Adobe Creative cloud snapchat ads

Directed by Atlas Acopian
Creative Directed and Produced by Jeremiah Warren

BACKGROUND

My long-time friend and creative collaborator Atlas Acopian was asked to direct a series of 4 Snapchat ads for Adobe Creative Cloud by the agency Media Nug. The agency didn’t have an in-house production company and most of their work at the time was UGC content or low-budget ads shot on DSLR so Atlas brought me on as a creative producer and creative director. 

The creative brief was very open-ended on the specific look of the creative. Adobe wanted a high-concept “tutorial” for each featured software application. They didn’t need exact priming on a step-by-step process of how the software worked but rather more direct examples showing what they could do with the Adobe Creative Cloud software apps. Adobe was very open to our creative concepts and pretty much gave us full creative control. They even leaned on our advice to pick the specific software applications that were featured in each ad.

They wanted to drive traffic to the Adobe website and downloads of the app trials and then software purchases. They wanted to focus on ambitious young creatives looking for new creative opportunities, with the primary focus being on aspiring creatives seeking to advance their skills. I wasn’t involved with any of the research or pre-market ad testing but I did spend a few days studying Instagram and Facebook ads that Adobe was currently running.

The intended audience was less likely to be pros but still familiar with content creation and using tools to create fun videos, memes, etc for social. They wanted the first 1-3 seconds of the ad to be attention-getting, colorful, and inspirational. They wanted to showcase their flagship apps and speak to “creativity.”

At first, we wanted to shoot 4 ads in 3 days and quoted a budget of $80,000. Adobe had an expectation of around $45,000 and after adjusting the creative scope we settled on a budget of $50,000 with 2 shoot days and 4 video deliverables. $50,000 was still very tight for the quality we were aiming for so Adobe agreed to focus on making three of the videos with higher concepts and then simplifying the 4th video (the one highlighting Photoshop AI filters).  

It took us about a month to finalize the creative concepts. From the very beginning of that process, I had a rough timeline for filming and post-production. I knew we would need two days of filming over a weekend (not including a few hours of filming that Atlas and I did at a skate park) and that we’d need three weeks for post-production. There wasn’t a hard launch date for the ads so we ended up going into a 4th week of post-production because the Adobe team needed more time to get us brand assets for the end title cards and to make some revisions on the copy.

APPROACH

The concept for the Adobe Lightroom ad was to show a film photographer doing a photo shoot with a model and then going through the whole process of developing the film and editing the scans in Lightroom. Marie Lombardo was the photographer we cast and she’s a long-time friend of both Atlas and me. It just so happened that she was visiting LA from NYC during the week of our shoot and happily agreed to be in the spot. My friend Rae was cast as the model and she happens to be an actual real-life model and someone I‘ve cast in a number of my projects.

There wasn’t a requirement from the client to have “real” people in the video. Atlas had planned on casting random actors or models to play the role of photographer, editor, etc but I thought it was important to cast real people in these roles. It was a chance to feature femme. nonbinary, and queer creators that typically aren’t represented in these roles. I also wanted people who actually used the software we were advertising. Casting random actors/models seemed like the easy way out and we had the time to be thorough and find people who were actually in the professions we were representing. 

For the Adobe Rush video, we wanted to show someone filming a dancer and then making a GIF in Rush. Julie Logan is a filmmaker and photographer and a long-time friend of Atlas and me. Her company Nutmeg was the first acquisition by Giphy back in 2015. She shaped a lot of the way GIFs were used from 2015 to now. As she puts it, you text GIFs because of her. I immediately knew we had to cast Julie as the GIF artist. It felt like a full-circle moment and the perfect opportunity to highlight someone who had a huge part in shaping the culture of image-based communication. We wanted to cast a dancer who was really good at high-jump acrobatics but they had a last-minute scheduling conflict so we cast someone else. The dancer we cast didn’t have the same acrobatic skills but he was an incredible dancer and choreographer who’s worked with Gwen Stefani,  Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Camilla Cabello, Fergie, Haley Kiyoko, and Ariana Grande. 

In the Adobe Premiere videos we wanted to show an editor using hotkey shortcuts so we cast Grace McIntee who is an editor that works primarily in Premiere. I really got into rollerblading during the pandemic and I’ve made a lot of friends in the skate community because of that so I got the idea of showing Grace editing footage of my friend Jess Wu rollerskating. I frequently pitch rollerskating concepts to brands because it’s become really popular during the pandemic so I was really glad to be able to include this and also feature a close skate friend. 

The AI concept was the most challenging to come up with because we wanted to show off the AI tools in a “cool” and unique way but also keep it as simple as possible in order to film all 4 ads in 2 days. I came up with the idea of the one-shot selfie POV which Atlas liked and I’m really proud of it because I think we accomplished all those goals. We cast our friend Vinny Balbo for this ad. We’ve worked with him a number of times in the past and knew he’d be able to very easily act out the expressiveness we needed and also had a face that wouldn’t look “weird” with the AI filter. I tested the aging filter out on a few other faces of people before we cast him and found that it was very easy to fall into a “this person looks old in a not-flattering way” kind of look.

Alissa Rooney is a director of photography I’ve followed for a number of years and someone I’ve been wanting to collaborate with for a long time. It just so happened that she worked full-time for Adobe and although she was on a separate team (Frame.io) she was able to DP this project on her weekend off days. We had to reschedule around her because of commitments to Adobe but it was well worth it. She brought on her lighting and camera team that she frequently works with for the Frame.io spots and was very familiar with a “style” that Adobe already liked.

