SecondFocus Blog

Many of you have seen the latest BodyBuilding.com ad in the magazines. Yes BodyBuilding Bowlers! Another one of many ads we have been doing that is much more fun. I thought you might like to know some of the behind the scenes on this one. This is the photo that the ad was built from.

We did this a few months ago, print ads take a lot of lead time for publishing and as well they take a lot of production time for us. First is the concept and some design by the team at BodyBuilding.com. Then it comes to me and I have to bring that into an actual shoot. First of all we had to get bowling shirts made. It wasn’t that easy to find what we wanted and big enough. And although they were XXL, the guys still had to cut the sleeves open in the back with scissors to get their biceps in!

Then I had to cast the shoot. If you don’t immediately recognize the team, we have from left to right; Robert Hatch who at almost 300 pounds right now is really serious about getting his pro card this year, Eric Domer who is a rising NPC competitor as a super heavy, IFBB Pro JP Fux who retired a few years as a top Olympia candidate and a real mass monster, and IFBB Pro Idrise Ward-El who might be in the best condition ever.

Along with casting I had to rent an actual bowling alley, get everyone on the same schedule and line up my support people and all of the right gear. With that I had to decide how I was going to shoot the scenes. Much of the shooting was done from down the sides of the alley but that could have been somewhat limiting. So we came up with the idea of shooting right down the alley from the perspective of the pins.

That idea represented a new set of problems. First off I did not want to be the target of a team of super heavy weight bodybuilders throwing a 16 pound ball at me with as yet unknown and questionable bowling skills. And then I found out that we could not stand on the alley. It turns out that alleys are specially prepped and oiled. So I would have had to pay for that and the time the alley was out of service. That would be costly. So we came up with another idea. I had my set builder design and build a rack that would hold a camera over the alley but would stand in each gutter. That worked and we actually suspended 6 thousdand dollars of camera and lens just an inch above the level of the ball rolling under it. We fired that camera remotely. As a side note each of the cameras also had to fire a rather substantial amout of lighting for each scene.

Well it worked out great and we all had a lot of fun, even me despite working pretty hard at this one. The actual ad photos would have the magic of the computer remove extra wires and things but the bowling is real! And by the way one of the guys is really a pro level bowler. Guess who it is. And there is an IFBB Pro out there who actually almost went into the pro bowling business instead of bodybuilding. So for all you trivia gathering people in the sport, guess who that is!

Keep watching here for more and THANKS!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.