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Stills & Video: A Makeup Artist's Perspective with Cathi Singh

Chief evangelist at Creative Force

Summary

In creative production there are many roles and skills that pull together to make the magic happen, and each of those team members have a perspective on how things shake out. One very unique role in creative production is the Hair and Makeup artist. Present on almost every production that requires human talent, the hair and makeup artist sees it all and is impacted directly by every other role. Joining Daniel for this episode is Cathi Singh, Southern California based hair and makeup artist, to talk about how shooting stills and video changes how she approaches her job, and the trends she’s seeing in the types of content being produced.

Key Takeaways

  • When considering how to tackle hair and make up for stills vs. video, there are considerations you need to make to ensure not only continuity between stills and video, but also how the nature of video changes what you can get away with. 
  • In stills production you can get away with a lot more because of the locked perspective and the fact that nothing moves. You can place hair elements where you need them, and you can use make up to cover things in stills that don't work in video. 
  • Art direction also should probably move toward more natural and product focused. 
  • As a hair and make up artist, Cathi must remember that she isn't selling her hair styling skill, but selling the product featured. 
  • How you approach the shoot for still and video has an impact as well, are you bouncing between stills and video or shooting stills on day 1 and video on day 2. 
  • Somehow we ended up talking about task switching, as related to stills and video. 
  • A challenge for campaign shoots in the future: reduce you deliverables per day by 10%, just to see how that impacts the team and quality of the work. 
  • Many shoots that Cathi is working on are shooting multiple vintage formats on top of digital

Full episode transcript

Daniel Jester:

From Creative Force, I'm Daniel Jester, and this is the E-Commerce Content Creation Podcast.

In creative production, there are many roles and skills that pull together to make the magic happen, and each of those team members has a perspective on how things shake out. One very unique role in creative production is the hair and makeup artist. Present on almost every production that requires human talent, the hair and makeup artist sees it all and is impacted directly by every other role. Joining me for this episode is Cathi Singh, Southern California-based hair and makeup artist, to talk with me about how shooting stills and video changes how she approaches her job and the trends she's seeing in what types of content are being produced.

Cathi Singh:

There's some major details. I have encountered this since 2019. It's only increased in my career. It's only become more and more popular, and to the point where I almost expect it. If I'm shooting something, I expect BTS to be there as well. We haven't discussed that either, which is a complete different entity-

Daniel Jester:

It's a whole other thing, right? Yeah. Behind the scenes content.

Cathi Singh:

Third camera that you need to be aware of.

Daniel Jester:

Cathi is a wealth of information on current trends in producing multiple content types because she's been on set and seen it all. So let's get into my conversation with Cathi Singh.

This is the E-Commerce Content Creation Podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Jester. Joining me for this episode, my good friend, Cathi Singh, hair and makeup artist extraordinaire, and just genuinely nice person. Cathi, welcome back to the podcast.

Cathi Singh:

Thanks, Daniel. That was a super nice intro. I enjoyed that.

Daniel Jester:

Well, you're a super nice person deserving of a super nice intro. And we're old friends, so it'd be weird for me to be cold and hostile towards you.

Cathi Singh:

Yeah.

Daniel Jester:

Cathi, we had you on the podcast a while back for a very popular episode for us. It was a very popular episode with our listeners, talking about the power of positivity on set. We started chatting about some of the... thinking about e-commerce creative production and how ubiquitous video has become. When you and I were working a lot together in 2019, it was big. Every customer was asking for product images and videos. And to be clear, we're going to focus this conversation pretty much on e-commerce, PDP, stills, and video. But the other thing is that hair and makeup becomes an entirely different issue with an entirely different dynamic than when you're talking about just stills, or even just video. But having to do both in particular combines and really complicates that process a little bit, and that's what I thought would be interesting for us to talk about for this episode.