Below is the moodboard that Atlas made for Alissa and her lighting team.

Locations were a unique challenge because we needed to find a single location for each shoot day. Locations are expensive and changing locations takes up a lot of time (and time is money) so we had to find a single location for each shoot day that could double for multiple locations across 4 videos. It took a LOT of searching but I was able to find a large home in the hills of Highland Park, Los Angeles that had the perfect outdoor space for the dancing/GIF filming scene, a kitchen that could be used for the film development, a room that could be used for the editor’s office, and a bathroom that could be used to show the film strips drying. 

The Lightroom and Photoshop videos were filmed at a studio space I’d kept bookmarked for a while that has built-in lighting that can be adjusted to a wide array of colors. For the rollerskating shots Atlas and I went to one of my favorite skate parks right at dawn and filmed those shots ourselves with Jess because we didn’t have the budget or time to bring a whole crew out for a third day of filming.

Something that I think often goes overlooked on video projects for tech companies is makeup and wardrobe. Next to the cinematography, lighting, and location, wardrobe and makeup were the biggest visual things we focused on. You can completely change the visual aesthetic and tone of a shot with wardrobe and makeup and we wanted to use these to make a statement. I pushed really hard for a more vibrant, fun, and queer style that is rarely represented in advertising for tech companies. 

Shideh Kafei was our hair and makeup artist and we were recommended her by Marie who we cast as the photographer. Shideh is a very renowned makeup artist who’s worked with some huge brands and household celebrity names. Virginia Fontaine is a stylist that Atlas and I became friends with through the skateparks we frequent. She’s worked on music videos such as Beyoncé’s LEMONADE visual album and was Lady Gaga’s personal stylist and we thought her sense of style was perfect for the look we wanted to achieve. 

Below are the moodboards that Atlas sent Shideh and Virginia for inspiration.

Before the shoot, we created a storyboard and shot list. We tweaked things slightly on the day of the shoot but this saved us a considerable amount of time because we knew exactly what shots to get and how to time them. We filmed the rollerskating scenes about 2 weeks before the full shoot and that was helpful because we were able to create an animatic that was timed exactly to the skating shots we filmed. We were also able to ensure ahead of time that the concept for the hotkeys videos “worked” and made sense. 

Below are the storyboards we made for each ad. We weren’t able to find images that were exact to the framing of every single shot but close enough to convey what we wanted.

PRODUCTION

The first day of production was in the studio. We picked this location because of the look but also because the studio space had lights installed in the ceiling that we could change to any color of the spectrum which saved us a considerable amount of money because we only needed to rent one additional light for that shoot day. The space was really small so we made sure to do a location scout ahead of time to make sure all the shots we planned out would work in the available space. 

We spent most of the day shooting a majority of the Lightroom video with Marie taking film photos of Rae. We shot all the studio scenes the first day and I had our production assistant drive the undeveloped film to my friend Kohl Murdock who developed it overnight so we could film the developed film strips at the house the next day. 

The second day of filming was at the house location. We weren’t able to do a location scout of the house ahead of time because of our budget which stressed me out quite a bit because there were a few concerns about parking for the crew and how we would load everything into the building. Luckily the space ended up being very accessible and because the house was so large we were able to set things up faster by prepping one area as we were shooting in another. In the future, I would push to budget for a location scout, even if we’re working on a tight budget. In the long run, knowing what obstacles and challenges to plan around at the shoot location saves money and time.

Since we didn’t location scout before the shoot we spent about 30 minutes when we first arrived talking through the shots and where we would set the camera and scenes. Normally we would’ve had a production designer to set dress locations but because of budget limitations Atlas, myself, and the production assistant had to move the existing furniture and decor around to get the look we wanted. I’m especially proud of how we styled the editing room because it was filled with furniture when we arrived and had massive glass doors. We emptied out everything but the desk and darkened the glass doors with fabric to make it look like an editing space dimly illuminated by the computer screen.

Below you can see what the areas looked like before we filmed in them.

POST-PRODUCTION

The post-production process on these ads was honestly the easiest I’d ever had on a project of this scale. Because of budget limitations, Atlas edited the spots and I did all the VFX and motion design. In the long run, this saved us time because we knew exactly what we wanted and we didn’t have to deal with lots of revisions and back-and-forth communication. The Adobe Creative Cloud team was very trustful of our vision and since we storyboarded everything out ahead of time the first draft of edits was pretty exact to what we had pitched them so they had zero notes. The challenging part was creating the UI animations because Adobe didn’t provide UX assets so I had to recreate everything in Figma and then animate it in After Effects. I was able to save a little time by screen recording the Lightroom slider UI elements but everything else had to be redone by hand. I also handled the VFX shots showing the Photoshop AI filters. I used the actual filter in Photoshop but had to do some minimal VFX work to show it being applied and adjusted. 

We didn’t have any spoken dialog in the videos but since they were so short I wanted to punch them up with the sound design to accent the music tracks. The final step was having all the ads professionally color graded. We could’ve done this ourselves but we opted to hire a colorist who was able to do a better job of matching the color of shots and giving everything a cohesive look. 

Below you can see how a shot looked straight from the camera and then with the final color grade.

IN CONCLUSION

I’m extremely proud of what Atlas and our team pulled off. I’m confident that any other production company or agency team would’ve been hard-pressed to create this quality of work with the same timeline and budget and with the same level of care and consideration that we had for our creative team and crew. 

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get specific data from Adobe on how the ads performed but I know that we completely passed their expectations with our deliverables and that the ads performed better than some of the ones that were live when we first started on this project.