If you live in NYC, Barcelona or Shanghai – Here’s a chance to become involved in a TV commercial shoot and get Paid to do so!

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I’ve been prepping for a pretty cool commercial over the past few weeks.

During the first week in November I’ll start to shoot a  TV commercial in New York City, followed by a second week in Barcelona, and then culminating in a third week in Shanghai.

Here’s a chance for you to become involved in this process:

I’d love to invite you to become a part of a social networking experiment of sorts…  I’ve never done this before but thought of doing it  a number of times before!  And this seems like the PERFECT opportunity!

First – I can’t tell you much about the client or ad other than it has to do with business and progress and finding a clear direction…

But it’s quite irrelevant to  what I’m asking you to help me with, because that is pretty specific:

I’m looking for natural occurring ARROW SHAPES in all 3 of these cities.

Let your imagination and eyes run wild if you live in these cities over the next few weeks (over the next week if you live in NYC !)

And please – THINK OUT OF THE BOX.

We all know of the one way sign… we all know of the Flatiron building.

We’re looking for ORIGINAL interpretations of arrows…

But here’s the catch – we’re not looking for TRIANGLES (that would be far too easy) but actual ARROWS – i.e. the head of an arrow with a stem or line that extends from it.  A one way sign would work well – but a real arrow with a thinner stem is even better!  But again – NO TRIANGLES (unless they have a clear stem to form an arrow shape 😉

And of course: we’re not really looking for signs, those are generally the easiest to find of course – hopefully you can help us find more interesting occurrences – in architecture, in the way you line up elements, in the way light and shadow move.

How do you get involved?   Please post links to your pictures/snapshots on the comments to this post – or tweet your pictures to me on my twitter account @vincentlaforet

We of course have professional scouts working on this – and I expect them to do a solid job.  But this is a pretty big challenge for even the best scouts out there…  finding naturally occurring arrows that aren’t just on signs takes a REALLY good eye and a lot of time… ideally I’d fly out to each city and spend a week looking myself – but then this commercial would take me close to 6 weeks to shoot – and I REALLY don’t want to be away from my kids that long!

More to the point:  I don’t think they can compete with hundreds of people out there who are keeping an eye open and happy to take a snapshot and share it… I’m not sure this kind of scouting technique has been done before – but I’d love to try it on this project.

A few people have already sent examples in – and they’re awesome!

Lastly – there is a reward- I’ll pay the person who submits the best picture (or series of pictures) for each of the three series 1 and possibly 2 day rates to go out and find more…  seems only fair and right.   And you’ll of course be invited to the shoot.

PLEASE remember to have geo-tagging / GPS on when you take the photo  if at all possible (easy if you have an iPhone) – at the very least please take note of the exact location, time of day and orientation/direction you were facing when you made the shot (North, East, West or South will do!)… that’s going to be critically important to us when we do the tech scout and figure out the schedule on the best time of day to shoot your shot(s.)

I hope you like the spirit of this – I’m really excited about it – and already impressed with the images that people have shared already!

Hopefully you’ll keep them coming – and perhaps even see your scouting contribution on your TV early next year!

Update: Photographer Tim Kang (who shot the locations in NYC) was hired to shoot 2 days to scout in NYC and I’m hiring him on the shoot for 3-4 days in NYC as well! Congrats Tim! v