Behind the Scenes of a CMG Shoot

Behind the Scenes of a CMG Shoot 

Here at Colossus Media Group, as a full-service digital marketing agency, our priority is helping companies grow and elevating their brand awareness with creative and innovative strategies. Content creation, one of our passions, is a detailed, complicated, and fun process. We get to do this every day and we love it! 

CMG VISION

For this shoot, we arrived early in the morning at one of our favorite clients, Rosalita’s Roadside Cantina.  Our incredible crew consisted of Carroll, our content creator, Rocco one of our founding partners, and Matt A., one of our senior photographers. 

We wanted to showcase Rosie’s incredible team engaging in the important responsibilities of their daily routine. We captured the cook shaping knives, bartenders crafting cocktails, the hostess seating happy guests, and the servers presenting food. We wanted to create more humanity in Rosie’s content and introducing their team to our audience creates a familiarity while simultaneously showing appreciation for their hard-working team.

Upon arrival, our team set up our state-of-the-art equipment, eager and excited to see what the day of shooting would produce. 

EQUIPMENT 

An important part of setting up the shoot was compensating for the low light of Rosie’s. Carrol decided to use four-point lighting in order to capture the content. Our lighting equipment included: 

• One Dracast LED light panel set to 4700k at 80% power on a c-stand in order to capture hair and backlight 
• One  Dracast LED light panel set to 4700k at 100% for the key light 
• An Aputure Light Storm C300d Mark II LED with a softbox as a fill light
• A Yongnuo YN360 Light Wand set to red to match Rosie’s colors as a kiss on the right of our talents’ faces

For camera equipment, we wanted to capture the action in slow motion and focus on what’s most important to the shoot — the Rosie’s team, and of course their scrumptious food. For this, we used: 

• A Canon c200 with an Atomos Inferno monitor shot in 1080p and 120fps
• A Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 Lens in order to capture a wide look of the restaurant
• A Ronin M Handheld Stabilizer for extra buttery smooth shots

THE SHOOT

As we began our work, some unforeseen issues arose. When Rosie’s opened for the day, the lunch rush came earlier than expected. The staff, understandably putting their guests first, scattered. We had to get creative if we were going to get the content that we needed. The team was incredibly accommodating as we maneuvered to capture shots of their work. Additionally, we had a light die in the middle of our shoot. This caused a slight delay in our process because we had to swap it out with a new one. Despite these setbacks, we captured everything we sought out to, and more! Everyone was a joy to work with and the staff shots were captivating and fun. 

In addition to these scenes, we managed to capture some simple laydown videos of the food for Instagram Reels. For this, we transferred to a two-point lighting system and used one of our Dracast light panels set to 4700k at 90% for fill and key another set at 80% for the backlight. 

Overall, the shoot was a huge success! We had so much fun working with Rosie’s and can’t wait to share the final product.