Joe Wigdahl 1/3/17 Joe Wigdahl 1/3/17

Campaign: Destination Gold Coast

A campaign I just shot for Gold Coast Tourism has just started to roll out. We set out to look past the party reputation that the Gold Coast is well known for and tried to capture the sense of how beautiful the Gold Coast and the area around the GC really is. There will be more shots from the campaign to come but this is what I've got so far...

Client: Gold Coast Tourism
Agency: JWT Sydney

Joe Wigdahl 30/10/13 Joe Wigdahl 30/10/13

Kids Shoot Test- Alicia and kids

I did a test shoot with Sydney agency Bump Models a few weeks ago and got the chance to work with Alicia and her kids Ryan and Sara. I love working with kids and when I test I try to see how much I can get out of them within a time limit- say half an hour or an hour and a half or something like that. Most shoots that I'm hired for that use kids usually get planned in such a way that I have a limited time to get something and then I have to move on. For the test shoots I try to let the kids get crazy, come up with ideas as they're happening and let them play freely to allow them to come up with things naturally on their own. Nine times out of ten the parent is worried that the kids are being too wild and are apologizing for them and yelling at the children to be polite and do what I ask. I usually have to reassure them that the mayhem is perfectly fine and exactly what I want. At the end of the hour or two hours I've got a ton of great images and the kids are wiped out, the parents are relieved and everyone's happy.

Joe Wigdahl 5/2/13 Joe Wigdahl 5/2/13

Australian Mangoes

Mangoes in the summer in Australia are amazing- during my first summer here in Sydney I went crazy for them. Every Sunday I would buy a box of 20 mangoes for 20 bucks and spend the next couple days dripping with juice, eating them over the sink. My mother-in-law grew up in South Africa and her fondest memories of Christmas always involved piles of mangoes (and that's all that she ever wants from us for Christmas). Needless to say, I was pretty excited when the people who represent Aussie Mangoes contacted me to do some shots for them.

After a little searching we ended up lucking out and finding a fantastic family for the shoot. It's not always possible, but if I have the opportunity, I always prefer to work with a real family as opposed to a family made up of assorted talent. The main reason is that, well, it's real. I always think that it serves the client in a better way because they can say, "Yes, this really is a real family enjoying themselves" and it helps me do my job faster because we don't have to worry about any awkwardness- we can dive right in. It also helps with how I approach these types of shoot days. I'm usually presented with a shot list in the brief and I use that as a guide to how the days will flow. Once we get the wardrobe, maybe some props and other lighting/tech things set up I like to push that stuff out of my mind and begin the shoot. In this case, I spent the days cooking and eating with the family, cleaning up, having dessert and then running around in the back yard in the sprinklers with the kids. The end result is that we have a lot of fun and we get a lot of real moments of a family spending time together. I'd say the only negative thing about doing this shoot was that the mom was a little exasperated that I had gotten the kids so wound up and had fed them something like a dozen mangoes each- I think she was a little worried that they were never going to go to sleep again. I got to go home with about 20 kilos of mangoes and spent the next week making mango chutney, mango jam, mango pavlova...

Slicing the Mango

Scooping the mango cheeks out of the skin with a glass.

The mango cheeks removed

Mango, spinach, chicken and white bean salad

Mango, prawn and rocket salad with a capsicum vinaigrette

Mango pavlova

Grilled Lamb and Mangoes

Joe Wigdahl 27/2/12 Joe Wigdahl 27/2/12

Ad Campaign: GoodStart Early Learning 3rd ad

These images are for the third ad of the GoodStart Early Learning campaign that I shot with the ad agency The Monkeys. To continue with the concept used in the first images that I shot for this campaignwhere the tagline is physically integrated into the image we wanted to create life-size letters that the children could interact with. When I first saw the concept drawings for this ad I was really excited with the idea of the kids running around and interacting with the letters in the shoot. I had a pretty specific idea in my head as to how big the letters should be and how they should look so that they were the right size for the kids to play with and that their scale would read properly when set at different distances when placed in the large room. I jumped in and offered to build the letters myself. I had studied glass sculpture in college and one of the things that was a constant part of the creative process in sculpture was the act of building a maquette out of cardboard, wax or other materials before one went on to attempt to build the final object. This helps the sculptor visualize how the final product will be assembled, how much material will be needed and what obstacles one might come across in the process. I spent a lot of time gluing cardboard together in college although it didn't really help all that much since I broke just about everything I made... But I was pretty sure I had the chops to make the letters for this shoot in the way that I wanted them to look.

