It’s All in the Details for a Trio of Stop & Shop Spots
When shooting branded content, our main task is to find the sweet spot between the goals of the business and our creative input. Our approach starts with acute listening to the client’s needs; it’s important to understand their objectives and target audience so that we can be impactful and creative. The Vessel approach is a true collaboration: through keen listening and healthy discourse, our experiences have proved that every project benefits when diverse perspectives are given a seat at the table and then working as a team, we can push each other to explore all the creative possibilities.
For Stop & Shop, the client’s goal was to promote their supermarkets as a one-stop-shop to satisfy all your summer needs. (No pun intended.) Instead of making product-driven narratives, AMP Agency crafted clever scripts that captured a palpable summer vibe through fun, engaging, and relatable storylines, while subliminally marketing brand awareness. But with only 15 seconds per spot, we relied on wardrobe, props, set dressing, and camera tricks to capture the feelings, temperatures, and situations that define summer.
In one spot, we decked out the top of the family car with luggage, floaties, boogie boards, and beach chairs as a nod to classic summer road trip films from the ‘80s and ‘90s. That thought led to another idea to push the wardrobe and set design towards a subtle throwback look that also complimented the brand’s colors and hinted towards the heat of summer, i.e. reds and oranges.
Working with budget constraints and a small crew tapped us to stay nimble and think outside of the box. For example, in order to embellish the look of summer heat, our ingenious crew placed Sterno cans underneath the camera lens to create a heat wave effect. And to disguise that two of the three spots were shot in the same location, we shot with anamorphic lenses to maintain a wide field of view with shallow depth of field, which also elicited the nostalgic vibe we were going for.
To the common eye, a lot of these behind-the-scenes choices are lost, especially in such short spots. However, Vessel leaves no stone unturned when bringing an idea to life. We believe that every detail matters, no matter how big or small.