Shooting Product Videos Like a Pro Syrp shooting a mock iPhone commercial step by step

The good people at Syrp recently published a very interesting educational video showing how they made a high-end professional looking mock iPhone commercial using relatively simple accessories (some of them from Syrp of course) with some outstanding results.

Apple has some of the best product b-rolls money can buy but as you will see in the video above, re-creating at least some of what you see in those videos doesn’t necessarily require spending Apple-style budgets.

The idea for this iPhone commercial was to combine motion and lighting in a very special way to achieve the desired result. In this case, it is not necessary the camera that moves (although you can decide to move it as well) but the product or even the background or the light.

Some examples of what you can do in this way include connecting a product to an arm that moves or twist (in this case connected to a Genie mini 2) and using only some backlights get beautiful rim shots as the products twist.

Another shot included moving the light on a slider towards the product getting some gradual change in the lighting as it moves by.

Another interesting idea that can be done with a long (and large) slider is a moving background behind the product. There are other ways that you might do this as well (including green screen and adding background video in post – but lighting might be tricky) or even putting a large LCD behind your product with a video playing (but again you will need to work on fixing those lighting issues and avoid glare and reflections from the screen).

In any event, you will likely need to do some work in post using a software like after effects to clean some things up and mask out unnecessary bits (like the arms holding your product for example) like you can see in the last part of the video but otherwise this could be less complicated than it looks to create.

You can find many more product photography related videos on our dedicated product photography on our technique section. You can also find many more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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