Cathi Singh:

There's some major details. I have encountered this since 2019. It's only increased in my career. It's only become more and more popular, and to the point where I almost expect it. If I'm shooting something, I expect BTS to be there as well. We haven't discussed that either, which is a completely different entity-

Daniel Jester:

That's a whole other thing, right? Yeah. Behind the scenes content.

Cathi Singh:

Third camera that you need to be aware of. So as a makeup artist, you might be doing a still and you might be worried about video and focusing on both, but then remember that there's a dude videoing my head and everything I'm doing and following us around, so there's-

Daniel Jester:

You need hair and makeup for the hair and makeup person now. You got to get touched up-

Cathi Singh:

Mm-hmm. I just today, just now, signed a release that I'm okay with myself being on camera in this shoot, which means I have to really look ready tomorrow. But the biggest difference I see in... There are makeup differences in video and photo. There are major things that we apply differently, powder being one of them. The most basic thing that we use is powder. You can pop it on certain places when the lighting in the studio is hot, and I can pop it on and fix it for this one moment to get that shirt, to get that crisp line of something just right, and I can help out in that moment. Well, now if you shoot video, she has a giant piece of powder on her face. We can't fix that.

I have a photographer I work with often, and he always says, "Let's do it in post." I wasn't raised that way. I was raised, we do it now. That's why you hired me. I am your post saver. I am the one who keeps things cheaper. I keep things looking more authentic and more according to what the client requested so that when it comes time to you having post, I might have made a note that, "Hey, there's a blemish. I can't get rid of that texture. In video, you're going to see that raise. You might just want to make a note." I do provide that to the client as well.

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, it's really important to note, again, stills has an entirely different post-production process and things that you're capable of doing, and video has other things, and in some cases they're more limited on what you're able to do. But the other thing that I think is interesting about this, Cathi, is I don't think a lot of people are making the connection between their makeup artist and what type of lights their photographer is using, but it makes a difference, because strobe is going to impact the makeup that's on the model in a different way than constant lights are. If you're shooting stills with strobe and shooting video with constant lights, that means that you have to pay attention to how you're making up that talent to make sure that there's some cohesion between them, because the makeup that might look great for video may not look so great once it's hit with a ton of light through the process of being shot with strobe. So it's interesting to me to think that... I think there's probably a lot of studio people who are like, "Oh, yeah, I didn't occur to me that my makeup artist is paying attention to what equipment we're using because that impacts the decisions that she needs to make."

Cathi Singh:

Yeah. That's a great question. I guess I would start from the very beginning is as producers, as studio heads, as you're setting up a shoot, as a makeup artist, I would love to be included on that pre-production call. I would love to just give you my two cents, because what I have found on different sets when I do have to ask about the lighting, and that hasn't been thought of or it hasn't occurred to them that there's a lighting change or that there's a shadow going up here, something like that. So if I bring that up, well, now we've elongated the shoot because I might have a different need or they might have to change lighting. So it's really important, I think, to get all those potential onset bombs kind of laid out beforehand and just give me the five minutes to say, "You know what? I can't wait to get her ready, but the look that you are asking for in photo, to reset into video is going to take me X amount of minutes to make that look presentable. Do you want that, or do you want to re-edit her photo? Do you want to change her look? Because if we change her look to something [inaudible 00:06:38], we can do both. If not, how much time do you want to give makeup?"

I often think about photo as being the smoke and mirrors. We can do a lot of magic. We can clamp the shirt in the back and pin her hair. A lot of times the ponytail is never in the back. It's never in the center of their head. It's usually weirdly to the side because it's the only way that she looks not bald, right? So you pull the ponytail... Right now, if I just pull this to the side, then you guys see I have a little bit more hair. There's tricks. If I do that in video, she's going to look ridiculous. You're going to think, "Who hired this artist? This is-"

Daniel Jester:

It's the locked perspective, right? It's the locked perspective. You can get away with a lot. You can trick people, you can trick them in a lot of ways when that perspective is locked, but as soon as your talent starts moving, the camera starts moving... I think back all the time, Cathi, one of our shared clients, I think one of the fatal flaws that we made was agreeing that the model should walk towards the camera and then turn around and walk away from it, because that presented not only a pretty extreme lighting situation that we had to build, where there was multiple planes that the lighting had to match, but then also we're going to fully see the back of that model now walking away from us-

Cathi Singh:

360.

