10 years ago this September our first ever photo booth was created. Our Founder and Creative Director, Oliver Reed, was working in event photography at the time alongside his fashion photography work. Influenced by fashion portraits Oliver was creating pictures at events that had some conformity to tie them together. He would choose one wall as a background and shoot all the people with a similar crop. From this, he felt that he could automate this process and create a more interactive way for people to take the pictures. So in the summer of 2007 for £250 our first prototype photo booth was built.
The first few events proved to be very popular and from there the rest is history! Although it didn't look like much to begin with, this prototype was where it all started for Say Fromage. We still have the front face of it hanging in our studio to remind us where we came from and that everything has to start somewhere.
We will be looking back over the last 10 years of Say Fromage and reminding ourselves of some of the great projects and people we've worked with.
We've worked with some amazing clients over the years and have been very lucky to be able to grow and develop our services, experiences, our knowledge and team. We have grown in number over the years to be able to expand our expertise and capabilities to enable us to work on more exciting, interactive and collaborative projects.
It's been a whirlwind decade! (can we say that?) but it kinda feels like yesterday. From small beginnings back in 2007 from our very first booth, we have been learning, growing and developing our products and services - above are just a few of our most memorable moments.
See our latest Instagram posts to see a GIF of our crazy first years. There was Yinka Shibonare at the opening night of his "ship in a bottle" at Greenwich Museum and Jarvis Cocker hanging out at the Proud Galleries in Camden in 2009/10.
We've had our images turned into T-shirts by Topman in 2011, ensconced ourselves at the BBC with the "instagrim" booth for BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show since 2012, oh and we were at the Olympics that year too with multiple booths for P&G and a custom built booth for BT.
2013/14 was a year of custom builds for us we worked with Patternity and helped them create GIFs for their installation for the LDF in Trafalgar Square, a bespoke full-length photo booth for Levi's® to help celebrate the 140th anniversary of their iconic 501® jeans. The results were the largest photo booths we had created so far, installed in twenty Levi's® stores across Europe. We also worked on a floral enchanted garden installation for Viktor and Rolf's launch of the new perfume "flowerbomb" Christmas campaign in Selfridges London. We custom built our beautiful mirror booth for Burberry at the Vogue Festival that year too.
We've been in countless magazines over the years, by far, one of the best was the Vogue cover shoots we did in 2014/15, hurrah. We also did a bullet time tour with Emirates for the Rugby World Cup that year, oh and who could forget the multiple booths we had at the infamous Serpentine Summer Party, good times. Also, we built a custom plywood booth for Google for the Launch of Google Glass that was installed in their head offices in London. Oh, and we developed our Paparazzi Machine for the X-Factor finals that year too.
2016 came in with a blast with the most striking event photography I'm sure we have done to date for Converse and a leaf blower, nuff said! Also a bright and bold mini bullet time activation for Urban Decay for the launch of their new brightly coloured spectrum palate and an excellent time-lapse collaboration with Dyson to showcase their new hair dryer, Dyson supersonic. We also partied at 40 universities during freshers weeks with Spotify and our 180 bullet time rigs.
And last but not least to the present day, this year has flown by! We've had an excellent customised colouring booth for Clinique that travelled around Selfridges in which customers could colour in their portraits, We were so excited when were asked to deliver an awesome Glitching GIF booth for Hennessy to coincide with their pop-up bar at the Demon Dayz Festival. And lastly a new sequential photography installation for BMW at the PGA Golf World Tour, to name but a few........phew.
We are looking forward to another ten years with lots of new and exciting things in the pipe line. So watch this space for new products, services, and collaborations. Now all that's left is for us to take a break to celebrate with our 10th birthday party just around the corner. It will be a cracking time to catch up with the people who have made Say Fromage what it is today. We will keep you posted! Cheers and here's to another 10 years! SF x