Getting Grippy!

Dancing feet in the studio for a special video production

For one of our last shoots before Christmas, we were commissioned to produce an ad for Australian-based sock brand GrippyPlus – certainly a first for us! Socks don’t come up too often in our projects list!

We’re gradually producing more and more fashion and product video through our video production department, and this project was a welcome one to end 2019 on. Our brief here was to create a vibrant and engaging promotional video for use online and throughout the GetGrippy social media channels including YouTube, to highlight the main features and usability of the socks.

For best effect, and to make the most from the budget, we organised a session in the studio with a variety of backdrops, with the help of our very enthusiastic model – Natasha. She’s lovely to work with and has become one of our highest recommended models to use across video production and photography projects.

We love tackling a variety of projects and so this was exciting for us and would allow us to exercise our skills in fashion video – even more exciting as it was the first shoot with some of our new production kit…

This shoot presented an opportune moment to use our new Panasonic S1H as there were loads of colour and dancing feet involved! it also meant that we could effectively give our client a free quality upgrade – so we all win!

I used the Panasonic 24-70 S Pro 2.8 to complement the beautiful 6K full-frame sensor and recorded in the 4K 25p 10 bit 4:2:2 internal codec in a V-log colour profile, which gave us over 14 stops of dynamic range – insane for a camera of this size! For anyone non-techy readers, all of these elements add to the visual quality, as well as the look and feel of the images.

The flexibility this gave me in post-production was huge, meaning we could push colours and exposure much more before any visual degradation started to creep in. The sock product has a glow in the dark feature, so it was important that I was able to bring this feature to life in the post-production stage which this camera allowed me to do with ease.

The screen is bright, clear and you can rotate it to any angle – this was incredibly useful as I was able to show Natasha what was being captured, in real-time, meaning the dance moves were spot on and we were able to get accurate placement of slightly tricky foot positions.

The LUT view assist built into the camera really helped me process what the final image would look like in post-production while lighting each scene – this was also essential for the client as it’s difficult to understand the extremely flat and grey look of LOG footage and can cause concern, so this was a welcome feature. One of our perennial challenges with video production is helping to fill in the gaps between what a client sees on location during a shoot and where the visuals will eventually end up.

Also of great importance here, as we know with all fashion video and product-based video work, accuracy of colours and shape of product are really important.

The shoot was only a half-day booking so we had to move along the shot list pretty fast, but in the end, the finished video ended up looking great and the client was very pleased. So overall a very successful and enjoyable first use experience with our new gear!

You can see the end video above, and if you’re interested in our other video production projects there’s plenty more examples across our site.