Daniel Jester:

360.

Cathi Singh:

She did 360s, yeah, and then the lighting, the focus, everything... That was mindboggling that we did that-

Daniel Jester:

It was a pretty wild... A lot of lessons were learned with that client, for sure. I think I'd approach video in some pretty different ways. But again, you make a great point. The cheating the ponytail is another one. That's a trade secret that I wouldn't have thought of, but you're right. You take a picture of your friend with a really nice ponytail; if their head is positioned a certain way, it looks like they just got short hair that's slicked back. You have to cheat it. I'm thinking about some yoga shoots that we worked on together, where oftentime the hair is pulled up in sort of a casual, athletic way, and there is a massaging of that so that it presents aesthetically pleasing in the image. But then video is in just, again, it's an entirely different consideration that not only requires thoughtfulness on your part, Cathi, but time to make those changes, time between looks and shoots.

Cathi Singh:

I find that is the biggest problem is that it's not thought of. It's just thought, "Well, here's two formats. We have one artist. She's just going to bang this out." What I have found is, if you look at my work, more of my work that is video and photo-based that I post both of, it's a softer look. She doesn't have a beat face. She cannot physically be contoured within an inch of her life. We don't do that anymore anyways. Thank you, Jesus. But she can't because in video she will look like I drew on her. It will not translate. It will look like markings. It won't create the contour. Video I always think of is extremely authentic. It's very honest. It is-

Daniel Jester:

It really is.

Cathi Singh:

... the honest format. There is no hiding. If she has a textured zit, you are going to see it. I cannot do anything about that. If she has gray hair, I can work on it, but you're still going to see some texture. It's honest. So I think when clients want to see the exact same layout just made motion, I think that needs to be discussed that that's not really possible. They're two different formats altogether. And you can zap in photo and soften this and get rid of this wrinkle and do this in photo, but in video, I feel like maybe you could embrace it is my opinion. Embrace it. I'll be honest, as a consumer, I shop a lot. I want to see the shirt in motion. I want to see it real life. I don't want to see it perfect like this. I want to see you walking around in it. I do like the video, but I don't want it to be perfect video. Do you know what I mean? I want it to be honest. I want her to walk and put a bag on and be like, "Okay, so that's where it sits on the bag. Cool. Awesome. Cool shirt."

Daniel Jester:

Cathi, when it comes to shooting video for e-com, I guess let's not focus on just the video part of it, but I'm curious to know what level of involvement have you had in actual model casting? Are you typically engaged with a client at the point-

Cathi Singh:

Sometimes.

Daniel Jester:

It stands to reason that, yeah, some of your longstanding clients, that they might reach out to you that you have a relationship with, they might want your opinion because they've come to know and respect you. But I'm just curious, are you involved in model casting and providing input in that way? And how does the video versus stills conversation impact the model choice potentially?

Cathi Singh:

Yeah. I think model choice over the last couple years has become really interesting as well. So many different types and things, which is so nice to see. I was doing beachy waves, I felt like, for two solid years on the same exact person, and I just am so glad to see it venturing out into something a little bit more real. This is just people being people. So that's really been refreshing for me to see in that world.

