Saucony Grid Azura 2000 by Jae Tips
This was another fun photo composite project. It all started last year back in 2022 when I worked on a campaign for HATCLUB. They were doing a collection of hats designed by rapper Jae Tips. The following are just some of the pieces but if you want to check the whole campaign you can click here.
As you can see, Jae Tips aesthetics is very straight forward. Very colorful and organic inspired by nature and flowers in particular. The idea for that campaign was to create a giant product that brings color and life through flowers to specific key cities of the US.
This year Jae had the opportunity to release a sneaker with Saucony that was inspires by his upbringing combined with his particular aesthetic. So naturally he reached out in order to me to execute the main images for this release as a continuation of the concept or universe of flowers we already created for this HATCLUB hat collection.
The idea for the location was to place the sneakers near where Jae grew up. He is from the Bronx y New York so with the help of one of his friends and a drone we were able to get these shots for the project. This is the train station close to his neighborhood which I imagine brings him all the way back to the beginning of his life and his musical career which I think is pretty cool.
All retouching and photo composite work was done with Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Lightroom®. In terms of assets, Jae was able to send a production sample pair of the sneakers for me to photograph in my studio. This is ideal cause I can then match the perspective, light direction and intensity of the background drone pictures.
For all the flowers, vines and nature elements I used the same pack of assets I used for the HATCLUB campaign but I used them a bit differently. In this case it is more evident that nature is growing out of the product rather than around it like on the hat collection campaign. This asset pack was a collection of pictures of flowers that I took, combined with a few free images from Unsplash and A LOT of stock images from Adobe Stock®.
Each of these photo composites took between 10-15 hours of work each. A lot of small detail work to be done aside from the integration of the product to the scene. Here is a sample video / layer breakdown from one of the pieces:
I really enjoyed working on these photo composites and the images were a success. A los of media picked them up to cover the release of the sneaker and prints were given away at the pop-up shops where the sneaker release. Jae was there to sign both the shoe boxes and pictures. Pretty cool! Hopefully this is not the last time I get to explore this universe.
