Behind the Scenes of a Global Rebrand Photoshoot – Part 1
How an email enquiry turned into the biggest campaign photoshoot of my year...
In early spring 2025, I received an email from a freelance creative based in the US. The client that she was working for had stumbled across some images of mine whilst putting a moodboard together for a creative pitch.
They’d included some of my work from a previous Bruntwood photoshoot campaign in their mood boards before they even reached out and decided that they wanted me to pitch for their rebrand campaign photoshoot.
That first message didn’t give too much away, and to be honest I was surprised that they had contacted a guy in the UK when this was looking like a large-scale US marketing campaign for a major HR agency with a global reach. A few emails, one zoom call and a signed NDA later, I'd seen the brief and was bidding for the shoot.
The Brief: Global Feel, Real People
The client was clear from the start: this wasn’t a stylised ad campaign with models and overworked setups. They wanted real people in real scenarios across a broad spectrum of workplace scenarios – healthcare, IT, public sector, senior management, HR, education, amongst other areas. It had to feel lived-in, authentic, and real. This was a global rebrand campaign that had to have an international feel and the images could apply to any country across the world.
As the scale of the project unfolded, the deadline looked incredibly tight. Brand launch on October 1st, so all assets delivered by early September.
I knew straight away that I’d need a production company to manage this project. So I began speaking to production companies around the world – London, New York, Toronto, and several in mainland Europe – asking whether they could realistically pull together logistics, talent and locations on a fast turnaround.
Some couldn’t help in such a short window and shooting over the Summer break was a challenge for others. However one production company and one city stood out.
Enter Scout Productions
After speaking to multiple production companies around the world, it became clear to me that London would be the optimum location for the shoot. It had everything we needed. All I had to do was find the right production company. After a conversation with Algy at Scout locations, he quickly put me in touch with their sister production company.
I found an instant connection with Scout Productions Services in London. Their producer, Crispin, was calm, had buckets of experience and just felt like the right guy from the outset. He helped me pull together early costings, location and prop decks and kept things moving behind the scenes while I worked on the brief with the client. I was already busy with other photoshoots so needed a huge amount of help to out this together. We had about 2 months to bid, prep and shoot (should the bid be successful).
We both knew this was a long shot and were bidding against US photographers who the client had worked with before. So was this a longshot to use a photographer from the North of England who the client had never heard of prior to the creative pitch?
We started refining the quote.
By the time we had sign-off, we’d been through something like 19 versions of the quote. I say 'we', but Crispin was the engine room behind the constant revisions. His experience in film production and the resources of Scout Production services proved invaluable.
The Budget Gets the Green Light
Eventually, the client signed off on the budget. This allowed us to not only meet the original brief but exceed expectations. We realised we could actually deliver more content than originally scoped – more scenarios, more coverage, more real-life scenarios.
That flexibility proved vital. And it’s a huge credit to the UKG team that they trusted us to adapt and expand without compromising the feel of the campaign.
At this point, it was all systems go and Crispin brought in the quite staggering talent that is Sorcha O Sullivan. Sorcha gets things done! I appreciate that I am comparable to a sloth when typing, but watching Sorcha on a laptop was mind bending. She applied her incredible ability to multi task and got to work on producing the shoot.
Recces, casting and more recces
The next few weeks were a succession of video calls with the client, recces and castings in London. My family didn't see much of me, even on family holidays, but this is the life of the freelancer. Feast or famine as they say.
Juggling time differences added a layer of complexity but I soon struck up a rapport with Kelly from UKG. Her Creative Director, Stacy, was away on video shoots and other productions as they were creating a series of assets for the UKG brand launch in October.
UKG is a huge company, so getting quick responses to questions was tricky. However, multiple meetings, phone calls, emails and that now generic mode of communication, whatsapp, brought us to something like a state of readiness. Crispin and I were now good friends and this is where the relationship bit comes in. I just don't think we could have achieved this without a good working friendship. With shoots of this scale, there is a huge amount of pressure and that load is often shared, so to have the right crew who can take this onboard with a smile on their faces is critical. Long days away from home, problems to solve and last minute hiccups to navigate can out pressure on any working relationship and the ability to work around issues whilst having a bit of a laugh is the only way to get through, in my humble opinion.
Location, location, location.
The reason that I knew London would be right for this shoot was the quality of production, depth in global looking talent and range of international looking locations. We were creating offices for CEO's in Denmark, coffee shops for Barristas in Australia and fire stations for firefighters in New York.
Flying around in the crew minibus to a huge variety of locations is always one of the exciting aspects of location photoshoots and doing this in London simply gave us the different options that we needed.
Soon enough, locations were agreed and a schedule was coming together. We used the highly experienced Camilla Arthur Casting to give us the range of talent that we needed. All the while, props, wardrobe and vehicles were being sourced. One fire engine, one police car and a delivery truck to be precise.
The clock was still ticking fast and shoot dates were looming. There was still lots to do but the initial recces, casting and scout days were getting results. Next step was the technical recce and photoshoot weeks.
In part 2 of this blogpost, I'll go through the two week shoot, some of the challenges that we faced and how the whole production finally came together.
