Suncoast Furniture Catalogue | Brand Video Case Study
A deep dive into our furniture catalogue video for Suncoast Outdoor Furniture.
Prologue: The Catalogue Shoot
In 2023, HyperJump Productions were directly contacted by the head of marketing from Suncoast Outdoor Furniture, to do a comprehensive video & photo production shoot of the entire lineup of their catalog.
This included hundreds and hundreds of pieces of furniture, like different lamps, fixtures, chairs - pretty much everything Suncoast had to offer that year that was new that were going to go into their showrooms. They needed us to cover everything.
We had an A-team that set up three different lighting setups inside their warehouse. So instead of going to a studio, everything was shot in their warehouse. We had a team of maybe six or seven people that were bringing in these entire setups, lining up the chairs, lining up the pillows and cushions, and doing photo and video against the white backdrop so we could create PNG photos, and as well as some beautiful texture videos to show off all the furniture. That was done over six months.
We had a team in the warehouse for over 150 days, every single day shooting furniture and video. It was a complete success, but it needed an insane amount of preparation, coordination and editing, because each furniture had an SQRCODE, so as we took it we had to log it in that system. We had to go ridiculously comprehensive.
The Brand Video
At the same time, because they really liked our quality and work ethic, they asked us if we were interested in doing a sort of lifestyle video shoot, so that's how this project came to be.
Our suggestion was, what if we took these items and brought them to very iconic places in Dubai and breathed a bit of life in the background? So one of the locations we chose, of course, was the desert. Previously, we actually shot an Aldo commercial there.
I picked this desert spot because it's very iconic in UAE. It's called the Al Qudra Star Gazing Site. A lot of astronomers actually go there to see the stars and it's a very remote location. They have, iconically, this one massive tree in the desert in the middle of nowhere. So we brought all the furniture there. It was quite a challenge.
If you've seen the BTS video, you'll see their truck got stuck in the sand and then all of us had to come. It was very difficult, but we managed to overcome it by having another car pull out the truck, moving stuff into my vehicle to bring it to the side.
We ended up with these beautiful, gorgeous videos - a full barbecue set up in the middle of the desert and this beautiful sofa with this nice transparent white veil with a nice dune behind it. In technical terms for a video, we had to time it correctly, because if we just go there and shoot when the sun is overhead, it'll just create, harsh shadows and not make the furniture look really beautiful. So we had to go between the sunrise and the sunset.
On our Scout, we used the Sun Seeker app, and that told us the beautiful window that we had, three, four hours here and there when we can shoot. So when we came, we were working under that notion. We were lucky with the desert shoot, but then we did the beach shoot.
The Beach Shoot
The beach shoot was really difficult and unlucky. In Dubai, there's an insane amount of paperwork you need to do to actually shoot anything by the beach, and the area that we shot was a very iconic area; it's right beside a massive hotel and you can see the Burj Khalifa. It's a public beach as well, so a lot of people are there, so to block off a specific area of the beach you don't just need a Dubai Film and Television Commission permit, you actually need a Dubai municipality permit on top of that. You also need special permission to shoot by the beach, you need to select the exact area you're going to shoot by the beach, what you're bringing, if you're going to disturb the area.
So we were back and forth with the specialized team from Dubai Municipality. We were explaining what we're gonna do, how we're gonna bring the furniture there, how we would preserve the site, how we wouldn't dig and damage anything. So in the end, everything went smoothly and we brought the furniture, but the day before it was heavily raining. It's impossible to move dates after you've done this and it's also extremely expensive. We spent probably around 10,000 dirhams on this one day to shoot by the beach, with all the different municipalities and permits. So we couldn't remove the day.
When you actually look at the footage of the furniture there, it was a complete overcast. We still wanted to have certain characteristics of the furniture, because hard lighting on furniture looks amazing. You want to have a bit of like sharp angles, a bit of shadows, really accent the furniture. And when it's completely overcast, it looks a bit stale and dead.
So we kind of tried to use some lighting, but more of the magic happened in post. It was... completely overcast. But then when we brought it to post, we played with the color of the sky. We added a bit more highlights. We tried to shoot it in a way, and used a bit of lights, to actually make it look a bit like sun, sort of an aspect of hard lighting and the natural sun. The rest of the shoot, we did it in villas and in different sorts of locations. Those were very, very easy because we were super lucky with the weather.
What it's Like to Shoot Furniture
Through the process, you start to realize that shooting furniture isn't, you know, shooting architecture or shooting a villa or anything like that. There's a certain beauty that you have to capture on the details, and then the placement of the furniture to complement the actual villa and its surroundings, means there's a bit of layers to it.
We had a great team to help us accomplish this. We had a sort of "furniture fashion designer" that was there. He would add a few more things to liven up the scene. He'd put maybe a burger, an orange juice, he'd find colors that compliment the actual setting.
So we're not just taking furniture and putting it in a location. We're sort of figuring out, how does this furniture fit this location and how can we compliment this furniture to make it look natural, lived in and like it's in the perfect location.
One of our most proud setups was the one in the Palm Villa, where we put this beautiful blue sofa that had this sun veil on top of it as well. We had the Atlantis Royale right behind it as well. But the way they got it on the floor to keep it leveled and to keep the Royal Atlantis all in one view, it just felt so natural. It felt like something you'd see in a hotel, so that's something we're super proud of.
