| CHEF'N PHOTOGRAPHY | Art Direction

CLIENT: Chef’n DTC customers, Retailers, Wholesalers, and Amazon

ROLE: Art Director

DELIVERABLES: Lifestyle photography, including stop motion videos

TEAM: Producer Shelley McCracken, Photographer Ryan Castoldi, Food Stylist Malina Lopez, Models Carly Hood & Jill Unruh

PROCESS: Directing Chef’n in-studio and on-location shoots for various company needs such as lifestyle images for Amazon, website, email designs, tradshows, catalog, Meta and Google Ads, along with stop motion videos for website, Amazon, and ads.

Visual Shotlist & Moodboard

Beyond the standard style spreadsheet shotlist—which can often feel static and limited—I prefer to create a comprehensive visual shotlist and moodboard. This document serves multiple purposes:

• Overarching Moodboard: Sets the overall tone and feel for the project, providing inspiration and a cohesive visual direction.

• Crop Ratios: Includes all required ad and banner dimensions with sample text placement as specified in the brief, ensuring every visual asset fits its intended use. PDF outlines are also provide to photographer to be applied in live time on-set for proper alignment.

• Graphic Elements and Type: For large campaigns, I find it helpful to include a quick single page that outlines how typography and graphic elements will be applied to the final assets.

• Concepted Visuals for Each Shot: Combines hand-drawn sketches and product photography to visually communicate the look and composition for every needed shot.

Although creating this document requires a significant upfront investment of time, it ultimately saves me between 20 to 30 hours across the project. It offers a clear, visual reference that benefits less visually-oriented stakeholders by enhancing their understanding. Bonus, these documents are highly adaptable, making them easy to update during presentations which also creates engagement when everyone can participate in the creative process. Additionally, having this detailed visual guide on-set accelerates shot setup, reducing downtime, quicker styling, and streamlining the production process.

Visual Shotlist & Moodboard

Final Image

Final Desktop Banner

Final Mobile Banner

Visual Shotlist & Moodboard

Very similar to the visual lifestyle photography moodboard and shotlist, the stop motion videos also get storyboarded out. I work closely with the social team on these to be able to cut them into smaller social or campaign videos for future assets.

Props, more props, and backup props! Working with all that food makes this girl real hungry, an extra large lunch on-set is my go-to.