The Container Store Already Here

Know what you have. Love what you have

Producer and DP · Spec campaign

No budget and 3 crew

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. When you’re a student without a budget, you do what you can to make it work.

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.

The manifesto and the scripts came to me already written. The art director and the copywriter knew the objects and the story they wanted to tell, so it was up to me to make it happen.

As a DP, my job is to take the idea they had and make it real. I’d spent a lot of time with them, so I knew what they wanted, and I did my best to recreate it.