What we also realized is that we can't just take furniture and shoot it. We needed to add the small details, which is having a stylist bring the pillows and setting it up in a perfect way, and adding the table and also shooting the textures that they have. The materials that they have are like these very intricate nylon and detailed sort of structures on the furniture. It's mainly made like that so it can last for several years.
We tried to shoot the furniture with just normal lights, you know, we had three 600 D aperture lights with soft boxes. We looked at it and we're like, it looks kind of flat. So we realized, to show off those crescents and those details, we actually have to play with a lot more hard lights. We would remove the soft boxes. We would put cone lights, we would hit the texture. We try to force shadows.
So for the viewer, we had to make the textures and the the design of the actual furniture stick out. We we had this one shoot in Love Lake in the Al Qudra area in Dubai. It's really beautiful there, it's a massive lake that's really deep in the desert. And when you go there, there's camels and gazelles. There's flamingos just flying in the sky and everything. This is the location to shoot. So we took this pergola, and it was a huge mess to actually build ,but it's one of the starting shots I think in the video.
Normally when you see that pergola like when it was shot it in the studio and we first shot it outside, it just didn't look that beautiful or that interesting on its own, but now when you put it in the settings of this lake and there's greenery behind it and it has all of these functionalities, and you have the table and a sofa and all of this setup built with different furnitures, you could see that it was a high-end, luxurious piece of pergola, and I understand why someone would spend thousands of dirhams on it.
One thing that I did learn is Xavier, our photographer that we used on a few of the days of the shoot, he would find very unique positions and super detailed moments, so he would shoot through a small little glass design ball. We weren't selling the glass ball, but when you see the settings and the textures and the arc, the lines and everything looks very like clean, beautiful, symmetrical, so it looks like a beautiful picture, and it showcases the pergola without being so ostentatious, in your face. Instead of looking at a detail, you understand the surroundings look luxurious, so you know, the pergolais the same.
What HyperJump offered to Suncoast
First of all, the client wanted a flexible one-stop shop company that could come in, handle their entire catalog in their warehouse, and have the capabilities of setting up a backdrop, the lights, and also coordinating with an internal team to bring in a thousand-plus furniture pieces. It's not just small furniture pieces- some of these furniture setups are 10 meters wide, like a massive sofa with a table, several meters each direction, so the level of production was high.
The client also wanted to teach the entire integrated system of Suncoast to one supplier. The problem is, most of the time, they deal with several suppliers and they have to repeat, this is our brand identity, these are our colors, and so on. So they were looking for one team to handle everything, and then always relay to one project manager. A, to make it more streamlined. B, to make the same consistency of the team to not do the same mistakes.
The project was a success because, they didn't nead their lead marketing person to come in, deal with a different team, waste a few hours, go to a different person, waste a few hours. It's the same configuration between the warehouse, and the lifestyle shoot. The same people, same knowledge, same structure of how we calculate data, and then giving them all that videos and photos.
How was the finished product utilized?
First and foremost, our photos appeared in the Sunocast catalog The videos appeared on Suncoast's social media, on their website, and in exhibitions. Every time you'd go to their stores, you would see their videos. So the videos were heavily used across the board. And also, for example, if they're trying to sell the furniture to a hotel, instead of just having pictures, now they have pictures complemented with videos, and the videos would show off the textures and the details.
Finishing Touches
We were extremely happy with the project, and they were extremely happy with the project. It was a success, and we definitely overachieved in terms of the lifestyle video, especially with the locations and the backdrop and the level of quality.
It was also a chance for me to use the Ronin 4D, which had recently come out at that point, and we used it for a few TVCs, and I was like, it would be interesting to use such a high-end professional camera on such a simple shoot. The benefit of a Ronin is that you're a one-man army, but with broadcast cinema quality. So one person could pull focus, could set up the shots, could move in. It's a gimbal, but you can also have an extremely high-end lens.
We were using Cooke SP3 lenses which are around a hundred thousand dirham set of lenses, and the footage that came out of it has character. It's not like digital quality, you know, it has a bit of emotion when you look around it and you're like, this doesn't look like some videographer shooting it, it looks like a high-end film production shot this, because of the level of details the level of character from the distortion of the glass.
We wanted to really show off because at that time we were relatively young as a company. I was just like, I want people to see our work and be like, damn, who shot that? Even though it's a sofa.
It's funny to see us trying to take furniture and trying to set up situations like a hotel before it's actually sold to hotels, so it was quite interesting problem-solving on that project, and i would say overall towards the end we had several tens of thousands of photos of the furniture from the lifestyle shoots, and then from the warehouse shoots, and tens of thousands of videos from both shoots as well.
The key on such a large operation like this was the sheer amount of preparation we had behind it and taking it step by step. Because I feel like in the first week, if you didn't have that structure, it would feel fine. But then when you're three weeks in and there's several different editors jumping on the projects, we need to speed up the workflow, and with different video teams coming together, things would get extremely messy if we didn't have a coherent system.
So I think Suncoast being our first high-level, very large end project taught us a lot. We did make a few mistakes, but nothing to ever impact the project, more to understand the relevance and structure. That has been something we've baked in into our internal system as well. So it was a great experience. It was a successful project, but it was also something on a larger scale that was a new level for us.
Have a project you’d like to talk to us about? Contact us now at info@hyperjumpproductions.com or at (+971) 058–599-8064.
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