I was commissioned by Amazon Prime Creative to collaborate with the creatives and help develop a modular image system tool-kit that revolved around the Prime Box and all the products it can carry.
Our technical goal was to have images that worked well in every scale from 100px icons to large format print ads. Lighting was designed with that in mind along with the flexibility a modular image system requires.
We decided to make an isometric grid and have all the images live in this world. Images could be used as stand alone assets or be place in compositions as large as needed.
On the technical side I tested in my studio, screen with focus target image, to choose what was the best way to get these images with as little distortion as possible in camera.
Isometric drawings have no distortion and every lens will always give you some distortion, it’s just the way physics work. So, how did we do it?
After setting height and angle, some testing and lots of reading I used the longest possible focal length lens I could get and images came out very close to isometric.
To shoot the 80+ objets on set we layed out our right and left facing grid lines on top of a gray formica base to help orient ourselves in our iso-grid and shot away.
“Respect the grid” was out shoot motto for a whole week in LA!
Our post production partners made everything fit to our Iso grid by adjusting perspective lines and removing the remaining lens distorsion. I worked the post team to create a file system so that colors could be easily changed as needed, making the combination posibilities endless and the file workflow self-explanatory.
Our final delivery had over 100 assets shot in left and right angles, to be used by teams around the world in Amazon Prime’s ever expanding markets.
One of my favorite compositions of this series is the "Q-Bert" (pardon my Atari Geek lingo) illusion we get when laying the boxes side-by-side.
Check the project out here.