Straight Shooter: Making An Impact With Video Production Marketing

In December, we got a call from one of our favorite people — Jason Miller of Arizona Archery Club, an archery shooting range and equipment store in Phoenix.

An experienced and passionate archer, Jason wanted to do something extremely cool, but highly technical, and catch it on film to show how the most popular arrows and broadheads behave on impact when shot into common and not-so-common targets

I’ve been a client of Arizona Archery Club for years, and count on them to tune my bows and arrows for accuracy and effective penetration. We threw around some ideas about what it would be like to shoot some really cool marketing videos. Ones that might go viral. We were in.

The scope of the project was immense: We’d shoot over 150 of the most popular arrow and broadheads in two days and film each one with the ultimate super high-speed camera: the Phantom Flex 4K at over 8,000 frames per second.

We would catch the motion of the arrows and broadheads hitting the target and the subsequent explosion, implosion, etc. We had so many items we wanted to shoot. It meant we’d have to clean up, replace a new object and be ready to shoot again in under four minutes.

It was a hare-brained and seemingly impossible undertaking. But we did it! Prior to the shoot, Jason and Tara’s amazing staff organized and rehearsed for weeks to work just like an Indy 500 pit crew.  And they did!

“It was a dream for us to work with someone like Robert,” Jason said in an interview. “We could never have pulled off something so extraordinary by ourselves. Out of all of the fun things I’ve done in my life — and I’ve done a lot of fun things — the shoot with Robert ranks in the top 10.”

One of the best parts of the shoot was knowing that we’d taken this seed of an idea and put in the thought required, plus the execution, to see it to fruition.

There were two parts to this shoot: technical and artistic. The most fun part was trying to accomplish the trick shots in the limited amount of time we had. Some of the shots were just crazy, like putting glitter inside of glass Christmas ornaments and shooting them, or shooting a single arrow through the filaments of four lit light bulbs.

“We set them up so they were several in a row, and we had to align each one to get hit with the arrow at a distance,” said Jason. “The arrow has an arc, so we had to measure the distance and calculate it. There’s a little bit of science to it, but it was a lot of experimentation. What was amazing was at the end of every shot we attempted, we accomplished it. I never imagined it would look as good as it did. It was thrilling.”

We didn’t have a single frame that didn’t work. We didn’t do any retakes. After we finished shooting, we spent hours reviewing the shots and can’t wait to share them in all their glory.

“Robert and his team were so organized, all we did on our side was remove the variables,” said Jason. “Everyone had a role, and you know what, no one let anyone else on the team down. It was seamless.”

We’re excited to share a few snippets of this work with you. Check it out!