Stellar - Pop-up Portrait Studio
In March 2020 I was given the opportunity through Full Sail Univeristy to create an experience for students and alumni at their annual Hall of Fame event. I collaborated with Shane Valentine to create a fully functioning pop-up photo studio with four different backdrops to match the brand of the event: Stellar. In late January we were able to attend a creative briefing from the creatives behind the event planning I immediately fell in love with the branding of the event with all of the galaxy theming and the beautiful color pallets that perfectly matched my personal branding for “Bates Media”.
The idea behind the different backdrops was to transport our subjects into these “out of this world” settings, but on a budget. Shane and I began meeting a month and a half before the event to start testing what worked and what didnt work. For one of the backdrops, we wanted to use a projector to project moving galaxy videos onto our subjects in front of a white background. We quickly found that our subjects were getting lost in the image, blending in with the background, and casting heavy shadows on the wall behind them - ruining the illusion of them being in space. We quickly troubleshooted and figured out a lighting setup to separate the subjects from the background and raised the projector to a higher vantage point to get rid of the harsh shadow on the back wall.
My favorite scene we set up was the bokeh/ fairy lights set up with the twinkling blue and pink lights. This was created using a 5’x5’ PVC pipe frame and wrapping over 40 yards of string lights around the PVC in a randomized pattern. The trickiest part about photographing this set up was making sure we had the right amount of space (no pun intended) to perfectly pull off the desired effect. If there wasn’t enough distance between the wall of the space we were in and the PVC frame, the fairy lights would light the back wall and ruin the black backdrop. If there wasn’t enough distance between the fairy lights and the subject, the lights would look very small and not create the starry, bokeh effect we were going for. We also had to figure out the right amount of distance between the subject and the photographer and which lens to use to avoid getting the edges of the PVC frame in the image and create the maximum amount of bokeh that we could.
Our other two scenes were fairly simple. With Stellar being Full Sail’s eleventh annual hall of fame, they incorporated the number 11 into the “Stellar” logo as two italicized 1’s instead of the double “L”. We took inspiration from this and used two rectangular soft boxes to mimic the logo as another backdrop. Our fourth and final backdrop came as a special request halfway through the event as attendees began asking for headshots they could use on their LinkedIn profiles. Shane took it upon himself to set up a simple white background with one light and a reflector to get these professional headshots.
Over a month and a half of collaboration, we designed and built four different sets and trained an AMAZING team of 10 brand new photographers the technical skills necessary to operate this fully functioning portrait studio. Some of the things we taught our team were manual camera settings, lighting techniques, how to pose models, and how to use the Adobe Creative Suite to edit the images. Over the course of four days over 10,000 images were captured, edited, and posted to a gallery on the same day for instant gratification social media content for attendees.
As you can probably tell by the photos, we had an insane amount of fun and I am so incredibly thankful to have been given the opportunity to lead this crazy project with Shane. After only a handful of meetings I am incredibly proud of the talent and leadership the blossomed from our team that came together to pull this thing off. Be sure to watch the video below by my good friends at Full Sail for a behind the scenes look at our studio!