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Back in May, my team and I photographed a regional advertising campaign for Pioneer Asia-Pacific's car audio and entertainment group.  Working closely with Nectar9, Pioneer's advertising agency in Singapore, my task was to create two images: "Driving" and "Dancing".

My brief was to tell a story in a single frame, capturing real-life moments of pure kinetic energy, blasts of dynamic light and explosions of bright colours.

Creatively, "Driving" was about the driver achieving nirvana -- a state of perfect happiness -- in unison with his car, the music and the city swirling by as it engulfed him and his vehicle in lights and energy.

On the other hand, "Dancing" was about taking a moment and making it better -- the women freeing themselves and embracing that experience.

Ultimately, the man in "Driving" had to demonstrate an awareness of his surroundings and control of the moment, while "Dancing" had to illustrate the women letting go, being free in their surroundings and allowing the moment to control them.

Like most of my work, I chose to approach this shoot from an editorial perspective, creating images in a true photo-reportage style and providing the viewer with a feeling of spontaneity, realism and authenticity. I wanted to produce images showing candid and emotional moments-in-time, captured in a true cinematic fashion.

We thought long and hard about how to photograph these scenes, eventually deciding it would be best to shoot them in a studio versus on the streets of Singapore.  My production team from Ugly Duckling Projects pulled everything together, including two beautiful automobiles for me to photograph: a mint condition 1969 Mercedes-Benz 200 and a brand new Maserati Granturismo.

Working in the studio, we had to rely entirely on artificial light for our shoot.  We opted to use a mixture of powerful strobe lights that "pop", film and television lights that "burn", small in-car lights and a collection of multi-coloured fluorescent tube lights.  We lit the scenes for both "Driving" and "Dancing" in a dramatic, high-contrast manner -- giving us the nighttime essence we wanted -- and then achieved the splashes of colour and streaking lights on the hood of the car separately in-camera.  Our

friends at Procolor in Singapore then helped bring everything together for us in post-production to create the desired speeding, streaking effects in both photographs.

The resulting images of this dynamic shoot rolled-out across the region last week. The entire team is very proud of the work. And fun was had by all, especially me...

Browse more of my advertising photography portfolio here.

Credits

Client: Pioneer Asia-Pacific

Agency: Nectar9

Creative Director: Robbie Bempasciuto

Art Director: Tom Kelly

Account Service: Andre Chen

Production: Ugly Duckling Projects

Executive Producer: Annette Fausboll

Styling: Arina Abu Bakar

Hair & Make-up: Andrea Claire

Photographer's Assistants: Zam, Halid & Jun Yang

Digital Imaging: Dave Phung / Procolor