14.01.10
Dispatches: Tales from the frontline of professional photography.
As I mentioned in my October dispatches, this month I would like to share the story about the making of a short film produced for Elizabeth Arden New York, for the recent London Fashion Weekend.
The project was quite ambitious and needed to be produced within a very tight deadline. As there is so much to tell, I’d like to focus on this alone for this November issue. The project came via Charlotte Lurot, the owner and director of Bacchus PR (www.bacchus-pr.com). Charlotte is one of the organisers of both London Fashion Week and London Fashion Weekend. We had worked together a couple of times previously at the V&A for its Fashion in Motion series of events (www.vam.ac.uk) and she’d seen my stills work. She’d also heard that I was shooting video with the new Canon EOS 5D MKII. Bacchus and I had been looking to collaborate for a while, and the Elizabeth Arden project seemed like the perfect opportunity.
THE SET-UP
I chose to shoot at Spring Studios (www.springstudios.com) in London, as I’ve worked there many times before and feel comfortable and at home on its stages. Charlotte and I pulled the team together; her role as producer and mine as director and director of photography. I bought in my lighting assistant, Billy Waters, who is extremely creative, very experienced and great fun to work with. I also invited Frankie Jim from Canon UK to come and see the shoot first-hand and get feedback straight from the set. The rest of the team consisted of senior stylists from Toni & Guy, senior make-up artists from Elizabeth Arden, several of the team from Bacchus and a couple of assistants for me. The brief for the project was to illustrate two new types of make-up that are ‘on trend’ for this season, then to show the film on two big screens either side of the catwalk, before the shows at the weekend. We had one day in the studio to shoot all the sequences.
THE BRIEF
Confirmation was given on a Wednesday evening, with the shoot planned for Friday. That night, I sat at my kitchen table and, with the help of plenty of fresh Illy coffee, sketched out ideas until the early hours of Thursday morning. The next day was spent organising the schedule and ordering props and equipment. Bearing in mind that I work with continuous light and selective focus, I decided to use one Canon 5D MKII and three prime lenses – the 85mm, 180mm and 50mm. I based the concept on images I knew that the client and I liked; using selective focus to isolate the model between foreground and background props. As I wanted to create a light, airy feel that would be dream-like, beautiful, sensual and atmospheric, I’d decided early on to take a chance and shoot the key sequences with the 85mm wide open. As the depth of field is so narrow, it takes a great deal of practice and I find that when shooting, it often becomes an intuitive process. It is also a great help to have the camera on a solid tripod with a fluid head.
THE SET
I decided to use frames (goal posts) for the set and built four on which to hang 1.5m x 4m pieces of white satin. These were held by assistants and moved both by hand and with fans. They were like big dominoes, set right across the studio. I used four types of light: bounced Reds off poly boards and walls for backstage (warm light); a couple of Dedos for selective highlights; a 2.5k and 1.2k HMI for the key sequence bounced off and through the silk; plus several Litepanel LEDs (daylight) for product and additional fill. I love to experiment with light and the more I do, the more I want to do.
THE SHOOT
When shooting moving images, I usually find myself shouting out my instructions to the model and assistants, and hopefully getting more and more animated as things start to come together. By slowing down the models’ movements, I was able to create beautiful, sensual moments. I am obsessed with getting highlights in the eyes. It is almost like the spark of life or visible personality, and in this shoot we got it just right. For the pack shots, I wanted the filming to be as beautiful as possible and fit with the rest of the project seamlessly. Having been involved in the design industry for so many years, I’m always very conscious of the significance of a client’s branding, so I wanted to make sure that we lingered on the products and created a photographic journey through them. I’ve learned to trust the LCD on the back of the 5D MKII and keep it on normal brightness. Occasionally, I use an external monitor (www.ikancorp.com) and Hoodman 3" LCD screen viewer (www.hoodmanusa.com). When it came to the key shot, we only had 20 minutes left, but ended up shooting for an extra hour and a half. The edit took three days in Shepherd’s Bush studio with feature film and commercial DOP [Director of Photography] and editor Alex Moreno. For me, this was one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of the whole process. I count myself very lucky to have had such an extraordinarily talented and committed team. I am looking forward to our next project, which I hope to tell you more about very soon.
View the full film at www.clivebooth.co.uk/elizabetharden
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