Lunara Bay Copy
Overview
Lunara Bay wasn't open yet. No photos, no direction, just a property in Key West and a scope that didn't fit the budget on paper.
Client:
Lunara Bay (managed by Brightwild)
Industry:
Luxury hospitality / vacation rentals
Project Type:
Brand photo campaign
Scope:
3-day principal shoot + 2 flex days, 12-person crew, 6 Miami-sourced models + local Key West talent, lifestyle, boat, dining, wedding, and wellness scenes
Timeline:
Pre-production January 2025. Production: June 2025.
What They Needed
They needed photos that show guests what it feels like to be there. Boats on the water. A chef's dinner at a long table. A couple on the lawn at golden hour. Guests arriving to something that feels like it was built for them.
They also had a budget. And a lot of scenes.
The scope didn't fit the number. Most production companies say so, then start cutting until the work stops meaning anything.
That's not how we do it.
How We Brought It to Life
The brief was 30% done.
On the first call with Brightwild's team, their Director of Brand and Marketing was straight about it: "We've got like 30% baked." The shot list wasn't finished. The inspiration boards weren't done. And they needed their partner group on the same page about what good creative even looked like before casting could start.
We didn't wait. We pulled from Chalant's own archive and built a mood board. We built the shot list. We iterated the production deck through multiple versions, syncing with Brightwild every week all the way through production.
Dave was on set for the shoot. It wasn't until post-production that he transitioned out of Brightwild and Art Director Elizabeth Baldwin took the handoff. We brought her up to speed on the selects, the composite notes, the retouching direction — all of it — without losing a step.
By the time the final photos were delivered, Elizabeth had full context on every decision that had been made.
What made these photos work.
Dave described what he was after better than any brief could: "It's the photos taken in the in-between moments that are the most beautiful." For a property built around life at the water and time slowed down, that's not a style note. That's the whole brief.
Patrick Michael Chin's approach fit it exactly. His method: build the scene for real. Get the right talent in the right environment with the right food and props, then let them exist in it. Give them an hour or two and just keep shooting. That's how you get the laugh mid-sentence at the breakfast table. The towel dropped mid-stride. The shots that make someone feel like they're already there.
Brightwild had come to us specifically wanting Patrick. Our job was to build the production around him that let him do what he does.
How we made the budget work.
A 12-person crew in Key West for nearly a week needs somewhere to stay. Lunara Bay has homes.
We worked out an arrangement where crew lodging at the property was part of the deal. Brightwild got the full production they needed. The crew was taken care of. The scope didn't shrink. It grew.
Final result: a 437% increase in project scope from where the conversation started. Same client, same creative relationship. We just thought differently about what value looked like on both sides of the table.
There's almost always a way to make a shoot happen. You just need to know what parameters you're actually dealing with.
Building the schedule around what was real.
Key West in late June means weather you don't control. Two flex days went into the schedule as a core part of the plan.
One family had a fixed window: 9 AM to noon on one specific day. The schedule anchored around that. Models who needed back-to-back booking got structured accordingly. Wardrobe fittings happened the night before each talent's first shoot day. The chef's dinner scene doubled as the crew's actual dinner that evening.
Every decision protected what ended up in front of the camera.
The talent mix.
6 professional models from Miami. Local Key West talent to fill out scenes with people who felt like they actually belonged there. The Brightwild COO's own family for the family scenes — real chemistry that casting doesn't replicate.
Wardrobe stylist Josh Owen built the direction from scratch and iterated in real time through a shared Figma board with Elizabeth's notes coming in as he went. Elevated and relaxed. Natural light. Linen over blazers. People in motion, not posed for a catalog.
What Happened
3 principal shoot days. 2 held flex days. 12-person crew. Boat and waterfront content. Wellness scenes. A staged wedding. An interior business meeting. All shot in the same homes the crew was living in. 437% scope increase from the original ask. Not because the budget changed. Because the deal was structured differently. On the post-shoot review call, Elizabeth was going through the photos one by one, trying to narrow the selects down. She stopped at some point and just said it: "Narrowing these down was like hell on earth." The team wanted more, not less. By the end of the call she told us they were planning to go well beyond the original scope on the next round. Before the project wrapped, Brightwild was already talking about what came next.
What We Learned (Again)
There's a version of this story that ends with "your budget doesn't support the scope." That happens every day at a lot of production companies. Our thing is this: there's almost always a way to make it work. You just need to understand the actual parameters early enough to do something with them. Budget is one parameter. What the client has — their location, their access, their flexibility — is another. Once you see both clearly, the path usually shows up. You just have to build it. The best clients we work with aren't always the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who are upfront about their constraints early enough that we can get creative about solving them.
Client feedback
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Jared Lin
,
Product Manager
