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Esquire

Design Director: David Curcurito

Art Director: Stravinski Pierre

Photo Director: Michael Norseng

Photo Editor: Alison Unterreiner

Photographer: Brock Davis

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted.

Heidi: How long did the photoshop work take for that image?
Brock: Not long, I only use photoshop to clean up an image and color correct. I prefer to work organically when it comes to creating visual props and pieces. No photoshop was done on the stallion. My friend Amy made the prop, we decided it would be best to use a model horse from a toy store and cut it in half. The wig was wrapped and styled around the torso of the horse.

What was the inspiration for that, a hood ornament? How much word play goes on in your mind when thinking up solutions? Do you have you a process you go through?
Hair grooming was a big focus of the article, I knew that I wanted to show a man with a bold hairstyle.

The first thing that came to mind was a pompadour which is meant to be bold and dramatic, but I wanted to take it a step further so I added the animal shape. I was thinking about animals in dramatic poses and I remembered the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver. The shape of a stallion rearing up seemed to fit the shape of a pompadour, so I decided to go with it.

Did you work with a hairstylist?
No, my friend Amy and I did the styling ourselves. Esquire had requested that the model be a red head, so I asked my friend Gabe to model. Amy found a wig that matched his coloring and we assembled the prop.

For your Rapala video: how did you get the fish to drive?
The fish was a prop made by a place in Toronto. It was made to look and move realistically. The gills and mouth were wired electronically to open and move as they would in the water. I wanted the framing to show the fish behind the wheel, but I didn’t want to show how the fish was holding onto the wheel, or sitting in the seat of the car. I didn’t think those details were necessary and could possibly be distracting. The main thing was to show the fish just being a fish, with a moving wheel in front of him. This image edited around the car actually driving down the road would work well make it seem like the fish is tearing down the road. The car was placed on a trailer, and pulled down the road. The trailer is a rig designed to hold a vehicle so that it can be filmed on the outside and around the vehicle easily, while still maintaining the motion of driving down the road. At the end of the spot, we threw a fake rubber fish out of the car to make it look like the fish dives out of the door. The final shot is a real fish swimming off in the lake.

 

What can you tell me about the development of the Harley Davidson work?
The Harley ‘Build Yours’ campaign was for the HD Parts and Accessories division. P&A is all about giving riders the chance to customize their bikes. The idea came about when I was thinking how interesting it would be to drop a motorcycle from a great height and when it hits the ground it explodes into hundreds of parts and the parts form the shape of the person who customized the bike. That was the feel were going for. We worked with a company in London called First Base imaging. They flew out to Minneapolis for the shoot. We dismantled 3 bikes all the way down to the last bolt. Each piece was photographed. It was a meticulous and tedious production. I wanted all of the pieces to be in proportion to each other when arranged on the floor. Each ad went through about 30 versions before getting to the final image. We photographed models and in photoshop placed all the appropriate pieces to create the image. It was a long project but in the end I think it turned out successful.