oren meets world: master art direction: photography, branding, and visual storytelling

Welcome to Art Direction 201. We're gonna dive deep into how to take amazing photos, whether of you, for your friends, or for your brand. In my Art Direction 101 video, I talked about the very basic, how to use things like location, action, and perspective to make photos stand out. But that was just scratching the surface. So in this video, we're gonna dive deep into what it takes to make standout art direction and have that as part of your toolkit as just a normal person who creates content or as something that's a foundational point of your creative career. Let's lock in. So in this video, we're gonna talk about reference and using references. We're gonna talk about the concept of displacement. We're gonna talk about parasite marketing and what you use inside of your images to be able to connotate a feel or provide a context for a brand. We're gonna talk about perspective, go deeper on location, and then tap into world building. And I'm gonna do all this through the framework of two different types of shoot. And we'll end, as always, with some hope. But this first type of shoot is one of my favorite ones. And this shoot is a refrigerator shoot, a kitchen shoot. It's something you can do for a product or for a person. And we're gonna dive into it. And the second shoot we're gonna talk through is a reference shoot, where I'm actually gonna go through a shoot deck of something I'm working on where we're replicating a video game and doing a GTA-style shoot with people. So first, let's talk about reference. So I got to this idea of the refrigerator shoot by browsing through reference. I was going through Cosmos. Cosmos has a feed based on your boards. It actually enables you to see different images that come up. So I'm always doing things like some key searches. I'll search for vintage fashion ads. I'll search brands like Helmut Lang. I'll search product photos. I'll just search art direction. And I'll also browse through Arena, which has a great reference set for specific art directors and creatives. Often have a lot of their work organized down there you can go through. And so these fridge shots caught my eye. And they caught my eye a lot because of this concept of displacement. This idea that you can put an item into an unfamiliar environment and it stops to scroll on the feed. This is a technique that anyone working in marketing, photography, social media should understand. That if you want someone to stop, give them something unusual. Something that doesn't make sense in their brains. This is a key part of almost all the art direction techniques that you see major brands do. Is something just feels different or new or exciting about what they put on. You can do this with nostalgia. You can do this with scale, like oversized items. You can do this by just plain being weird. But what I like about this is it's almost subtle. It's an object that doesn't belong. You see a pair of boots inside a refrigerator and you wonder, how do we get here? So let's dive into what you do to put together a shoot and think through it from an art direction. I love the fridge idea because everyone has a fridge for the most part. You can use the actual inside of it or you can use your door and you have an infinite kind of world of creativity you can play with within a couple key scenarios. So the first one we're gonna look at is this refrigerator door. This idea of you can put almost anything inside one of these slots if it's a product you can fit in it and think about what story are you telling? So what do I mean by that? I love this shot from Lolita Swimwear because it's a contrast. You have a bikini hanging inside of someplace cold. So there's almost like a sense of a feel of touch that comes with that and the senses are a key art direction thing to think about. Can you, through what you're able to present visually, get someone to feel something that isn't visual? Can you get them to smell the environment you're in? Can you get them to feel cold? All these are things in your art direction toolkit you can use to connotate emotion and they can be done through what you visually present. And when you begin to think like that and think what of the senses could I, through imagery, bring to life, you're beginning to have part of a toolkit that makes creatives create really interesting things. And with that, you have the idea of really cold or really hot as well. Things melting inside a refrigerator is an interesting concept because something's not right. The extremely frozen thing inside of a freezer is something that people feel automatically when they see it. You get almost a visceral connection to seeing everything iced over. Even more so if you see a hand touching it. These are little pieces of sensory action that you can apply to almost any concept but they really come to life inside of a refrigerator chute. And you can use that concept of steam or ice or whatever it is to begin to create a visual environment. So now let's talk about what's around the object on the shelf. So there's a couple things that you can do whenever you're kind of dressing a scene. And one of the concepts I talk about a lot and I've done short form videos on is this concept of parasite marketing, which you'll see a lot of brands do once you see the concept and you know it. And that is associating their brand with brands that they wanna be like. Much like how some lower end brands will always