“we’re not shooting Chanel”
Inspiration
Lighting struck when someone said an off-handed joke. When looking through our costumes they said “We‘re not shooting Chanel.” I jokingly said there’s your concept. I said that it would be a funny commercial if our costumes were on good looking models pretending to be modeling for Vogue or Chanel. Once I had the idea for a high fashion parody, I instantly went to the source.
As a team, we were struggling to come up with an artistic direction for the whole Hauntlook line. The brand had been rebranded in the last year, but the brand foundation was always based on haute couture. Thus the name Hauntlook was born. My creative director coming from Kohls and Reebok was used to high-end fashion shoots. She would always joke about how we can’t be like Vogue or Chanel. We’re “not high fashion” in previous years. This past year she made the joke again, and then I said, “There’s the concept”. Shoot the costume commercial, but put a high fashion parody spin to it.
par·o·dy: an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.
The Journey…
The shoot took 11 days. Planning took two and a half months. There were over 1500 photographs taken. 40 hours of video footage. 2 sets going back to back.
My favorite part about Hauntlook was the process and the journey the team went on for the project. The journey was just as important as the final results. We were creating something that had never been done at our company.
We were creating a brand foundation for Hauntlook that can span over years of content, and grow into more and more each year.
There were over 200 costumes we had to photograph. At the start, we knew it was going to be a marathon and not a sprint. I’ll never forget what it was like to be on set, and creating the kind of work I was creating. It was like I was able to dive into a whole new side of my creativity.
Since the completion of the project, the click rates for Hauntlook's Amazon landing pages have tripled since deployment and the 28 videos John and I collaborated on have accumulated over 56 hours of views
Landing Page
Cinematographer: John Mclean
Art Direction Brandi Underwood
Hauntlook Decor & Accessories
Hauntlook 2020 was more than just costumes. We had decorations that had the same level of custom art and attention to detail.
So I had to photograph them in a way that made the whole brand feel cohesive with the limited resources at my disposal.