Behind The Scenes On The Bus...

If you have picked up any bodybuilding or health and fitness magazines in the last few months you have seen the BodyBuilding.com "Public Transportation" advertisement. Like so many ads that we do this one started with a phone call to me…


At first thought to some people this would seem pretty simple; get a bus, put some people on it and take some photos. Well it didn’t seem that simple to me because I immediately realized that getting people evenly lit in the interior of a bus to get a lot of good color could be tricky, especially if it ended up being a cloudy day. And then of course there was the part about getting a real transit bus.


Living near the land of movie magic, Hollywood, usually means that you can get anything you want and it all just depends on what it will cost. And as it turned out the bus was available. Actually the place we found had every kind of transit bus you could imagine from 1950’s East Coast buses to current Los Angeles type buses. And while we were finding a bus, I lined up a cast. We had the face of BodyBuilding.com, World Champion Bob Cicherillo, the bigger than life competitor Jerome ‘Hollywood’ Ferguson, stunning fitness model Cara Basso, Mr. Canada Eric DiLauro, and amateur bodybuilding competitors Larry Brown, Eric Domer, and Geoff Etherson, and amateur figure competitor Kim Hill.


Now I have to thank world famous Gold’s Gym in Venice for giving us a place to put this all together in their parking lot behind the gym. So on a sunny morning it all started to happen. A lot of lighting gear got set up, a generator was delivered, the bus showed up and we got going. If you look at the actual ad the things that you don’t see is down the left side of the bus on the outside is a lot of lighting equipment shooting in to the bus at various angles. Down the right side of the bus are two parked cars placed so it looks like the bus is in traffic but so you don’t see that there are no drivers in those cars. At one point we even tried having Bob as our bus driver but we ended up not using that series. The dish you see on the right is an additional strobe that it took to light up Bob deep in the dark in the driver’s seat.


This was another fun shoot and it was interesting to see it all come together from everything from the city permits being delivered to the bus driving in, all of the gear getting set up, the cast arriving and then of course some friends and bystanders. And my personal thanks to everyone who was a part of it.

This next photo is also from a series we did not use. But it does show you what it would look like on an airplane if you put a bunch of bodybuilders in aisle seats in coach! Like my buddy Cicherillo says; when flying you have to change sides of the airplanes each flight so that you get even bruises on the back of your arms from the service cart!


Thanks again for checking in and keep coming back for more!