try to place their stores near a Gucci store so they're associated with it, this is the same thing. If your brand is shooting a stocking or something and you actually pair it with a Gucci bag inside the chute, you are using parasite marketing to take the power of Gucci's brand and associate it with your brand. Now the same thing can apply on almost any level. So let's look at it in terms of a fridge. If you're inside this context and say you had a food product inside here and then you surround it with diamonds or you surround it with Moet champagne or super expensive and exclusive things, then you're creating one vibe. You are drawing like a luxury environment into it. Surrounding it all by bottles of Moet might imply that you're creating a celebration and that that's the context someone's going into, that a party is about to happen. Surround it all with the finest organic fruit, a bunch of Airwomb boxes, and immediately you've begun to create a vision of a customer. So I love this idea that you could use your customer persona in what's on the fridge to get something or some inside joke that they understand. So that dressing around it becomes one of these fundamental principles of how you apply your art direction. What contextually do you do with the objects around it? And if you have a displaced object, like a boot in here, what are you creating that then gives this scene something more interesting? Now you're establishing multiple layers to your visuals. You have this displacement effect, you have this kind of persona coming to life of what's surrounding it. Maybe you're actually playing with some of the senses, like this is the essence of doing real interesting visual creative direction. And the same thing can go multiple. Say that you wanna create a contrast. So you have a bunch of Tupperware, you have a bunch of Chinese food boxes that look old around there, but then you have one object that's perfectly lit or brand new. Now you're contrasting between this beautiful protein bar you put in the chute and all the things that surround it that are unappetizing. You have all these different ideas from drawing positivity from things around it to creating a standout from things around it, or even nostalgia. Say that you had an item inside of a fridge that was all surrounded by things from a certain period. You have this lifestyle element. All of these are tools that, again, we're applying to a fridge, but can apply to almost any chute, anytime you set up a table, anytime you set up a room. This is how art directors can really think about creating interesting environments. But now we have perspective. So all the shots that I've shown so far are just of this fridge door, right, or the interior of a fridge. Now let's look at how you can look at this from the other way. So Karl Shakur, who's a really popular creator, he shot this shot. He's not the first person to do it. There's lots of shots like this, but it is a wide-angle shot, shot from inside the fridge. Now you can do this in a few ways. If you have a camera with an ultra-wide angle lens, you can capture this. You can put your iPhone on wide mode in there. It's an easy way to do it. But you are now setting a scene. You are saying, I'm inside of a space, an unexpected space. I'm viewing a person, a person generally in a vulnerable position, and opening a fridge and looking around. Maybe it's the middle of the night. Maybe it's in the day. You can begin to storytell around what's happening there. And with anything that is shot in a wide angle, it gets this exaggerated feel. You can compliment that with exaggerated emotion. Someone looking skeptical or excited or sad gets accentuated when you add that perspective of the wide-angle lens to it. Then you can experiment with the lighting and the storytelling there. You have both the lights within the fridge and you have the lights in your background. If you shuttle the lights off, then it can be a midnight snack environment, or you can create that contrast of light on the face. Maybe you only light the shot with what the light that's emanating from the fridge. Maybe you can play with the dimmer. All of a sudden, you have a toolkit to work with. Or if there's lights on in the background, if there's things going on in the background, the light's not as hard, you're telling the story of something happening where the actual environment may have a different story being told. And I love this fridge example because you have the control of these elements in such a simple way, where you can say, I have this lighting, I have this on and off, I have all these environments people think of, the way we eat, the way we consume, the times of day. There's immediate storytelling that's built into something that we all experience. And then you have the little things like the location or essence of the fridge. If it's a mini fridge or a nice one or a big one or inside some kind of environment, you can put all of this together. And before I step into the second example where I'm gonna kind of introduce a different approach to it, I want you to really think about this because if you are trying to come up with an interesting idea or shoot something and you wanna take an idea like this and bring it into the world, I suggest you do it. Your homework for this video will be to go out in the universe and shoot a fridge video, whether it's in your house or somewhere else. Because here's where the idea of location comes to mind. For instance, I have a fridge