Big’s Mobile Airport Campaign Written Up in Photo District News
Our I FLY MO campaign’s innovative use of photography, landed Big a mention in Photo District News. Big thanks to photographer Jason Wallis
Full article below:
Small Market Production, Big Market Inspiration: Jason Wallis
Major retailers and other national clients aren’t the only ones hiring photographers to shoot still and video for the same assignment. Local clients are, too, and Birmingham, Alabama photographer Jason Wallis was ready when he got the call to shoot a combination campaign for the Mobile Regional Airport.
The “IFLYMO” campaign was intended to encourage people in southern Alabama to use the Mobile airport instead of other regional airports. The strategy was to appeal to a sense of community by telling them their patronage would attract more low-fare carriers to Mobile and stimulate economic development in the region.
“We were going for something edgy, [not] something with a soft, dated small-market feel,” Wallis says. “The client was eager to try something out of the norm.”
Big Communications, a Birmingham agency that Wallis has worked with on various projects, conceived the campaign. They hired Wallis because he is one of few local photographers able to shoot video, too. He learned by observing what ad agencies and photographers in large markets were doing with HD-DSLRs.
“When someone did something cool, I could see it right away on the Internet,” he says. He may live in a small market, he adds, but “as an artist, I want to make something great and cool, too.”
He bought a Canon 5D Mark II and started shooting video for fun, eventually showing clients what he could do. He convinced Big Communications to take a chance on his video skills for the first time about two years ago. They realized that high- quality commercial production was within their grasp, and they were looking for photographers with the know-how to help them do it, explains creative director Ford Wiles.
“I don’t have go pay some crazy money to get an awesome end product,” in Nashville or beyond, he says. “And I’d rather work with people in the local economy who can deliver the goods.”
The Mobile Regional Airport is a hub for business travelers—an educated, upscale demographic. So Wiles’s concept was to build a campaign on testimonials from several business and community leaders. But he wanted spots that felt “very progressive. Not talking heads or typical slice-of-life business shots, but more like a TV program viewers would want to watch.”
Wallis adds, “We wanted something fast-paced, with quick cuts and pans that made it look really sophisticated. We didn’t want it too jumpy, like Saving Private Ryan or Bourne Identity, but we did want it to have a lot of energy.”
The shoot took a total of six days, and had two components: scripted testimonials at the subjects’ offices, and B-roll gathered in and around the airport. Wallis and Wiles spent a day scouting all the locations. Then with a crew of two assistants and a stylist, they visited the offices of each subject, and recorded them reciting their scripts in front of the camera. Each subject was backlit from the left (relative to the camera) with an Arri 650 Watt fresnel spotlight (tungsten), which Wallis bounced onto the subjects’ faces using a reflector positioned in front of them and to the right.
“We ran through that several times, then paused for a portrait of each person so the lighting would be the same,” Wallis says.
On previous jobs, he had switched from continuous video lighting to strobes for the stills, in order to shoot at a higher shutter speed for clean, sharp life-sized images. But Wallis decided he didn’t need to switch to strobes to get images sharp enough for the IFLYMO magazine print ads. “And I’m getting comfortable using continuous light” for the still images, he says.
The B-roll footage, meanwhile, was shot with mostly natural light, and was entirely unscripted. “It’s storytelling at its best. It’s like when you’re an artist, saying, ‘That’s a cool shot, let’s shoot that,’” Wiles recounts.
In fact, they began shooting B-roll while they were scouting the airport. That saved time and took advantage of opportunities they may not have had later. “That’s one of things I like about the camera we were using. It’s real run and gun. You can set it up and break it down easily, so you can try lots of things to get what you like,” Wiles says.
In all, they spent about three days shooting in and around the airport. The footage emphasizes motion, including moving camera sequences that give viewers a sense of a purposeful drive to the airport, and bustling passengers and employees inside it.
Wallis shot all of the images—stills, testimonials, and airport shots—with the 5D. Although he offers post-production services, Big Communications art director Brian Curtin did post for the four IFLYMO spots.
Curtin used panning techniques to match the camera movement, along with jump cuts, time remapping, “and ramping throughout for a more stylistic look,” Wiles explains. The color was also stylized using Magic Bullet Mojo from Red Giant Software.
The print ads are running in local business magazines, while the spots are appearing on cable and network TV in Mobile. From a production standpoint, though, they wouldn’t look out of place in a national rotation.
