shaun fenn: aristocrat gaming
Photographer Shaun Fenn loves sports, whether he’s playing, watching, or photographing them. So when Aristocrat Gaming—a digital casino platform that offers users a range of virtual experiences—hired him in partnership with the NFL to simulate and photograph a football huddle right from the field, he was game.
The campaign was meant to show how lifelike and experiential Aristocrat’s software is, transporting users from the casino environment to the world of their chosen game. “Aristocrat Gaming wanted the campaign to put the gamer into the action, to create a series of images that showed users in various scenarios, whether they were out on the field on the line of scrimmage, hiking the ball, or as a coach on the sidelines making calls with a headset on,” Fenn explains.
Fenn worked with the creative agency Moon Rabbit and producer Gizem Algan to recreate the gameday energy on a new stadium in Las Vegas. Just like in football itself, the shoot required a level of intensity and a number of pivots in order to capture the action. In all his work, Fenn enjoys the fun of in-the-moment collaboration and creative problem solving. “The crew and I put all of our creative brains together to make the images look authentic, to look like a real game was underway with all its emotionality and adrenaline,” says Fenn. Composition, color, and a variety of perspectives lead the eye in the images.
While the job required a different approach than when documenting live-action, Fenn says that “like always, we were in pursuit of something real.”