Blackhawks brand is focused on real food and the bond between people and animals. To show this bond we cast a true owner and pet and even managed to keep the dog’s name, Chester in the spot. Although this made things slightly harder to get Chester to perform certain actions compared to a commercially trained dog, the bond between owner and pet was far more authentic and convincing as Chester was drawn to our talent, giving eye contact, and not focused on food or a trainer.

We shot three 15 second spots in one day. These were influenced by creative brief to keep a sunset feel so the tone would align with a spot ‘Backtrack’ that I previously shot for Blackhawk. However this was in the middle of the bush fires, so there was very little sunset to see with the sky filled with smoke. We used some bigger lights to recreate the sunset feel and composed the shots to not show the skyline which also meant that we could be more relaxed with our time getting Chester’s performance without chasing the light.We shot on a set of vintage lenses to add some subtle character and flattering softness to the image whilst choosing to shoot on a slightly longer focal length in order to create more compression bringing the backgrounds closer with a narrower view to focus predominantly on the bond between Chester and our talent. This focus on the emotional bond also influenced our lighting and we focused on keeping everything backlit letting more fall into shadow and creating a darker emotional and more authentic mood and tone in our image.