Roberto Chamorro — Commercial Photographer & Director, Miami

02The Challenge

On paper, three obstacles made this shoot feel closer to impossible than difficult.

The locations. A surf shack. A medical lab. A mechanic shop. A greenhouse. A bakery. A construction site. An outdoor café. A home living room. A home kitchen. An artist’s studio. A tech startup office. A military scene. A neighborhood street. An old folks home. A car. A Florida Blue corporate office — complete with Florida Blue employees. And more. Each environment entirely distinct. Finding a location that could become all of them — without large company moves destroying the timeline — meant we weren’t looking for a studio. We were looking for a blank canvas big enough to build a city on.

We found it: a sprawling Miami facility with multiple buildings, bungalows, a warehouse, a garden, and a collection of structures we could transform entirely with art department. With the location map in hand, we assigned each shot to a space and began designing the transformations.

The talent. The brief called for 50+ unique, standalone images — each one its own world. But not every shot required a recognizable face. Some were designed around hands. A torso. A silhouette. A body in motion, identity intentionally obscured. These weren’t compromises — they were deliberate creative decisions, each one signed off by the client for that specific shot’s purpose. What the brief did require was that no face appeared twice in a hero role. With 38 models and 50+ shots, every casting decision had to map precisely against the full shot list. Who could double as background in one scene while carrying another shot entirely. It was a casting puzzle as much as a production one.

The clock. On a typical advertising shoot, 7–8 shots in a day is considered heavy. We needed 17–18 unique, fully-realized shots per day across a 10-hour window. No overtime. No flexibility. The client’s budget was fixed. The shot count was fixed. The math was brutal.

03The Approach

More time wasn’t the answer. More money wasn’t available. The only solution was choreography.

We designed the shoot like a military operation. Multiple sets would be live simultaneously — lit, dressed, talent in wardrobe and staged. I wouldn’t wait for a set to be ready. I would land on it, already hot, camera handed to me by my first assistant, capture running live. Direct talent. Get the shot. Move.

Pre-production stretched into long nights in my New York office — me, two executive producers, and a junior producer — working against the facility’s location map, the talent non-reuse matrix, and the daily shot timeline. Every variable had to be solved before day one. There was no room for a problem that hadn’t already been anticipated and planned around. A single slip behind schedule would cascade into a day we couldn’t recover from.

Some sets had 7 minutes. Timed with a stopwatch.

Pre-production timelapse

04On Set

The moment that stays with me isn’t a single image. It’s the flow.

Being moved from set to set — my producers on either side, my first assistant handing me the camera, another set already alive in my peripheral — and watching the whole machine move in perfect sync. 30 crew members. All of them executing without hesitation. The client watching from the monitor and barely believing what they were seeing.

Three days. No overtime. All 50+ shots delivered.

We took 45 minutes for lunch. That was the only rest.

05The Result

A complete image asset library that gave Florida Blue the visual range to build an entire campaign ecosystem. For everyone on set — from the crew to the producers to the client and agency team — it became one of those productions people talk about afterward. Not because it was glamorous. Because it shouldn’t have been possible, and it was.

02The Challenge

A few days out, pre-production fully closed, every contract signed, cancellation costs on the table, the forecast showed a storm rolling through Austin across both shoot days. Not a light rain. A storm. For an outdoor campaign built entirely around sunlight, this was the worst possible news.

Moving the shoot wasn’t an option. The agency had been clear: the schedule held. The budget was tight and a reschedule would mean eating costs the production couldn’t absorb. We were going, weather or not.

03The Approach

The backup plan was decided immediately: we weren’t fighting the weather. We were replacing the sun.

We called in a fleet of Arri M18s and M40s, large-format HMI units powerful enough to simulate direct sunlight on an exterior set. We’d come in tighter on each setup, light aggressively, and manufacture the look the brief demanded regardless of what the sky was doing above us.

The logistics of shooting in active rain required its own set of decisions. Umbrellas were rigged directly onto the light stands to protect the fixtures. Pop-up tents covered the set, the product, and the table setups right up until the moment we needed to shoot. The crew knew the drill: protect the gear, protect the talent, be ready to strip the covers and roll the instant there was a window.

04On Set

Two days. Rain on both. Parts of each day gave us heavy overcast, workable, actually useful for even light across the setup. Other moments brought torrential downpour that forced us to pause, hold position, and wait it out under cover before resetting and going again.

The clients were behind the monitors watching the conditions and quietly losing faith. The sky was gray. The streets were wet. It looked nothing like the campaign they’d approved.

Then they saw the monitors.

What was coming through the camera looked like a completely different day. The M18s and M40s were doing exactly what we’d asked of them: carving hard shadows, throwing warm directional light, making the Sol bottle glow against the scene the way a real summer afternoon would. The gap between what the eye could see on location and what the sensor was capturing was so dramatic that the mood in the camp shifted visibly. The clients stopped worrying. The images looked nothing like the rain outside.

05The Result

Every location delivered. The taco stand, the rooftop poolside, the urban cantina, the indie market, the sky court: all of them shot across two rain-soaked days, all of them bright, all of them looking exactly like the sun-soaked campaign Sol Beer had asked for. Twelve people, five locations, two days of Texas storms. A final set of images that looked like we’d ordered the weather.