Production Deep Dive : Organifi

How We Met

A long, long time ago, I owned a yoga and kickboxing studio in East Village called Hale Holistic. I was fortunate enough to be an ambassador for lululemon for several years and met some amazing people. One of them, Lisa, has since gone on to work for Organifi. I happened to post some recent commercial work we did on Linkedin and Lisa reached out immediately and said they just left their agency and were looking for a new content partner. 

The sales cycle was nearly 65 days. We had several calls with different members of the product and marketing team as well as a warm-up shoot for Lisa and the CEO's podcast. 

After a mix of patience and persistence, we were able to sign them as a new client.

Scope of Work

The first engagement was going to be a test shoot for a new brand direction. We wanted to test 3 different aesthetics and run ads to determine what was reaching their customers best. It ended up morphing into our bread and butter - a 2-day photo and video shoot designed to capture a few months' worth of content for their 6 main SKUS. 

We broke the shoot down into 2 full days. We shot at Influence Studios, with a full day of pre-light and set dec. 

Our crew consisted of:

• Stylist

• PA

• DP

• Key Grip

• Director/Producer

• Photographer

• DIT

Production Process

We always start with how we want the content to feel. Well, that's not entirely true. From an agency perspective, we start by understanding where the content will live so we can make sure to shoot it in a way that will feel natural on that platform.

Then, we talk about how we want it to feel.

Our goal for this shoot was to have energy behind every shot. Organifi sells supplements designed to enhance certain behaviors so we wanted our imagery to embody those things. 

Because we did this shoot in June, we knew we needed a backup plan for the Gold product. We originally planned to rent an Airbnb on the beach and shoot in the late afternoon of the second day. Given our unruly winter, we opted to turn the white brick wall at Influence into an outdoor patio. This took some pre-lighting and styling.

Another demanding setup was the client's ask for a grocery store. Because we were working with a narrow timeframe and a medium budget, we knew a grocery store permit/rental would take too much time and money away from production. The solution is to make the grocery store ourselves.

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of building the right schedule for a shoot with this much content. Everything has to be accounted for,  including wardrobe changes, product refills, set changes, lighting adjustments, quality control on imagery, and five minutes to take a breath. 

As usual, we hit every item on our list and finished the shoot on time. 

Deliverables

The agreement was for:

• 1, 30-60s brand trailer including all 6 product SKUS

• 6, 15s individual product videos with key ingredient/feature callouts - 8 unique still images per product SKU (this was a mix of product and lifestyle)