Telling a story of success for Pink Spaghetti Stratford-upon-Avon
I thought about writing a generic blog about brand photography and video production, and I may do that at some point. But it seemed a little divorced from reality.
So I thought I’d show you photos from a recent shoot for a long-term client, Pink Spaghetti Stratford-upon-Avon. Pink Spaghetti is a national franchise offering Personal Assistant and Virtual Assistant support for businesses.
The Stratford-upon-Avon and Leamington Spa franchise is headed up by Kelly-Ann Grimes, with whom I’ve worked for many years. Not only have I been doing photography for her and her business, but she’s also my PA and works for me on finances and strategy every week.
The Brief
A clear brief is so important. When you’re working with an experienced creative of any kind, they’ll have lots of questions to help you and help them create a plan for exactly what to produce. This includes your ideal audience, the style and tone, key colours, your ethos, where you want your organisation to be going (this is key, not just where you are), branding hooks (one of Kelly-Ann’s is flamingos!)
You may need to think about clothing, lighting, audio interruptions if audio’s being recorded, clients, pets (yes, really), plants, what’s on the walls, what’s on your desks, hair and make up, venues, interior and exterior shots, drone shots, but above all it must be authentic.
Kelly-Ann employs a team of people in her business: creatives, administrators, organisers, marketers. Because her team has grown, she’s moved to new offices which she and the team have decorated both beautifully and uniquely.
Many Virtual Assistants and Personal Assistants are one person businesses and work from home, but Kelly-Ann does things differently.
So the brief had to include that: show that it’s not just her but also a team, that they work from a proper office. She wanted photos and video clips (for Instagram reels) illustrate the kinds of support they can give, for blog posts, social media posts, email headers and other future marketing collateral.
The media had to be useful for the next 12 months, so it had to encompass the changing of the seasons, as well as seasonal services such as sending Christmas cards on behalf of their clients.
We also had to look at the new brand guidelines that the UK Pink Spaghetti franchisor had released, so we wanted a natural look, not like stock photos, yet still professional.
The Energy
So, we have a professional service for businesses, but Kelly-Ann runs things with great humour, warmth and fun. So that needed to come across.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of pink.
And Kelly-Ann loves flamingos, they’re all over the office, so they had to feature.
Kelly-Ann had given me guidelines for usage, an overview of the kinds of shots, the brand personality, the target audience, who needed to feature, where we could shoot and a shot list of ideal photos.
The Shoot
I had already been to the primary locations for the shoot, so I knew the space, the light, the weather forecast. The one location – a pottery studio – I’d not visited, so I’d checked it out in photos, so I knew the lighting and space.
Because this was to be a very natural, mostly unstaged shoot I chose to use natural and the bright, modern lights in the office (which we switched off for some shots). I set up two cameras with different high specification prime lenses, but had backup lenses if we needed anything different which I’d not anticipated.
Because we were using available light, we were able to use the office creatively, depending on where the light fell and what worked well. We could work very fast in getting a wide variety of both photos and vertical Instagram reel type shots with the same cameras.
About 95% of the photos and videos were taken with one camera and one lens: a Sony A7IV with a 35mm F1.2. It was wide enough for groups, narrow enough for portraits, could work in almost any lighting conditions, and it can separate out background and foreground beautifully with sharpness and blur.
We had a huge amount of fun. Most of my instructions were ‘just have a chat’ or ‘just type, now move the mouse, now type again’. There was a lot of banter, laughter and even a fair amount of skipping. No. Really.
The Edit
To reflect the brand guidelines and the feeling Kelly-Ann wanted to get across for her business, I knew we wanted mostly high-key (bright) photographs with plenty of colour and warmth. But they also needed to look natural.
I’d already shot with this look in mind, and because of the quality of the digital files my cameras produce, I was able to enhance those looks in the edit. I generally brought down very bright highlights, lifted and warmed mid tones, slightly lifted shadows and then brought blacks down a bit. (This bit is only for photo and video nerds by the way. Like me.)
The team were delighted with the final images and video clips. With over 400 images and more than an hour of video clips to use over the next year, it’ll give Kelly-Ann and her colleagues lots of choice about how to tell the stories about her business.
The Results
I thought I’d include just a few of the photos we took on the two shoot days.
The first day was in the office and meeting rooms in Warwick, and outside by the lake next to the office.
The second day was in Sophie Wootton’s lovely pottery studio on the Ascot Estate near Stratford where the whole team met up for their quarterly get together to talk strategic stuff (technical term) and spend some time together out of the office.
If you’d like to talk about having a brand photoshoot, video shoot or combined photo and video shoot then get in touch by booking a quick call or sending me a message at the bottom of this page.
And if you need any PA support for your business, then do get in touch with Kelly-Ann and her team. They really do help me enormously with my business and have done for many years, and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Go to: https://www.pink-spaghetti.co.uk/contact-us/virtual-assistant-stratford-upon-avon-leamington-spa/
A Sample Gallery
