Evaluation

This assignment required the styling students and the photographers to collaborate together in small groups. We also had to work as a team and come up with a concept derived from our blog posts. The concept had to be relevant to at least one post from each of the group’s blog. At first it seemed a bit daunting that we had to form our own groups by getting to know each other. I think that the Facebook page really helped with this process as we could all get ‘chatting’ at swap thoughts and ideas.

The other two members of my group were Rebecca Aubrey and Josh Brown. We all had the idea of dreams/surrealism in common. We met up several times in the library to try and develop a strong concept. At first we were going to create photo representations of the top five most common dreams however after much thought we decided that it would be too literal and we should do something slightly more surreal.  We then decided on showing the transition from a good dream to a nightmare through different make-up and lighting. We were all inspired by the Alex Box series that was shot by Rankin that showed nine images progressing from totally white make-up to the final image being completely black with all sorts of colour and texture experiments inbetween.

The next stage was working out the finer details such as Studio/Location and scouting the perfect model. We thought that doing the shoot in the studio was going to be the most effective option. As we wanted to do the series based on the make-up and expression we didn’t really need a location as a background as we all thought that would detract attention from the model. Also there were the obvious perks of using a studio as the weather in Preston had been very unpredictable. Whilst discussing the model we agreed that we should be a little different and cast a male for the beauty shoot. We needed to choose someone who was quite androgynous, who had a great bone structure to work with the make-up and someone who didn’t mind wearing the make-up itself! Luckily Steven, one of my colleagues at The Body Shop, met all three requirements and was very dedicated to being the model. He has done many shoots before so we knew he would be natural in front of the camera.

We wanted to accommodate plenty of time after our test shoots so that we would have the opportunity to re-shoot if we agreed it was needed so we booked the studio for the evening on the Tuesday 15^th February and for the following weekend. The test shoot went swimmingly. Becky and Josh arrived at the studio at 5pm and experimented with lighting and backgrounds for a couple of hours until they had reached the perfect set-up. The model and I arrived at 7pm armed with a bag of clothes and a huge box of make-up! I started on the make-up straight away whilst the photographers did some final tweaking of the lighting.

Steven was a brilliant model and took direction very well whilst still looking relaxed and comfortable. Becky and Josh shared the role of photographer and took it in turns taking a few pictures each. The lighting all worked really well thanks to quite a lot of planning on the photographers behalf and I felt like the styling and make-up was successful too. After a few hours of make-up changes and camera swapping the shoot was over! Everyone was really happy with the images we had taken. The next day we met and chose our favourite images, the next meeting involved us all editing the final images. We did it as a team so that we could all share our opinions instead of just one person editing the images. We wanted to keep the rawness to the images instead of making them perfectly polished, so we edited out any obvious make-up flaws or marks but left the texture of the make-up on the skin instead of airbrushing as we thought it had a more ‘real’ effect. To make the images work as a series we tweaked about with the colour temperature as some of the images look too warm compared with the harshness of the black and white. Apart from that we haven’t done masses of post-production.

I think that Becky, Josh and I worked brilliantly as a team. We bounced off each other’s ideas and everyone had a similar input. The roles were shared out equally and we generally had a laugh and had fun collaborating together. I think this module is a great idea to get like-minded creative people working together as a team to create some amazing images.