Sea Cadets On-Location Imagery March 2024

In partnership with Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (funding), we were tasked to create a new series of marketing images for forthcoming targeted social media campaigns with the Sea Cadets.

It was just me and two client marketing directors ‘run and gun’ style - no camera assistant or lighting crew - and a very heavily packed set of needed deliverables. Having worked for the organisation for a number of years, I knew exactly the kind of imagery they needed, and I’m pretty good at rapidly getting scenarios set up… Convincing a bunch of teenagers that they definitely love the idea of ‘let’s all sit round this table and point happily at a map’…. And cracking through creating the image efficiently and moving swiftly on to the next! In fact, there were multiple occasions on this day where I had directed three situations to be simultaneously set up while I shot one and therefore was able to walk straight into the next. Hard work! But worth it….

Working with ‘normal people’ talent is a big buzz for me. You have to quickly read how responsive they are going to be and tailor how you shoot to their personas. Sometimes you need to take the time to work quite sensitively, chat through, and include the subject in your decision making. Other times, the group of people work best with high paced shooting where you keep things kinetic and they feed off the energy and are quite happy to go ‘again again again’ because it’s a bit of a party we’ve set up.

I absolutely love this process of immediately figuring people out and using what is best for them to all our advantage to ultimately create the content that we have to walk away with!

Here are a few favourite final selects from the day.