Booked for every opening

Shooters Range opened in Leicester, and I shot it: the photography first, then the film. When they opened a second site in Nottingham, they brought me back to do it again, the cameras in before the public. That’s the arrangement now. Each new venue, the same pictures and film before the doors open.

What Shooters Range sells is hard to picture until you’re in it: a low-lit indoor range, electronic targets, replica guns. The booking pages turn on whether the photographs make that look like a good night out. Every venue needs the same thing on opening, images that sell the experience to people who’ve never tried it.

At the Leicester venue the core was photography: the lanes, the target systems, the gun packages, the wider space, shot wide for the website headers and tight for the booking pages, all graded to the brand. Around the stills came the moving-image work the brief grew into. Six short reels, each planned for a particular audience and platform rather than cut from one set of clips, so a family and a stag group each got a version aimed at them. And an FPV fly-through as the immersive piece, a single take down the lanes that drops a viewer inside the place before they’ve booked, flown with propeller guards for safe indoor work. Nottingham was the same approach on a new site: photography to carry the launch, a fly-through to give the opening its showpiece, the same planning and the same grade, so the second venue’s content sits naturally beside the first.

The relationship holds for a simple reason. The first set of pictures did their job, so there was no question who’d shoot the next venue. A client who hires you once might have got lucky. One who hands you every launch has decided the work is part of how they open a site. They open the venues, I shoot them.

Opening somewhere new and want it to look right from day one? Tell me what a film would need to achieve. I read every enquiry myself and reply within two working days.