I do have a couple clients who will send me potentials, like maybe they have a hold, and they would like to see my thoughts on, "How will this hair translate? Can you do this, this, and this? We like this example photo. Here's the model we're thinking of. Can you make this look like this?" And I'll say yes or no, or "That might be a wig," or "She will do this. This might show she has a shaved head. This might be more lighting for you guys. Remember, if she has a shaved head, this [inaudible 00:11:51] thing in studio," blah, blah, blah. So there's that kind of thing, but I think it's really, really nice to have that conversation. Also, it saves you guys time. It saves you guys surprises. I hate surprises on set. You know what I mean? In the morning we should have flow and kind of know what we're getting into, especially if you know who the model's going to be. If I know who it's going to be, we can be so much more prepared, for photo or video, and I think work out all those kinks beforehand, which save us 20 minutes in the morning, which is a long time for makeup, by the way.

Daniel Jester:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Cathi Singh:

20 minutes of makeup is like, woo.

Daniel Jester:

And that's a great point about... It's easy to say, "I like this hairstyle on this inspiration swipe that I've pulled, but I want to do it on this model." I feel like that oftentimes ends up in disappointment, right? Because there's so much about hairstyle that is impacted by face shape and the geometry of, really the geometry of the structure of your face and the way that your shoulders look. And a lot of people, I don't think, are as in tune with what they like about certain aesthetics in the way that maybe you or I might be, Cathi, where I can look at an image and I can say, "The reason I like this one more than this one is because of the shape of her shoulders or the way that she's kind of holding them or moving them." If I was less in tune with that, I might say, "Oh, I love that hairstyle on her, but it actually has a lot more to do with the composition and the way that she's holding herself and the confidence that she possesses, and not so much about the actual hairstyle."

So you take that hairstyle or that makeup inspiration and you copy and paste it onto somebody else who doesn't have that same sensibility or air about them, or just is a different vibe in general, and you could end up with something that is both surprising, which is bad, as we just talked about, but then also disappointing, which is even worse.

Cathi Singh:

Yes. And I have done both. I'll tell you, 100% honesty, in 15 years I have done both.

Daniel Jester:

Surprised and disappointed, both. Yeah, that's rough.

Cathi Singh:

Yeah. I have been the girl that just said yes, "Yeah, sure, let's do that hair. Anything the client wants. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," did exactly what they asked for in the picture, and then, like you said, it wasn't going to work on her. It wasn't meant for her. It wasn't meant for her face shape. We got halfway through, and I remember she came over and she was like, "Oh. Okay." I was like, "Mm-hmm. Yeah." So we had to edit and quickly adjust, and we did, and it came out great. That was me not inserting my own knowledge of the hair. So now I would say, and be more comfortable saying, "This is a great photo. I think if we just tweaked it to be this way for her, this would match her style and her body shape and her face closely to what the model you're looking at." You know what I mean? Adjust it to the model. Don't just put a mask on the model, right? We're trying to make her look the best and sell whatever you're selling in the most incredible way so people are naturally going to look at her and her happiness and how natural and how flawless she looks, how effortless it is to wear.

I have done hair, and I look back on it and I kick myself sometimes because there are times when you do the hair, they say, "Do something really cool." Well, I did this really rad, crazy braid. It's all I see in the photo. I'm not selling anything. I'm selling my braid. So I'm like this, "Whoops." I was the star there, and I need to tone that down. So as an artist, if any new artist is listening to this, too, remember that we're not selling your hair, unless it's [inaudible 00:15:14]. We're selling the product. You are making the client. You are a vessel to the client at this point. It's not your hair campaign.

Daniel Jester:

So many aspects of what we do, there's an element of invisibility. The goal is to not be super obvious if the thing that we're selling is the shirt or the... Unless, of course you're there doing makeup for a makeup brand, which actually, Cathi, this is interesting to think about. This is something that I don't know about you. Do you work on beauty brands? Is there a different type of makeup artist that does that kind of work than other kind of work? I'm very curious about this now.

