News // 105 News by WE! shoot it
On commission for the London-based agency FCB, it was off to Barcelona last winter for the photographer duo from WE! shoot it, aka Michael Compensis and Thomas von Salomon. Their mission in the Catalan capital: stage the new ŠKODA SCALA facelift for the after-sales campaign.
“While Munich was completely snowed in, spending a few days in 20-degree Spanish weather did quite good,” the two transportation specialists tell GoSee.News. “During the shoot, it was important to both us and the client to make sure the look was consistant throughout the series – despite the at times somewhat different locations and scenes.”
The motifs were shot with old-school photography: that means real cars, real models, and real locations. Styling came from Sabine Holderer, with production in the hands of the duo’s long-standing partners from Teamworks Spain. On the job as assistant was Marc Neuhaus from Düsseldorf.
Having been around since 2019, the compact model built by the Czech automaker was due for a mid-cycle facelift. The new Scala has been out since early 2024.
Exclusively here on GoSee.News, the two car photographers grant us another glimpse behind the scenes. But see for yourself.
29.07.2024
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In late summer, the two transportation specialists from WE! SHOOT IT, aka Michael Compensis & Thomas von Salomon – represented by KELLY KELLERHOFF – took a trip to the Netherlands, where they realized campaign motifs for the new ŠKODA KODIAQ in Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
“This job was extremely exciting, particularly because the groundbreaking new SUV model from carmaker Škoda became a project in limbo between the old and new lead agencies. In other words : art buying and creation were still in the hands of Optimist Inc. in Prague, while production and shoot support came from the new agency, FCB in London,” the two photographers tell GoSee.
Classic backplates and domes were photographed in numerous locations in the Netherlands, and the car – still top secret at the time of the shoot – was realized with CGI in close cooperation with Aufeer Design Studio in Prague.
And, the creative duo is just back from their next job in Spain on commission for FCB London…
21.02.2024
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In their personal project ‘Cloud’, the two car photographers from WE! Shoot it, aka Michael Compensis & Thomas von Salomon, get to the bottom of what’s possible at the moment with AI as an imaging medium. The result is the world’s first spread of commercial character for which an AI and photography hybrid was used.
“When Michael began, quite early, at the beginning of 2023 to experiment with text to image and image to image AI, I was still very skeptical. It all looked like a nice thing to play around with, but I didn’t really see any sustainable use of AI in our photographic work,” Thomas von Salomon tells GoSee.
A half a year of working with it intensively, doing research and a bit more training later, it was an entirely different story.
“It is actually quite similar to photography. Of course, you can create a few nice pictures pretty fast in the beginning, but if you really want to be able to prompt properly and get reproducible, target-driven results out of AI, it does take a little more. A deeper technical understanding and experience are crucial,” says Michael Compensis.
“It became clear relatively quickly that certain content could be generated well through prompts, and some content, on the other hand, not at all. AI is in part good at merging elements in an unusual manner. This makes images possible that could hardly be realized at all or only under extreme difficulty by means of photography alone, and it also enables the development of ideas in the design and creation process that only a year ago were unimaginable. But when it comes to the real depiction of objects, you reach the limits of what you can do with AI pretty fast.
The prompt ‘Porsche 911’ may then contain important cross-references from the training material in the generated image so that it’s possible to recognize a Porsche, but it has little to do with the real car upon taking a more detailed look. Which is why, we knew fairly quickly that serial commercial images could only be generated with a hybrid method.” Michael Compensis concludes.
“Our intention was to use the capabilities of AI as an imaging technology to create a spread with a surrealistic look. As a basis, we decided to shoot the photographic elements in the daylight studio of Inmotion in Allgäu because that would already result in a very graphical appearance with daylight. We really had a lot of luck with the weather because the light and sky themselves already had an otherworldly appearance to them.” says Thomas von Salomon.
What the Inmotion Studio did above all provide the duo with was an empty stage with enough depth to give the AI free space. The car in front of the lens was the Mercedes A-Class. All other elements were generated by the creative duo with various AI solutions.
“Thanks to the extensive experience we gained through months of testing how to prompt, we were able to generate the corresponding elements reproducibly and in a uniform visual language. In doing so, it was above all also important to us to create a certain tension between the individual motifs with corresponding size ratios, which tends to be rather difficult to achieve with generative AI. But I think we did a very good job of it.
The challenge then, in the end, was once again merging it coherently with the photographic elements in post production. Also, we had to first overcome the obstacle that most AIs are limited to a relatively low resolution up until now because we wanted to use only excerpts of some of the generative elements. In some cases, this made it necessary to use a resolution ten times what the AI is actually capable of delivering.” says Michael Compensis, who took care of post production in-house this time. “A hybrid approach was then taken here again with different AIs for generating and scaling.”
The result in the end is an impressive spread with serial character that consciously explores the question of reality and surrealism in artificially generated images. By the way, the motifs are all at least 8600px wide, which means they can be presented in large format without a problem.
The creative duo WE! SHOOT IT is represented by Kelly Kellerhoff, Berlin.
GoSee : we-shoot-it.com
07.09.2023
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