The Making of a Whiskey Campaign: WhistlePig's The Boss Hog XIII

It was a summer of whiskey for me! The shoot I produced and photographed for WhistlePig via their agency, Ei Digital, really put me through my paces and resulted in some of my favorite work to date.

Ei contacted me about doing a hybrid photo-and-video shoot for WhistlePig's new release of The Boss Hog XIII: The Golden Pharaoh, a limited-edition, single-barrel straight rye whiskey, alongside holiday images featuring other bottles in their lineup, plus pack shots on black and white backgrounds to live on their product listing pages. In all, it was a huge undertaking, and I knew I'd need a terrific team to deliver assets at the quality this client needed.

First off, I secured open dates at Lackawanna Creative Studios in Woodland Park, NJ, then got in touch with videographer Kristian Andi Lemmik, digitech Timor Raz, and prop stylist Kristina Mulyk to find a window that worked for everyone. With the schedule locked in, the real work of putting together a shoot in just a few weeks began.

Art direction was supplied by Ei Digital, which made my job significantly easier, and they were available to sign off on set builds and propping throughout the process. We built three distinct sets for the shoot: a dark, moody set and an Egyptian tomb-inspired set for The Boss Hog, plus a holiday set. To keep things moving, we shot across two working areas in the studio, one for video and one for stills, with enough distance between them to keep my strobes from contaminating the video set.

Based on the detailed art direction, I built the shot list carefully to ensure a steady workflow. I worked on holiday images to start, and as Andi finished a clip of The Boss Hog that needed photo duplication, Timor and I made our way over to the video set to photograph the setup with video lights in place.

Timor set up a video village for our clients and Ei to monitor shooting as it progressed, and I came over to discuss each shot for sign off before moving on to the next. It really couldn't have gone any better, and it's been exciting to see the images and video pop up on my feeds!

I'll be back when the holiday images drop, but for now, here are images for The Boss Hog!