AmericanMuscle F-150 Top Summer Mods

Brand new AmericanMuscle F-150 Catalogs are being delivered today that showcase the F-150 and dirt bike creative on the cover for our Top Summer Mods campaign. About a month ago I showed an image from the photo shoot our in-house photographer and I worked on, and the creative is also live on the AmericanMuscle homepage. I'll backtrack a bit to walk you through how the image evolved from conception to completion of the entire campaign creative.

In our monthly meetings the creative team brainstorms creative concepts based on the marketing campaigns and copy the marketing team creates. I personally pull a lot of inspiring imagery from motorcycle related publications and websites, so incorporating a dirt bike with an F-150 was a natural idea. Being that this creative would be for the AmericanMuscle F-150 Top Summer Mods campaign, I found it fitting to create an image that showed the power of an F-150 and the lifestyle of someone heading to the racetrack in the summer time. 

The initial idea was approved so then I found a photo that had been taken before of a rolling F-150 with an angle that would show off the bike as well as the truck.

I knew the creative would be used for web graphics and a catalog cover so that affected composition decisions and I knew I needed a wide back plate to accommodate horizontal and vertical graphics. I roughly clipped out the rolling shot I found and used several stock images to use with the original 2015 rolling shot in order to compose a background for the truck. Below are the several stock images I used.

I found a low-res dirt bike image to use for the rough mock I had approved through the various departments. Once approved, I worked with the in-house photographer to get the composition as close to the mock as possible.

Our photographer shot the dirt bike in the 2015 and 2009 F-150 in the company parking lot, making sure to match the lighting in my original concept image. With the matching lighting, it made the entire photo composite go much more smoothly since lighting reflections and shadows would be more accurate to fit the scene. 

I clipped out each photographed truck with the bike in it and added it to the scene. For the 2015 I was able to use parts of the initial rolling shot I used as inspiration to get accurate motion blur on the vehicle and especially the wheels. I added a number plate to the bike as well as some AmericanMuscle branding to the graphics on the side of the bike. A few environmental elements such as photo filters, lens flares, reflections on the truck, and dirt kicking up was added to complete the Photoshop composite. Below is what each truck looked like in the scene when completed.

Because I needed to include a wide background scene to accommodate the variety of graphics this would be used for, a lot was clipped off in the actual graphics. Essentially, no graphic showed the entire background as shown above. Below is what the on site graphics look like currently at AmericanMuscle.com

This creative spanned across various web graphics, email newsletters and social images. The 2015 also was used as a cover on our AmericanMuscle F-150 catalog below:

I don't believe I could have been happier with how these graphics turned out throughout the entire campaign. It's always gratifying to develop an idea from conception to completion and have it turn out exactly how you imagined it. Not only did this creative reach the digital channels but it also made it to a printed form, which cannot be said for all of the campaigns we create. Be sure to check it out either when the catalog hits your mailbox or online.