Hero Shoot vs Lifestyle Shoot: What’s the Difference?
The Scenario: you have a great product, a substantial following, and even a little buzz, but your visual assets are getting a bit stale. Or maybe you’re about to launch a new product. In either case, you can be sure that new photos are a must.
But what, how, and where to begin? For starters, let’s fire up the cameras! We’ll get stills and some video, but we need to determine whether or not to invest in a Hero Shoot or a Lifestyle Shoot? What’s the diff? What’s it matter? Basically, it all comes down to the level of polish you want to achieve and how you’re going to use the images. Let’s break it down.
Hero Shoot
These are the money shots. Let’s say you have a liquor brand. These are the bottle photos that go on billboards, trucks, and print ads. Got a restaurant? This is where we shoot your marquee dishes like they’re fine art--using tweezers and nitpicking the placement of every sprig of parsley.
A hero shoot takes its time. Everything in frame is important, no detail left un-fussed with. We shoot it perfectly because lots of eyeballs are going to see these photos AND we want to get as much longevity out of the assets as possible. Depending on the scope of the shoot and your particular needs, we’ll bring in food stylists, prop stylists, a lighting guy, a Creative Director, Producers, and have you and your team on-site in our studio to make sure everything appears to be in tip-top shape. This is at least a one-day production built on precision, intention, craft, and a direct plan for the assets.
These images are an investment because you want to have them for the long run.
The baseline philosophy to a Hero Shoot: Quality over Quantity. Perfect and precious.
Lifestyle Shoot
For a lifestyle shoot to succeed, we sacrifice some of the control and intention we obsessed over in Hero Shoot in order to yield more assets that are a bit more versatile and broad in their usage. The less you fuss over the precise image of the product, the more you can shoot. Now, that’s not to say you’re going to get a bunch of lackluster images—they just may be more appropriate for ad campaigns more so than a 14-foot billboard. Lifestyle shoots are great for ongoing digital support that you can use on social channels, email marketing, and in web ads.
Depending on the vibe and tone of your brand, Lifestyle Shoots tend to be more fun (All shoots are fun for us, we love what we do here), but the engine under the hood of all Lifestyle Shoots is to show people enjoying your product. Whether that’s good-looking people holding good-looking bottles of liquor, cute families dining in your restaurant, or chic models wearing your merch. These are all about how humans interact with your great brand, not just how pretty it looks on its own.
Since volume is the name of the game on a Lifestyle Shoot, we like to run lean: a Creative Director, Director, Producer, and a shooter or two. It’s important for us to get you as many assets as possible because this is an investment and you need lots of assets that will stay fresh for a good long while.
However, here’s the trick to making a good Lifestyle Shoot great: just let us run. We’ll set the scene, get your products in the mix, have some cool people enjoying the products, and shoot the crap out of it. We’ll rely on you and your team to provide us with benchmarks to hit, but we’ll also fill every moment, nook, and cranny with usable content. We’ll have a script (aka shot list), but sometimes the real magic comes when you go off-script. You’d be amazed at what happens naturally when people get together for a shoot. It's capturing this level of authenticity that makes these shoots so successful.
The baseline philosophy to a Lifestyle shoot: Quantity AND as much Quality as possible. Perfectly imperfect.
However, when deciding what option works best for you and your brand, remember the best option is: why not just do BOTH! Give us a shout if you’d like to talk about options. We can customize our approach and costs to just about any of your needs.