indoors. In here where I am now, I have a smaller fridge. I have a Rocco smart fridge. And I could shoot something in there that would tell a very different story of the little fridge, also has a very different feel and vibe. But then the same thing would happen if I went and snuck a few things into like my local Ralph's or tried to do the same shoot inside of an Air One. Or we were able to take over a bodega in New York and do something with that essence there, shooting from inside or from outside or what that looks like or the commercial environment. All of these ideas you'll see in a reference. Like if we start with just that single reference image and now we've added onto it perspective, we've added onto it the story of all the things surrounding it. We've added on the idea of location and where we could take that idea to. This is how you think when you're really doing creative direct. All right, so now we're gonna go onto concept two. This is what I'm working on for my valuables brand right now. This is, when I'm shooting this, this video may come out later. This is the week of Black Friday. So I'm trying to add some extra firepower on for a shoot we're gonna do on Monday. So that right after our Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we're coming back hard. I have some new inventory coming in. And as many of you know, my brand has kind of like a racing theme. And a lot of the content we've put out has like a heist theme around it. We're sort of playing into this kind of world building there. And I'm looking to kind of connect the dots between this kind of vintage feel I have inside these products. This idea of creating some characters and a story which I'm slowly rolling out. And then connecting into the world of the things that I feel like my customers really enjoy. My customers are very into car culture. I've started to notice that the younger customers, a lot of the kids I met at ComplexCon are really into gaming, are following people on streaming and on Twitch. So I'm connecting the dots there a bit with this GTA themed shoot and kind of building a little bit of a world around that that will intersect with this real world kind of heist idea I've played out in some of these films. So to do that, we set up this shoot. I'll give you a little idea of the brief I put together and how that works and how we're art directing it. So we started with the perspective of environments. And this is a great idea to look at a ref. If you wanna reference a film or reference a video game, that's an excellent place to look for art direction examples. Because what you're gonna get there when you use a reference that's from something people know is that you're gonna have people feel like they're in on the joke or feel like they know or be like, oh, I recognize that. That means that they have a moment with the brand. This is why I love movie references. You see me do this all the time. All the titles on all my stuff are like odd. Cormac McCarthy references for like insiders. And there's like four people who get those jokes, but they like really get it. And those people like the brand, right? And that's the world you can create. So here, this is Grand Theft Auto screenshots, right? And you'll see this unique point of view you immediately recognize as Grand Theft Auto. You're behind a person, you're about four feet back, you're a couple feet up, looking slightly down. And there's all these things like cars are always angled a little bit too much. There's like a map in the corner. This is something that we're gonna recreate with the art direction. And what I love about video game recreation is that by just bringing it into real life, it's immediately interesting. And so we took a couple of different perspectives. I'm doing a male and female model inside this shoot. So I have some other female ones. You'll notice like she has like an aggressive stance in this Grand Theft Auto screenshot. I'm like, cool. That's the kind of stuff that I'm putting in this deck because that's what I wanna reference. I wanna say, hey, how can we take these models and have equally an aggressive as a stance? If we do something like this, can we have a supercar right there? Like, right? We don't need to rent a supercar for the shoot. There can be one on the street. If we position the person just like this, we can get a shot like this in Miami or in LA. And that's the kind of references that I'm putting into the look. And then same thing when we're doing that shoot, I wanna start world building. And so when we talk about art direction, things I've talked about before, this idea of world building is how do you develop characters? How do you give the people in your shoots a story beyond just looking at it and seeing something visually cool? And especially if you're gonna use similar people again and again, or if you're painting a bigger narrative. And so I am painting this like larger overall heist narrative with some recurring characters within my brand with lots of things that are gonna emerge. You don't have to world build that deep, but I'd even think about in a single image, what are all the stories you can help tell? What can a prop add to a shoot that makes it not just weird, but makes someone actually start to think about why does that exist? Maybe come up with a story in their own mind. So these GTA shots, someone counting the stack of money, my guy with the baseball bat over his shoulder, Trevor with the lighter pulled out, each of these is using a