The Top Down Rig

We know that April & May will be slow for us. It is the time of year where the season doesn’t quite know what to offer in terms of the outdoors.Weather can be unpredictable and often companies are unsure of what their plan is for media shoots for the upcoming season. It always feels a little like this rollercoaster is coming to an end. (I type this amidst a bunch of new bookings for July and August).

This year we were able to buffer this season by revamping our studio (which is sick by the way!) and using that opportunity to do more in house studio work. A great example of this type of bridge project is a camp cooking series that we did for GSI Outdoors.

In March we pitched to GSI that we could do an efficient camp recipe series for them to use on their social media. This style of studio shooting is new for us and provided a bit of a learning curve in working with an established company like GSI.

We used our top down rig that Mike build specifically for this type of shoot and armed with a batch of GSI gear we started cooking.(Plant based of course)

Michelle quickly got to building an animation template that matched their brand guidelines and had a fun feel to them. It really helps us out when we have a brand guideline to really hone in exactly what a client needs in terms of look and feel. It takes out the guesswork.

Projects like these are a lot of fun for us because they are different. There was definitely some learning with lighting, colour, & overall look but once a template is agreed upon we have an efficient model for knocking out projects fairly consistently for a great client like GSI.

Now that we are hitting the season where we will be in the field shooting a lot more we find our calendar starting to fill up. However, having really fun projects like this available when times get slow helps us keep busy and have fun throughout the year.

For what we thought would be some easy projects to bang out there have been a lot of things to learn along the way. We are pretty excited to keep refining and improving this style of shooting as there is a real demand for these types of projects.

In the meantime, enjoy what we feel is a fun project and a delicious recipe:

GSI Outdoors: Camp Recipes from FIVE2NINE on Vimeo.