you're shooting cars for example since they're so reflective you have to shoot on like a twenty like a 20 by 40 big overhead softbox and that will allow the reflections to just look like the roof already we're looking pretty okay honestly because it's overhead it's still giving us some shadows it's not frontal it's not making it flat yeah so we're still as you can see we're getting these shadows here in the product but it's giving us this really nice fall-off on top and into those shadows of the metal I think the first thing you can do to make these product shots that look better is never put a front light if you have a front light take it away put something either from the battery from the top the next thing I want to do is put some black do butene or a blanket or some kind of sheet on the ground actually behind this setup so we don't get light spilling anywhere else so I'm gonna go ahead and grab a sound blanket here but like I said you could use like a sheet or a bed sheet or anything black really I think we need some kind of back edge just to kind of give us some definition on the product all right so it's also going to give us a glimmer on the metal as it spins around it'll give us that glimmer of hard light so right now we have soft light I think we need to add hard light to give some shape to the product yeah so we're gonna use a kicker we'll use something with a pronounced pot light or something something sharp yeah right about there 45 degrees to the back beautiful okay another thing we want to do is try and get it off of our acrylic will spot it in and then we'll use the barn door to kind of cut off that light on the bottom you can also see you like down on the headphone band right there we need to flip those over attention to detail you're worried about the logo the logo his side down like touching in there making it worse smearing like putting your grease the thing with products that you constantly have to be cleaning it has to be perfect every time you roll the camera so yeah it takes a lot of time and then every time it starts to get dirty every time you handle it watch out for fingerprints and watch out for dust we've got a little dust cleaning kit we got one right over here and oh my gosh all those fingerprints they can see him now yep no yep see you don't you if you didn't do that oh my gosh there's so much dust nice so what else are you seeing that we could add optional all right so when shooting products brands have like branding right so say this company their logo has some red in it or some teal in it or something so you can take that kicker light and actually throw a gel in it to change the color and give us some branding kind of wrap the branding around into the product video so how do you pick which colors do you want to do you said basically I like to do research on the brand right if I'm shooting something small I'll see what they use as their color scheme and I'll just work that in so put on some red in here oh man look at that that looks already that's incredible um obviously we need to clean that acrylic but so far we're getting some beautiful stuff down in our reflections and then you try changing things up right you're not stuck to a lighting setup then why don't you just turn that guy off and then you get you know this kind of moody reveal moody reveal yeah and real quick gonna remind you guys about story blocks who will actually save the day when you actually have to make a product commercial all of the money went into shooting the product which is definitely not the case in this episode but if you were backed into a corner like that someday why not consider trying story blocks is incredible library over seven hundred ninety thousand HD and 4k clips back you find dozens of clips of people wearing headphones doing all sorts of things that show off the product people exercising with the headphones listening to music and fed at the headphones or on the couch playing air guitar with the headphones literally everything you need to show off the versatility of your product and sure you might have to cut away really quickly before anyone notices that those aren't actually the headphones that you shot but the point is stored vlogs has an entire library of clips that doesn't limit the amount of times you can download them that's right unlimited downloads starting at $17 a month it's basically a must-have out there so get started by going over to story black stack comm slash Indy mogul and learn more about their wonderful stock but its library and now in fact did the episode so already this is an acceptable shot for me I would run this easily all day long but there's a few things we can do to kind of make it pop and make it a little bit different I like to use Hazel Lodge we just need a puff of smoke in the background and that's going to be picked up by our backlight and just give us some visual interest in the background you have to say the name of the fucker the mr. Skelly skeleton so I got the mr. Skelly scholar tin at Party City it was $79.99 and fog juice is like 10 bucks I think for a gallon okay so that's a really good issue to run into what's the problem um so we have our smoke but it's not really present in the scene right it's just kind of muddy in the background so I think we need to add one more light into this setup and that's just going to be an effect light to give us a back light on that smoke so the closer it is to being directly behind the product and down the barrel of the lens the more you will see it let me know if that's flaring in the camera yeah that's why are we seeing it yeah we're seeing it there you go