single prop to tell a story. And I love this idea, and you've heard me talk in these videos about my one thing concept, where if you're doing a shoot, if you just add one thing, just make one decision that's intentional, you immediately elevate the shoot. All you have to do is just do one thing, zero to one. Either you have a normal photo or you have a photo with one idea. And you can add a bunch more on top of that, but one idea takes you from normal into something art-directed or creative-directed. So for this shoot, I'm gonna have a Zippo lighter. If I can get someone to mimic the attitude of this character, who's kind of relatively notorious, like replicate this scene. But even if they didn't, even if let's say I had the female model do that and had that same kind of look in her eye and we framed it a little bit differently, that idea of that one lit lighter and that look sells a story inside the photo. And so this is why we put these references together, because I'm gonna let the photographer cook. He's gonna come up with his own ideas of how to pose this and stage this and do this within the context and things that he's given. But having this to set him up is the beginning of how we're gonna work on telling that story. And then you can look at some of these other perspectives. So I also put these shots in here of like cars and motorcycles and stuff like that, where I wanna get some video clips and be able to say, cool, if I just shoot from this perspective, a couple feet behind, a couple feet up, people immediately know what they're looking at. It feels like they're in a video game. Then I'm gonna get the design team, who you've seen me document in the videos, the guys at Darkroom, are gonna have them create like a little map view, a little bit of stats and stuff that's on there. So when I actually put these reels out, they're gonna feel like we're creating like a valuable video game. And so this is a very stark contrast to the fridge shoot, right? Where we're beginning to like start with a place, add on some context, add on some perspective. Here, we're starting with a reference and we're saying, hey, we're actually gonna duplicate this like relatively close, but then how can we do brand storytelling around this? I'm gonna introduce vehicles that are key to my brand in a certain way. They're gonna have the clothing of the brand all within it. I'm gonna have models represent the brand. I'm gonna have storylines and props that tell to other things in the brand. Like we're gonna use heist masks inside it, some of the props I'm gonna hand off because that's connecting to other video parts that I've done. So think about what your brand models, what those things are, what those products are. If you were to do this same shoot and you were Graza, for instance, you had the Graza potato chips, like in the shoot, like you can immediately begin to introduce it in your own way. And you have to have that visual language. And as a brand that has a visual language of racing, has a visual of like of being connected to some of these like plot lines or people that are scheming, I have a world that I can help build. And you'll see at the very end of this, I have some of the models that we're talking to and like who we're considering. And then you can start to see like, how does this all tie in to bring it to life? But this is a very straightforward example. This is a quick shoot. I saw my boy at ComplexCon. He's like, hey, we should shoot again soon. I was like, awesome. Here's a concept I have. We put together like literally this is some Google Slides. I'll turn it into a full brief and like Adobe Express before we do it. But like, this is a, like, this is kind of how you begin to think and go back and forth with people to kind of create an original ideas. And then I also just, again, let them cook. Be like, hey, this isn't like locked in. Apply your own creative vision. We've talked through a lot of concepts inside this video. Like the basics we talked about before, like action, what do models do? Like location, where they're at. But now we talked about displacement, talked about parasite marketing. We talked about scale. We talked about world building and characters and utilizing references. Like this is your toolkit. No matter what kind of creative you are, like having a art direction toolkit is gonna be super useful to you. Even if you're creating a graphic image, you're taking a photo of your girlfriend. You're trying to get a photo shoot for anything you do. Using all of these tools are super useful. So like I mentioned before, your homework is to go do a fridge shoot for anything you have. A cool product you have, something you like, photos of you, whatever it is. And then also to write down the things you like from this video. Start to build, literally make a doc that's like, this is my art director toolkit. You're gonna hate some things I showed, you're gonna love some things I showed. You're gonna say, I wanna do that or you're gonna say, I'm gonna avoid it. The things that you wanna do or you wanna try, like put them in that doc. So go back to it. The next time you have a shoot, you begin to have your references for it. So anyway, that was Art Direction 201. Appreciate y'all watching. We're gonna continue to go deeper. I did all these basic videos so I can do more expansive videos on them now once everyone's kind of learned it. I'll link the Art Direction 101 here video as we end it. And thank y'all so much for watching. Let's go.