FFILM & THREADS = A FRESH COMBO
Barbershop Threads is the apparel brainchild of Scott Lyons of Scott's Barbershop; a humble two-store barber-outfit from the South Wales Valleys.
I approached Scott with the idea of making a 'lookbook' style commercial for his new range of t-shirts, launched for 2018. I wanted to create something that was effortlessly cool, showed the heart and soul of Scott's unique barbershop whilst also promoting the new t shirt designs in all their handsome glory.
The real task I faced here was to promote the t shirts in a subliminal way; placing them in the scene naturally as opposed to a traditional studio shoot where it can appear posed and contrived.
Sometimes the best way to do this is to just DO IT. So without any real plan or direction, I turned up to the Abercynon shop and started filming around these super skilled barbers whilst they cut the hair of real, unsuspecting customers (god bless them for agreeing to being on camera!). This was documentary-style advertising through and through, with every shot just happening on the fly.
These shots were then combined with slow-motion 'posed' shots under lighting. I used Beecham (life long friend and real life barber at Scott's) as a model. The combination of the two styles, candid and posed, meant we had a genuine, real life documentary with detailed, focussed 'catalogue' videography.
Over two separate days, I managed to get everything we needed in just 5 hours of shooting in total. Another day for editing and the job was ready to go live on Scott's highly subscribed Instagram account.
Since we were delivering these videos for Instagram, we were limited to 1 minute per clip. The first video featured two designs and thus took us to that 1 minute limit, and the second video came in far shorter.
As well as the main videos, I also created two 10 second vertical video clips of each edit for use in Scott's Instagram story. This would help promote the main videos even more and drive people to his account to check out the new content.
I wanted to do this type of project for a long time, but could never find the right collaborator to do it with. I chose BS Threads for a number of reasons: the brand is local and humble but with big ambitions and they know how to use social media to their advantage. Scott and his team have been nothing but enthusiastic from the very beginning; with loads more projects in the pipeline.
Check out Barbershop Threads here and buy a t shirt.