In some cases I had to distort the letters so that they would look normal in the lens width and perspective that I was planning to use in the shoot.

At first, spending long days listening to music while working with cardboard and hot glue was sort of fun and reminded me of college years. One of the interesting challenges in this project was being reminded that I now live in a fairly small country (Australia with 20m people) and it's not like where I used to live (the U.S.) where you can get just about anything and get it cheaply. While back in the States I could go to just about any packing supply shop and easily buy or find cardboard with a white side to it, white cardboard just doesn't seem to exist in Australia. I was quoted by some company that it would cost me several hundred dollars for them to print the color white onto the amount of cardboard I would need and it would have to be rush shipped up from Melbourne at no small expense and it would probably arrive late. I ended up having to paint the letters myself and I was surprised at just how much paint a thirsty piece of cardboard can soak up before it looks like solid white and ended up painting 4-5 coats for each letter. After getting about halfway through the letters (and about a dozen hot glue burns on my fingers) it came flooding back to me how tedious this kind of studio work was.

At the shoot the kids had a great time playing with the letters and drawing all over them. Hiding in the rocket ship seemed to be a pretty big deal and a pecking order was immediately established as to who could spend the most time in the ship. It was only when they realized that they could kick and throw the letters that the shoot started to get a little hectic as the client, the agency and myself realized that the letters could get destroyed before we finished shooting. I had to jump in and run around, playing with the kids and distracting them from destroying the letters while I shouted instructions for when the art director should shoot, as he had become the camera operator about mid-way into the day so that I could manage the craziness.

All in all, it was probably a bad idea on my part to decide to build these letters the week between Christmas and New Years- which happened to be the week my baby daughter was due to be born. Having a baby is stressful enough but having to make gigantic cardboard letters while wondering if my baby is coming every time my phone rings is a bit more stress than anyone needs in a decade.

I finished the letters and we had the shoot 3 days after my daughter was born. It seemed like the minute the shoot was over and I was back at home I slept for what seemed like days. It might be a while before I volunteer myself for prop making but all in all I was pretty happy with the experience and end result.

Joe Wigdahl 30/1/12 Joe Wigdahl 30/1/12

Ad Campaign: GoodStart Early Learning

In December I worked with the impressive Sydney agency The Monkeys on a three image campaign for Australia's GoodStart Early Learning Program. The GoodStart program has hundreds of early learning centers around Australia focused on children's learning development in the crucial first 5 years of their life. Our approach to the shoot was to capture children engaged in discovery and play with their environment and the tagline, "Minds Now Open," becomes an integrated part of the image and the activity.

Joe Wigdahl 22/11/11 Joe Wigdahl 22/11/11

Pampers Village- Images for Global Website Relaunch

This past July I had the fantastic opportunity to go to New York and work with Saatchi & Saatchi and Strawberry Frog to shoot a series of images for the global relaunch of the Pampers Village website. Pampers Village is a site overseen by Pampers as a resource for parents and parents-to-be that serves as an information hub and an online community. The site covers a huge range of information for parents from learning about prenatal care to preparing your child for her first day of school.

The goal was to create a small library of images that would cover a broad range of ages and demographics so that as each country- or region-specific Pampers Village website rolls out they would have the appropriate imagery. Among the usual challenges of finding a range of locations, ethnicities and strong talent covering a lot of ages, we had to have it all in one place (and where else but New York?!). For about a month of pre-production I had to get up around 4am, work through the day and go to bed around 1am in order to be on the same page with the clients, the agency and my production team. I was in Sydney, the Creative Director was in Capetown, my producer was somewhere in southern France, the web design team were in the Netherlands, the agency was in NYC and the client was somewhere in the wilds of Canada (Toronto, I think). As one group of people were going to bed somewhere in the world another group were waking up somewhere else. By the time I arrived in New York we were hammering out the final details and the shoot went like clockwork... mostly due to the efforts of my indefatigable producer- whose name I reluctantly share- Annika Howe. It was a great week of shooting and working with Saatchi & Saatchi's Global Creative Director Tris Gates-Bonarius was one of the best working experiences I've ever had.

Here are a few images from the new Pampers Village (the first site to roll out with the new look has been the site for Ireland.) As more country sites come out I'll put up more pictures from the shoot.