One of our product launches I led at Dyson was the miniature travel versions of their Chitosan pre-style hair formulation. An incredibly tight budget lent itself only to a very basic photo shoot, but together with very talented members of our internal film and imagery teams (and a desire to push my Blender skills), we managed to squeeze out a lot more assets than that.
Although I’d like to say I modelled everything you see here, the plane model was sourced elsewhere due to timings. However, everything else was modelled, textured, animated, rendered and composited by me (the result of which can be seen here)—the CG house that did our product shot renders even used the files that I’d created to create their own final artwork.
The animated version I also produced can be seen here (if you’re on desktop, you may need to go fullscreen to see it properly):
Each of these assets was created with singular messaging in mind: the first to do with travel, the second being humidity, and the third representing the formula’s ability to hold a hair style all day.
The original palette was a lot more vibrant than this, but if you’ve ever dealt with the ten-thousand layers of sign-off within a huge international company, you’ll know why I could accept that small change.
For the key visual, I tried to find a way for the product to stand out while still showing off portable it was. I ended up with the idea for a travel bag where the only full-colour element was the Chitosan mini.
My favourite part about this image? It was shot for real. Of course, there’s always some heavy retouching involved, but I handed our amazing prop master a selection of empty travel bottles and items purchased from Boots and he got to work spraying them to match the colorama and positioning them carefully with small acrylic cubes which were removed in post.
One of our in-house photographers and another of our videographers worked together under my lead to capture a lovely selection of playfully-posed flat-lays, and each asset also had a short video asset to accompany it should a market want to use that instead.
Overall, this is one of the projects I’m most proud of by far: a true showcase of what ambition and a couple of very talented colleagues can help you to achieve.