Cathi Singh:

Yeah, that's a good question. I have worked with a skincare brand or two. That's a little bit different because it was much more... First of all, I've never seen a monitor that big in my life. It was almost like-

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Cathi Singh:

I've never seen that many pores in my life. I was like, "Oh my god." It was just so zoomed in, but so fascinating to see how they were going to do it. And the lighting, to me, as a geek of lighting and stuff, I just nerded out on that. It was so cool. But yes, I think that there is a definite... Much more of a beauty artist would be able to do that because there are certain looks, too... It seems to be more exaggerated, things of that nature need to be done, but they're much tighter shots. And then I do find that the video might be more in line with the photo, or there is no video. It's more photos of makeup.

Daniel Jester:

In your opinion, Cathi, of the clients that you work for that are balancing PDP video with still images as well, in your observation... This doesn't have to be specifically focused on makeup and hair, but it can be... But in your observation, the brands that are doing a good job, what do they do differently from the brands that you've worked with that still have to figure it out?

Cathi Singh:

The brands that do a good job, in my opinion, like I said, they just keep it really authentic in the video. They don't overthink the video. What I found is when we overset and we do this with a model, she just looks like she's selling something. Do you know what I mean?

Daniel Jester:

Yeah.

Cathi Singh:

It just doesn't look like she really loves that cell phone case or whatever. She's like, "I'm on the phone. I'm..." Just be a little more authentic with it. Those are the ones that I tend to gravitate towards. The ones that look day-to-day, that feels more real, but I think that's just me in general. I might be an exception to the rule. I like [inaudible 00:17:32] and real pores. I just want to see what I want to buy.

Daniel Jester:

From a production standpoint, Cathi, you and I have worked on a bunch of shoots where we did stills and video and we tried a bunch of different things, and I'm not even going to share what some of them are on the podcast because I'm a little embarrassed that we even considered doing it this way. But from a production standpoint, where are you seeing the most success when you're shooting? Because a lot of times you want to book the models for a few days, you need to shoot stills, and you need to shoot video. In your opinion, has it made a tangible difference to the success of the shoot or the ability of the shoot to go along smoothly without a hitch to shoot video first and then stills, or stills first and then video?

I know from a workflow perspective, the thing that makes the most sense to me and what we did at the commercial studio in LA was shoot stills first, get them into post-production, because we were going to use those as sort of the color-accurate version by which the video was edited to. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. You can shoot one or the other first or second. But I'm just curious, from a function of how the production shakes out over a few days, what have you found to be... Is there anything emerging to you that looks like a best practice, or is everybody still kind of doing it in whatever way they think... Obviously, some of it comes down to when you can book certain people. When is the videographer available versus the photographer and that sort of thing?

Cathi Singh:

Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, I have definitely noticed. I have seen two really successful ways. I do think photos should start first. All the teams I'm on that are photo and video, both teams are there all day. I find that great because it gets a feel and a vibe for what the photo team's going to do because they're still on set. Video's watching photo, obviously. But especially with e-comm and things of that nature, I think photo establishes what you need to capture in video. If I need to capture this pen in a certain way and we're going to get that photo, in video I need you to incorporate this moment that I'm doing right here somehow in the video. But if I don't know that yet, I'm just going to shoot willy-nilly on the video, and then photo's going to be like, "What are we grabbing?" So I think that, like you said, it's a good template for video to follow.

Now, if they want to get creative and that's agreed upon, then they can do that, but I just think that it adds more flow and I think it creates more of a streamline on set. I have been on sets where they've done half photo and half video. I don't think those are successful because the sets... We had four set changes, so we did it twice. Woof. How do you know the continuity was perfect? How do you know that that face is exactly where it was before? It seemed very stressful to recreate it four hours later, or six hours later from the morning. I was like, "Wait, what'd her hair look like? Can I see that video of where her hair was? Because I have to make this look perfect," da, da, da. Right? So I think doing them back to back is solid, going photo, video, photo, video, photo, video, because if you have four setups or four vignettes or whatever, four locations, you're not going to want to go back to all those. Also, your lighting will be different. If you shot your beach scene in photo, and then you went back at four o'clock and shot your beach scene in video, your shirt's not going to look the same. Your lighting is totally different. You need to shoot them in the same timeline, in my opinion, especially from a makeup perspective.

