Making of JDI`s visual work

As promised in the last entry, I will give you more information about our cooperate advertising and visual art-work "Fresh Imaginative Wind".

To show the world that JDI is a company with lots of creativity and total freedom of expression, we planned this work without any restrictions concerning the content. The original idea -  someone growing vegetables in his apartment and opening up a hole in the ceiling - developed into a symbol for our company Japan Digital Image. Our philosophy is to never be satisfied with just the basic (the vegetables from the supermarket) and what you would expect (a certain taste and look) - we are always going more than one step further than what others would imagine. At work this is about detail in the visual, the photographic sense and more.

To do more than expected makes us and our clients happy and satisfied - our work yields fruit. This is obviously represented by the hole that was opened up (doing something beyond one`s imagination to go one step further) and the juicy, healthy vegetables (the fruits of our work).

The visual piece started out with an idea I had and created a rough thumbnail sketch on a piece of paper. I am awful at sketches so please bare with me and the above visual.

What I imagined (loving Japanese traditional architecture) was a simple room in Japanese style and a farmers atmosphere. The brainstorming session with the staff led beneath other ideas to a more modern atmosphere for the room and the decision to create a comprehensive layout as a base for the actual artwork.

This comp was created with creative common pictures from the internet and our archives. We envisioned a lower angle for the perspective but were restricted to the material we could find. It was decided that the point of view shall be from another room into the actual "farmer`s room" to give a feeling of daily life.
It was clear that we had to actually photograph most of our visual material to be able to get the perspective envisioned.

For the photoshooting a very simple 3D simulation of the room was created so that the photos and the vegetable`s as well as other object`s height and position would fit 100% in the end.

We found a friendly farmer in Saitama-ken who let us photograph on his farm. It`s a cute little farm called "Family Plantation" which let`s everybody have their own space to learn to grow vegetables. They helped us a lot with this visual.
One day was spend looking for and shooting the vegetables that would fit into the visual; size, color, level of deliciousness...

To convey the impression that the rays of sun are streaming into the room, the vegetables were lighted by a small strobe. Besides shooting vegetables and the model, even the stream of water coming out the hose was captured.

The room is a 3D rendering which was further worked on in the compositing process in Photoshop, where one the most important part of the work is created: a warm stream of light that hits the delicious looking vegetables and hopefully makes you want to either buy organic food or even better yet grow it yourself!

As the slippers suggest:

You are always invited to come to JDI and feel the fresh imaginative wind in which we are working!

Yours,

Manuel