that's good and then if we can get the house lights back off here comes the haze now you can see the difference Oh night and day you have to be delicate with the haze right because it could also wash your image out you usually generally want the haze to be behind your products so you still have the sharpness in the contrast too much haze will lower the contrast and in films that's cool that's fine right it looks soft it looks more no make it looks great with products you generally want it to be like text sharp you want to be clean and then yeah we could throw the red in I think that looks great yeah it looks awesome yeah so let's see if we put the red on the backlight and that's a cool thing right you can you're not stuck to anything here experiment turn off some lights turn on otherwise it looks nice and then like I said if you move just by moving a couple lights you can get a different look a little more frontal now if you want to bring it up and give it more of a commercial or you can go a little more back a little more back I'm gonna go a little moody or to give it a little moody err well that looks great through those looks great as it is so for the most part I think a lot of people think that all product shops need to be really bright and happy yeah what do you say normally big productions it's a safe move right you light it bright high key lighting it's gonna show the product as it is but I feel like especially in the indie world that you can break the rules a little bit right so here we have an extremely contrasting look and it also goes into the brand right if the brands edgy and the brand is for younger people you kind of go with that flow and you kind of just do research so you can do different things it just has to make a little bit of sense if this is an edgier headphone company they're like you know all about like rock music and that kind of stuff why not go ahead and do this as long as you can go and get moments where you can see the logo clearly and like I said before make sure you have a normal light on the product so that you're not misleading people into the color of it a lot of companies want their products just to look safe they don't want to look so intense in them and gritty but personally I like it greedy I like it ready to this for me of all of them possibly even that looks amazing look so cool I always like to have multiple looks so I'll probably go around and turn off and leave one light on let it roll for five seconds turn that off turn another way let it roll right because that gives you so many options in posts now you can do something where the product spins and a light turns on turns off turns on turns off overhead turns on turns off right so there's a lot of effects that you can actually build in if you're thinking about the Edit in production okay so after we've got our wide what kind of shots are we punching in for after this so now I want to punch in for close-ups we're gonna make sure that it's 50% different than our original shot that way it doesn't look like a jump cut and looks more intentional and then we're also going to add a little bit of movement with the close-up while being on the tripod we could still add that movement without bringing in a slider or anything just by following details around as they move with the lazy susan finding details like the logo or the stitching or Englishers the reflect hinges anything that kind of screams the features of the product CIND boys headphones for the modern era done and cut good yeah now this product shot that we did is headphones obviously but we could swap this with all kinds of anything you want I think any product would work in this scenario okay so I'm gonna throw in some products real quick just to show that it all looks fine all righty so I think we got it real quick Justin for people that are approaching this for the first time what did they take away the gun so this is a classic look that's really easy to do you don't have to have a location you don't have to have a studio it's black wall with a black table and you can get this shot but also you know just experiment remember try turning lights on and off and just you're not stuck to one thing so sounds good so for people that want to find you Justin as well - we're gonna find ya so on instagram at Justin Jones DP and the studio that we're at today is my new studio it's beamed on LA again thank you to star blocks for sponsoring this video start upgrading your videos with high quality stock footage by going over two-story blocks comm slash Indy mogul and of course if you have any questions leaving the comments down below we'll try to get down there and answer those as well but any buggle I'm Ted and of course I'll get you guys the next when you start getting into bigger commercials and stuff like that you'll have somebody from the company there with you helping you stay on brand so casually standing behind your shoulder all day making sure that you're doing the right thing and basically making all the decisions for you for sure

Channel: Indy Mogul

Views: 378,898

Rating: 4.9514627 out of 5

Keywords: product cinematography, cheap and easy setups, commercial, shoot product videos, low budget, three light setup, advanced techniques, indie filmmaking, student film, tabletop b-roll, cinematography breakdown, lighting breakdown, beautiful slow motion, macro cinematography, behind the scenes, professional photography, epic product video, cinematic products, creative photography, how to shoot, how to edit, how I film epic handheld b roll, job shadow

Id: JUrIOMJY41I

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020