Daniel Jester:

It sounds like you're talking a little bit more specifically about campaign stuff that might be happening on location. And there are obviously also brands that use these images for product pages as well, because when you're talking about-

Cathi Singh:

Or e-comm.

Daniel Jester:

Sure.

Cathi Singh:

[inaudible 00:20:52]-

Daniel Jester:

And when you're talking about-

Cathi Singh:

... shoes set up, and then you have this set up. You have to put it all back together. It's just so-

Daniel Jester:

Right. Yeah. Because the thing that I was alluding to that I said I wasn't going to share and now I'm going back on is that we were shooting on a white sweep for this customer and we were shooting stills and video, and I just think that... I don't know. It's not exactly an impossible question. There's a right answer to the question, but we tried shooting stills for that look on that model and then jumping to video and having both lighting setups on in place, and we just felt like we lost so much to switching between those. But the other thing at the time that was an element of this was how much we had to do in that day. We probably should have told our customer we should not be doing that much.

Cathi Singh:

That's such a solid point you bring up. You will accomplish, I feel like, so much less, 30% less. That's just the number I'm making up, but it just feels accurate.

Daniel Jester:

There's actual studies on this, Cathi, and I can tell you from the book, Scrum, and people on this podcast have heard me talk about this because it came up with our recent episode with Adam Parker talking about flow production, but the more individual projects you take on, the amount of your time that you lose to task-switching goes up exponentially. You might actually be right on about that. From one to two projects, if we think of stills as one project and video as the other project, it probably is something like 25 to 30% of time that you lose just switching between those, not even actively doing them.

Cathi Singh:

Just think about lighting and just putting up your sticks and just that movement. That's five, 10 minutes. Zap, it's gone.

Daniel Jester:

There's a desire to try it because on the other hand, you're like, "The model is here in the look, she's already got it on, she's already done up hair and makeup." Again, it's not exactly an impossible question, but there's really good points to be made, and depending on the perspective from which you're tackling the problem, from a production perspective and from a timing perspective, it maybe doesn't make sense to leap-frog stills in video. But from a perspective of continuity and having the model in the look and not having to go back and retread looks and then find that pair of pants and then bring it back on set and do all of that stuff, maybe there's an argument to be made for that there.

Cathi Singh:

Well, if you think about the rest of the crew and what their job as well is, "Okay, so we put her in the wardrobe; now four hours later, now we have to re-steam it, redo all the things we just did, so we just gave the wardrobe double work. Why? Why did we give her double work?"

Daniel Jester:

Not to mention makeup gets on the garments and then appears in the images. That's also a very real consideration, that, "Will we be..." And I guess really what we're advocating for here, Cathi, what we're sounding like is maybe let's bring the daily shoot goals down a little bit to plan for more of this stuff, because it just gives us a little bit more breathing room to test different methodologies. Because, again, maybe leapfrog totally works and there's just some little element of it that we were missing when we tested it. But again, the bottom line, I think, is let's... You know what? I'm going to put a challenge out there to listeners of this podcast right now. The next time you do a campaign shoot, just reduce what you need to shoot in a day by 10% and see how much better that feels. Just see how much better... Just loosen one notch on the belt. Just one hole on the belt, loosen it once, 10%, and see how it feels.

Cathi Singh:

And then just see what he feels like at the end of the day. Just [inaudible 00:24:06]-

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, because I'd be willing to bet everybody's a little bit happier and probably has produced some stuff that they're feeling more excited about than exhausted.

Cathi Singh:

That is one thing. There are two things. I was asked once recently by a photographer who said, "All the things that you're doing right now, I don't need you to do. I just need her," and I went, "I totally understand that and I respect that. I'm doing this for video, so I need to do this." So that conversation and that time thing could have been fixed if we had worked that out prior to, and it also felt like that person was really cramped on time and I was getting into their timeline, obviously. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been up my neck, because we had too much scheduled. We had too much going on.

