Malouf’s Summer Sale

Recently, in Lubbock, we had the extreme pleasure of shooting an ad for one of the most well established brands in the area, Malouf’s. Malouf’s is a higher end clothing retail store that’s been in Lubbock more than 65 years! This ad has been in the works for several months and back in June, all that pre-production work finally came together.

Our shoot day started off with our most intricate lighting set up where we shot their tailor, Orlando, sewing the Malouf’s patch on the inside of the jacket. That set up turned out to be a little more difficult than what we had originally anticipated, but we still conquered it ahead of schedule. We top lit the Orlando and his table with a 650w tungsten diffused with some wax paper. Then we back lit him with a 1Kw tungsten fixture and did a hint of daylight balanced LED as a side fill. We threw a little fog in there to give a lift to the scene, rigged up our BlackMagic Production 4K camera to our dana dolly (aka Zuul) and did a few medium shot runs and wrapped that setup with the tighter shots on the Malouf’s patch. During this setup, our amazing talent arrived. We have to say that Keri and Russ were an absolute joy to work with all day!

Russ

Our next couple of setups weren’t so intensive because the ambient light in the store provide enough fill light that we only needed to key and back light our subjects. The next shot in the shot list was the Samuelsohn shot where Orlando was measuring Russel’s pants. We keyed them with a 1Kw tungsten fixture and back lit them with a 650w tungsten fixture.

From there we moved over to the shoes where the sales associate presents some super sweet Allen Edmonds to Russel. This shot was a lot of fun to make. We effectively did a crosskey where we used a 1Kw through a 4×4 half soft frost diffusion directly behind russel’s head which back lit him and keyed our sales associate. then we threw a 650w to the left of  Russ to add a bit of a kicker on the outline of his head. We used our Dana Dolly to track the associate walking from the display over to Russ and this may be one of our favorite shots with the little bit of lens flare we caught off that 650w.

After the shoes, we went over to the Texas Tech apparel section we chose to do another 650w toplight that would effectively backlight Russel and highlight the manikin wearing the Tech golf shirt at the top of the display. We chose to key Russel with our 1K+half soft frost combo and it worked really well for the shot.

Our Couple

Capturing the emotion of our couple came off much easier than we anticipated. Especially when you’re not working with trained talent, you run the risk of having what we call “Video Mode”. This is where someone you think would be great and animated on camera goes into a little bit of a weird, quirky, not camera friendly version of themselves and you have to figure out how to work around that. Keri and Russ never had “video mode”. They played to the camera and had some great ideas for their characters as we shot throughout the day.

At midday, we decided that, for scheduling purposes, we could shoot all of the shots that had Keri and Russ together at the same time. Our first shot had them walking into the store with their backs to the camera shooting at a rather wide angle and pushing in on our dana dolly. This was our store reveal and with all the highlights throughout the store, we feel like it really shined and sparkled. Something you may not know is that in this shot, we were so wide that we couldn’t help but see the dolly rails in the shot. So, Ross, being the VFX genius he is, managed to clone the floor, track the shot, and cover up the rails so you never know they exist. After this shot came one of our toughest shots of the day.

Our challenge was making sure that Keri and Russ were properly exposed as they walked in the front door of Malouf’s. So, we built our big 8×8 frame and threw our 8×8 half soft frost together. We set our 8x frame and took 2 650w tungsten fixtures and our 2 1Kw fixtures and blasted them through the diffusion. This brought up their faces enough that they weren’t competing with the incredibly hot background being blown out by the sun. We had them run their entrance to the store a few times and then moved on!

From there, we set up outside for their store exit shot which was relatively easy. We wanted the store to look HUGE, so we took our BlackmMagic pocket cinema camera outside on a really short tripod and loaded our Tokina 11-16mm lens on it and pulled it as wide as it would go. While we set up, the fine folks at Malouf’s loaded Russ and Keri up with lots of bags so they had their hands full when they walked out the front door. With such a beautiful and classy store face, we had to make sure to capture it all.

Once we felt confident on that shot, we went back inside to have lunch and break down the 8x and all the lights sitting right in the middle of the store front. We moved camera to just inside the front checkout desk where we shot their arrival at the front desk after their shopping spree. This is where their genius came in with their characters. Keri and Russ decided that Keri should have a gigantic armload of clothes and accessories where as Russ would have a modest shirt, box of shoes, and a golf glove. It was hard to not laugh in the middle of their performance, because it was so well done.

As soon as that was all finished, we had to prep two different shots simultaneously. These were our montage shots. We got Keri lit where the room behind her framed her pretty much perfectly. We used our 1kw key through our 4×4 half soft frost and then a 650w just inside the room behind her to give her a beautiful backlight. We took Russ to the other side of the store and did our best to mimic the setup from Keri’s shot, so we could cut seamlessly between them and not have a jarring visual shift. We Lit Russ from camera left (which was flipped from Keri’s shot) with a 1Kw thorugh our 8×8 half soft frost diffusion and back lit him from camera left with a 650w tungsten fresnel. When the setups were finished, we would alternate between Keri and Russ and shoot their montage pieces while the other one was changing wardrobe.

Keri

As we neared the end of the day we only had two shots left to pick up. The first was Keri opening up the clothes rack to reveal herself to camera. We actually planted our Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera in the clothes rack to give it that up close and personal feel.

Then came our very last shot, which made us sad to some degree. We wrapped the shoot with Keri’s earring shot where she tested out her Kendra Scott earrings. This shot was interesting in the fact that we had to angle the mirror in such a way that we saw her face in the mirror. So, for her, she couldn’t actually see her face in the mirror. She still acted with flying colors!

That about wraps up this blog post about our shoot with Malouf’s! We had a blast and really loved working with their staff and look forward to working with them again soon! In the meantime, please enjoy these behind the scenes photos!

We hope you enjoyed this blog post about shooting with Malouf’s! If this kind of stuff (filmmaking, video production, creative storytelling) interests you, we hope you enjoy checking out the rest of our website. If you want to keep up to date with what we’ve got going for more of a day to day experience please head over to our Hamil Bros Facebook Page and click the LIKE button, follow our Hamil Bros Twitter, and our  Hamil Bros Instagram Account!  Also head over to Youtube and subscribe to the Hamil Bros Studios Channel!

p

Our Info

806-855-3741

[email protected]

Our Blog

Current Weather

Please enter your OpenWeatherMap API key.