FMC

Over the past few years I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with a number of brands in building their visual asset libraries. For many brands it makes economic sense to make a one-time investment in capturing proprietary still and motion assets to be leveraged across multiple channels.

There's no magic formula for capturing amazing visual assets. And it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg. However it does require a healthy mix of creative vision, planning, commitment, talent, perseverance, and a bit of luck.

Case in point.

I was recently contracted to capture visual assets for the FMC Corporation. The still/motion images were to be leveraged for a multi-year, integrated brand campaign for their Authority® Herbicide brands. This omnichannel campaign (which I also helped create) came to life via landing page, video, print and digital ads, email, collateral, POS, event, PR and social.

Working with a very small production crew—headlined by photographer extraordinaire, Andy Anderson—we covered 5 states in 9 days capturing real soybean growers and their stories. Wphew!

With a finalized list of growers and locations in hand, we created a strategic production schedule before hitting the road. This plan of attack allowed us to efficiently travel and shoot affording our team the maximum time with our subjects during the best (natural) lighting hours of the day. Of course there were challenges. Due to timing and budget considerations we operated without the luxury of separate tech scout days. So with little to no advance knowledge of what to expect, we arrived at each location with only creative vision in mind (and luck in hand) shooting spontaneously to what was reality.

The project was a huge success. We captured a ton of great, original content on budget, on time, which made for a happy agency and very happy client.

Agency: FLM. Creative Team: Steve Aldrich, Ray Fesenmaier.