Daniel Jester:

Well, yeah-

Cathi Singh:

There was no time slotted in between stills and video for me, so I literally was running. And we were doing sweat. So this is the other thing. If you're ever doing sweat-

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, sweat.

Cathi Singh:

... you have to do video and photo together. You cannot redo.

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Cathi Singh:

Sweat is one of those games. And it was really hard to match. It was so hard.

Daniel Jester:

So the next time, though, you're doing a sweat shoot, Cathi, just invite me to be the talent, because there's no extra... Anytime I get on set in a studio, I'm sweating automatically, just as a Pavlovian response.

Cathi Singh:

Yeah. I love it.

Daniel Jester:

Bring me in for that. Cathi, really super interesting things to think about. There's an element to this that I wasn't expecting us to talk about, but the idea of the social media behind the scenes content adds another layer of, not a huge layer of complexity, but it's really interesting to think about. I can tell you want to say something.

Cathi Singh:

I do. I just thought of something. I don't know if this is happening in e-commerce studio, but this is happening in my e-comm/campaign days, I guess I would say. This happened on a couple of shoots. Photographer is not just shooting one format. He's shooting like eight-millimeter, Polaroid, film, flat. Most photographers I'm working with are shooting digital, and then their assistant's giving them at least three more formats, and we're shooting that, and then videos coming in.

Daniel Jester:

Very interesting.

Cathi Singh:

I've done at least, wait, three in the last e-comm that all three of them did that.

Daniel Jester:

Wow. That's really interesting to hear. Yeah, I have some friends that I've seen... Do you know Renee Wymer, photographer?

Cathi Singh:

Is that Renee from LA? Blonde?

Daniel Jester:

Yeah.

Cathi Singh:

Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I know that she's been shooting a lot of film stuff for brands and things, and actually I think she's been shooting older-format video as well, like an old camcorder product, jewelry stuff on an old camcorder. It's a heavy vibe. You're buying into-

Cathi Singh:

Like the handheld, the old-school...

Daniel Jester:

Exactly. Yeah. You're buying into a heavy vibe. That's a very boutique thing, but it is interesting.

Cathi Singh:

I think it's a bigger part. It's growing and growing. I think it's a bigger part of this industry, and I think that Polaroids and stuff are being used to sell. I've seen things pulled up on film and been like, "That's adorable." It's a cool format. It's cool to look at. It's fun.

Daniel Jester:

It is cool.

Cathi Singh:

Yeah.

Daniel Jester:

Cathi, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast and sharing your insight and expertise and wisdom. Yeah, great conversation, really interesting to think about, and I think there's maybe some other things to think about in there, too. But thanks for coming on.

Cathi Singh:

Thanks for having me, friend. It's always good to see you. This is lovely. Love chatting with you.

Daniel Jester:

That's it for this episode of the E-Commerce Content Creation Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, consider leaving us a five-star rating or writing a review if the podcast platform of your choice allows that functionality. Or you can also head to LinkedIn and follow the E-Commerce Content Creation Podcast page and give us your feedback there. We'd love to have you over there. Many thanks to our guest, Cathi Singh, and thanks to you for listening. The show is produced by Creative Force, edited by Calvin Lanz. Special thanks to Sean O'Meara. I'm your host, Daniel Jester. Until next time, my friends.

Hi, Ian.

About the host

Chief evangelist at Creative Force

Daniel Jester is an experienced creative production professional who has managed production teams, built and launched new studios, and produced large-scale projects. He's currently the Chief Evangelist at Creative Force but has a breadth of experience in a variety of studio environments - working in-house at brands like Amazon, Nordstrom, and Farfetch as well as commercial studios like CONVYR. Creative-minded, while able to effectively plan for and manage a complex project, he bridges the gap between spreadsheets and creative talent.