“We arrived with a mood board of film stills and no idea whether two crowded squares would photograph at all. Lumen scouted the light before they scouted the shot, worked around cities that never stopped, and sent selects the morning after we wrapped. The Florence frames are the ones people still write to us about.”
Project
Casella — Spring lookbook, Rome & Florence
A spring lookbook shot across two Italian cities and three studio days — stills and motion from the same trip, scheduled around the light rather than the calendar. Delivered May 2025.
The brief
A lookbook that had to happen in the street.
Casella came to us with a launch date, two cities and a mood board built entirely from film stills. Their last lookbook was shot in a studio, and the flat, even light on those frames was the reason they were starting again.
We took the commission end to end — casting, scouting, shoot, edit — and wrote the schedule around the light. That meant a short list of set-ups each day, and the piazzas held back for the first hour after sunrise.
Casella, in frames
Set-ups, outtakes, and the frames that made the final edit — pulled from the shoot files as they came off the cards.
Conditions
Two public squares and light we could not control
Piazza Navona and the Duomo steps open to the public at dawn and fill by nine. Anything we lit had to sit inside a working square without blocking it, and the noise off the stone made spoken direction close to useless past ten metres.
We walked both squares across a full day to map how the light moved, then built each set-up around a facade we knew would still be lit an hour later. The cities kept working. Nothing in anyone's morning moved because of us.
Approach
Daylight first, minimal grip
The street work was shot on available light with a single bounce, which kept the crew light enough to move between squares without a van. Motion was captured on the same bodies as the stills, so the campaign film and the print frames share a grain and a colour response.
The studio days carried the flat-lay and the paper-backdrop portraits. We held the same two paper rolls all week so the edit could cut between street and studio without the skin tone jumping.
Results
Discuss a commission
Delivered ahead of the launch, licensed across print and digital
First selects went over the morning after the last shoot day, and the graded set followed inside the week. The campaign film was cut from the same trip, so nothing had to be re-shot to make the two sit together.
The frames carried the spring launch through print, out of home, and the brand's own channels. The store set ran separately as an editorial feature, which is where most of the press pickup came from.
