New Site Launch

After months of work we finally launched our new website.

The blog will live there from now on so come check out the site.

Oakley Trophy

We love that our clients never cease to amaze us with their creativity and projects they come to us with. So when Oakley asked for a trophy that “looks like a torpedo” for a surf contest we just got cracking. We managed to find a WWII tail section of a torpedo and fixed that up nice. We then fabricated a custom stand out of aluminum to match the aesthetic feel. Tags were added for all the previous winners of the event with plenty of space left for this trophy to be passed from champion to champion. To top it off we added a “liquid holding vessel” into the top so the bubbly can served up.

Levis Commuter Series

Last summer we hosted 19 product designers, merchandisers, and category managers from Levi Strauss in San Francisco and showed them Colorado. We toured them through our backyard and put together 3 days of trending, biking, focus groups, partying, and kart racing.

Levis came to us because they wanted to get their finger on the pulse of the fixed gear and commuter bike movement in an authentic way that couldn’t be done with traditional consumer research. They chose Denver and Boulder (as opposed to NYC, San Fran, or LA) because the scene is still young and developing organically in Colorado.

The fruits of the research have finally hit the market. Utility waistband for U-lock, stretch fabric, reinforced fabrics, sanitized brand technology, 3m reflectivity and nanosphere technology. Find out what all that means here.

New Zealand Catalogue Photo Shoot Details – Part 2: Lighting

As you can see from our last post on traveling and packing the majority of our traveling burden can be blamed on our lighting equipment. What we choose to bring on any given trip depends on the goals outlined by the story and the shot list (on an editorial shoot) or the creative brief (on a commercial shoot).

The creative brief for this trip included outside sculpted portraits at night with gells and light painting, lit daytime action, product focused environmental lifestyle, and a variety of studio set ups. We’ll break these post down into 4 categories: On hill action, improvised studio, lifestyle, and creative (light painting etc.).

Unfortunately we can’t show any of the final imagery until Spyder’s 2012 product is launched.

New Zealand Catalog Photo Shoot Details – Part 1: Travel / Packing

Warning: This post may be a bit drier if you’re not interested in photography with some nerdy details and how-to’s for surviving a medium size international catalogue shoot. We also posted a short travelogue of the trip here if that’s of more interest.

There is a ton that goes into successfully executing a location shoot of this scale. We’ve been lucky enough to both shoot and produce photoshoots all over the world and over the next few weeks we will do a series of posts based on the New Zealand shoot highlighting what we’ve learned throughout the years.

We’ll cover…
Part 1: Packing and Travel
Part 2: Lighting
Part 3: Digital Remote Workflow
Part 4: Planning and Logistics

En Zed: New Zealand Spyder Photoshoot Journey

Our second big catalog shoot with Spyder is in bag. We captured 10,000+ images over the course of 10 days with 5 athletes at 3 resorts.

The trip started with the ambitious attempt to lug 440lbs of ski, camera and lighting gear into 2 ski bags, 3 pelican cases, and 2 Dakine roller bags. We made it though DIA with a manageable extra baggage fee of $300. We don’t say it often but… Thanks United! Once in NZ things didn’t go quite as smoothly. Two pelicans and a camera bag were confiscated and we ended up walking all around the Aukland airport grounds trying not to get hit by cars by looking the wrong way crossing roads and searching for the Customs office.

Pocketwizard

We were honored with the opportunity to beta test the new Pocketwizard FlexTT5 Nikon System and wanted to write this post on a few of our findings. The product is on the market and available to consumers now and they’re definitely worth checking out. This is not a full review, plenty of those already exist, just a highlight of a few things we loved about them.

We tested for two weeks on a Spyder shoot in Portillo, Chile (check out it out here) and have been shooting the system non-stop since we got it in our hands. The FlexTT5 system is working great and there is a ton of exciting technology that’s changing what we can do with off-camera flashes.

Bear Naked Brand Experience Kiosk

The Bear Naked Granola brand experience kiosk is now on the way back from the East Coast after stopping at the Teva Games in Vail.

On Board Experiential Marketing came to us because they knew we bring more to the table than just fabrication. Most of what passes through our fab shop starts with napkin sketches from chairlift, trailhead, or bar room meetings and goes though a long series of sketches, engineering, and prototyping. On this project On Board had a refined design that we helped bring to life.

The kiosk is framed out of beetle kill and skinned with corrugated steel. We CNCed the signage in our solar powered shop in Evergreen and the rest of the build went down in our Battery621 shop. The crew from On Board came down to Battery, checked out the finished product, and we loaded their trailer (wrapped by our friends at Ink Monstr) so they could hit the road to the Teva Games.

Red Bull Photo Slideshow

We’ve had an amazing relationship with Red Bull throughout the years that has crossed almost every category of our competencies. We’ve been a part of the Red Bull Media House team for almost 5 years and have shot a huge variety of athletes, events, and musicians.

We put this slideshow together as a quick tour through our years of shooting everything Red Bull. It was a challenge, as curation always is, sorting through the tens of thousands of frames. We edited and re-edited, feeling that one shot or a whole shoot was more worthwhile than another. In the end, photography is subjective and almost certainly there is someone who would be more or less happy at either end of our vacillations. There is a ton we left out but we feel it landed on comfortable length and selection. We’d love to hear your feed back.

Enjoy [at full screen]

Share on Facebook

The Blues Jean Bar

We built The Blues Jean Bar a portable retail experience to take on the road to test new markets and deliver their unique product to regions where they don’t yet have a physical location. The Blues Jean Bar takes an innovative approach to selling denim where knowledgeable friendly “Jeans Tenders” help customers find their perfect pair of jeans. They have 9 brick and mortar locations and 3 mobile units nationally and are rapidly expanding.

We designed the modular portable system as a system of light weight crates made of beetle kill pine. The crates nest together to create a shelving system and front bar. The top crates in each stack have branding both inside (behind the denim) and on the back and can be oriented either way depending on signage needs and amount of denim. The bar is branded with water jet cut steel.

The bar and one of three shelves in front of branded van.