Sep 264 min read

The journey from pre-production to post-production

Case study: Maidens Barn

Maidens Barn is a beautiful wedding venue in Essex, which offers an authentic barn and garden venue that epitomises rural simplicity whilst radiating a luxurious and modern feel. We absolutely love working with Maidens Barn - there’s a nice balance between content creation and social media management, their community is brilliant, the staff are lovely and we couldn’t ask for a better client.

Here’s a little bit about the process of one of our recent content creation days there.

Goal & pre production

The purpose of this shoot was to gather photo and video content of cocktails and food as well as some shots of the venue being prepared for a wedding which would be taking place the following day. We wanted to gather enough content to create at least 4 reels and a bank of images which we could use for specific posts as well as generic ‘stock’ to look back on for things like story backgrounds, open day ads and other situations where a non-specific photo is required.

Here’s our shot list:

Photos

Wedding setup
- Ceremony room and dining area
Cocktails
Food - a small selection of meals photographed individually and together on a dressed table
Snippets of staff, such as a hand placing something on the table

Reels

Walkthrough of the wedding setup (to speed up) - from ceremony room to dance floor
Cocktails
- Clips of them being made, poured and displayed
- Slow motion of a staff member shaking it up
Food
- Clips showing different dishes
- Dishes being placed onto the table all at once from all around the table
- 1 clip for each dish being put onto the same place
- Slow motion pouring / placing something / adding the finishing touches
Staff
- Various staff members working - setting the table, making a drink etc.

In addition to our shot list as a guide for what we needed to create, we researched similar accounts and past content put out by Maidens Barn to get a feel for how we wanted it to look.

Shoot day

With plenty of assistance from the wonderful staff at Maidens Barn, Jo got to work.

Equipment used:

Canon R5 body
24-70mm f/2.8 lens
50mm f/1.4 lens
Tripod
Gorillapod

The shoot started by taking a few general shots of the venue as it was being set up. Soon after arrival, the cocktail making began! We filmed the cocktail making process in 0.25x slow motion (to enable flexibility of leaving some parts in slow motion and speeding some up to normal speed). The lighting was a little tricky to work with as there were some bright lights behind the bar, however it resembled the feeling of being at a bar which is what we wanted!

Once all of the cocktails had been made, we experimented with different shots of them - some inside and some outside. We decided they looked especially enticing outside and we were able to achieve some nice images of the cocktails with the outside of the venue in the background.

Whilst waiting for the food to be prepared, we gathered some more general photos and videos of the venue and of staff working.

The last part of the shoot was a lot of fun and we got some more staff members involved to help us get the shots we were hoping for. It is so nice when staff are willing to get stuck in - it’s not everyone’s cup of tea being filmed and photographed, however we can adapt our shots if people prefer for their faces not to be in shot. Everyone had a laugh and we were able to tick everything off of our shot list! The best bit was capturing ‘action’ videos of cutting into the dishes, pouring sauce, drizzling lemon etc once we had got all of the set up shots.

Post production

First off, everything is copied onto a computer and backed up (twice)! Next, stills and videos are sorted into separate folders.

The photos just needed basic adjustments as well as touching up to remove any specks of dust, unwanted reflections etc. This is done in camera raw & Adobe Photoshop.

Videos were edited using Adobe Premiere pro and the main adjustments involved colour balance and curves. We exported some of the videos as individual clips for reels, and some of the more curated ones (such as the cocktail making process) as entire videos.

Results

The most exciting bit - seeing the results!

We like to pencil everything into a content planner to ensure we are spacing out similar content sufficiently and also making use of everything. Alongside wedding galleries from other photographers, we generated plenty of content from this shoot for a couple of months, plus extra bits and pieces to feed into the planner when we need it beyond this.

Here are some of the shots…