The Container Store | Already Here

Story

Our spec campaign for The Container Store, which I produced and shot, is about knowing and loving what you already have. We had to shoot an overhead, straight down into an open drawer at the screwdriver, and we didn’t have an overhead rig or the budget for one. So we spread the tripod we had across the kitchen. One leg sat in the sink’s drain, where it wouldn’t move, with somebody holding it. One was balanced inside the toaster, which was the right height. The last one was pushed up against the backsplash. It wasn’t the most perfect shot in the world, but I didn’t have the rig, so I built one out of what I had.

The manifesto and the scripts came to me already written by Madi and Rachael, our art director and copywriter: “Things don’t usually leave a house. People just stop looking for them. The things you think you’ve lost are still here, waiting for you to remember where.” They knew the objects and the story they wanted to tell, and I got brought on to make it happen.

Coming onto a project that’s already written is always kind of hard. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, but they bring it to you so you can make it, and sometimes you have to cut and adjust. I’d spent a lot of time with them, so I knew what they wanted, and I did my best to recreate it.