It was all hands on deck to capture the students in action photos at school for the Black Stone Valley Vocational High School capabilities brochure. The action, in this case, was the students working with their teachers in their various departments. This wasn’t so much capture as it was planned improvisation.
Planning for Action Photos At School
Great photos can happen at any time. However, if you are planning a marketing project that needs multiple students and locations, creating a plan can help nail down just when “any time” is. For this photo shoot, Sharon, the principle at Elan Design, had been working with the school to design a brochure to highlight different aspects of the hands on opportunity for the students. Our job was to scout out the locations and map out what we would need for each page of the brochure.
The school’s facilities cover everything from the CAD design classes to machining and fabrications. It was important for us to showcase the equipment, the relationship between the teachers and the students and the attitude of the kids as they accomplished their goals.
A Shot List Makes Photoshoots Work
One of our big challenges is always timing. We needed to create a shot list that specified how many kids we would need for each shot and how long the shot would last. But, we also had to go even further and specify what the kids need to be wearing and any other elements necessary to make the final photo tell our story.
We ended up with six main images we wanted to accomplish. Casting was handled by the school, drawing from the student population.
Action Photos At School
The day of the photoshoot dawned beautifully. We got on location and all of our preproduction work made the day go very easily. We did hit a couple of hiccups when the projects that we had scouted two weeks before were no longer available to us. And, one of the teachers had to leave early. That, of course, is when our shot list becomes all the more important. We were able to keep on our schedule and improvise within the goals of the photo to get the images we needed for the book.
In the end, the client was happy, the design team was happy and the only thing left to do was for them to finalize the copy.
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