The Bavaria Beer advert! And stills from the idents! And a making of! For the snow effect! Ha! Awesome day, brilliant and lovely production team and cast. I’m tired, is short bloggy!
The Idents!
The behind the scenes!
The stills!
Time is whizzy. It literally just whizzes by some weeks. Last two weeks being a case in point. And now for cases in bullet points:
1. Shot a cracking (and cold) beer advert for Bavaria Beer as an ITV ident for Benidorm a couple of weeks ago, the new series starts on 24th Feb I think. Bikinis in the snow and all the bacon butties you could eat. Exciting.
2. Hotels with clouds on the ceilings are a good thing. It makes you not want to sleep though as you are looking at the ceiling.
3. I’m eagerly awaiting images from a shoot for a juice bar in Italy shot back in December by the beautiful Stella C. Apples as outfits and raining nuts is all I’m saying.
4. There is a point four but now it goes from my head. Prematurely going senile perhaps…
I worked recently with the wonderful Paul Ottey* up at Hallam Mill Studios and we made this dance/experimental short with projectors and light bubbles and pointe shoes. Well, Paul made it, I just wafted around a bit for a few hours. I love working with Paul, he is talented and technical and has really awesome ideas. The whole day was a cathartic wonderland for me; creative, experimental, fun and productive. The final product is multi-layered barcode of fluid edits…. watch this space for the Super 8 version. Waiting for film to be developed and digitised is a bit like waiting for Christmas when you’re four years old – it can’t come quick enough.
* Guess who’s the otter and who’s the apple. Answers on a post card to: The Frog Box, Pond 10, Ribbetta, Constellation Lyra.
So the weather, he snows on us properly for the first time this winter. Not too bad considering the previous Tundra-esque snow drenched winters. I love a good spot of snow, the way it muffles sound and makes everything look like it’s beautifully lit by a giant octabox is pleasing for the brain. Where do all the hedgehogs go when it snows? Or are they hibernating still? I can’t imagine they like it too much, they can’t get much insulation from all their spikes…. But maybe they’re asleep and blissfully unaware of the fluffy crystalline precipitations. Either way, I hope they stay warm and cute.
In mid January I got to work with the lovely Carl Grim again and also a beautiful male model, Hugh Plummer, who is definitely a guy that the adjective ‘beautiful’ can be attributed, as evidenced below. I love working with fantastic models like Hugh, it brings a totally new and inspiring dynamic to shooting figure nudes, especially when as in Hugh and my cases, we are both from athletic/dance/yoga backgrounds and both know our bodies’ capabilities inside out. For me it is a journey back to all the best parts of working in a dance company; combining strength, physicality and trust to create something tangible, graceful and specific to our bodies in that moment in time. Carl did an amazing job on the lighting and all the other technical bits and I think the results are beautiful; definitely some of my favourite nudes I’ve ever shot and work I would be proud to hang on my own wall.
This is one of the most beautiful images I shot last year, I love the romance and the feel of it; the castle in the background, the boat, the dress, the ducks, the clouds… all were actually there and not added in post. It was shot in Portugal the summer just gone by the wonderfully talented Joao Carlos. We spent days before looking for the right dress and hoping for fun weather and everything went perfectly…
I love and hate the story of The Lady of Shalott; Tennyson loves to make us all miserable with his waxing melancholy and tragic endings where of course the love remains unrequited and unrealised and where death is the inevitable result of the doomed maiden. Tennyson’s beauties always seemed cursed to a life devoid of human involvement, with domesticated and passive tasks employed to fill the gap (in this case weaving the likeness of Camelot as seen through a mirror as to look out [as she eventually does] would signal her death).
I think Tennyson rejoiced guiltily in the idea of complete and enforced isolation and where The Lady of Shalott’s predicament reads very much as a sentance of gloom and life-long misery: ”Four grey walls, and four grey towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott…” For Tennyson, I think this was actually bliss. We all crave the total engulfing of complete isolation from time to time, it seems to me that for Tennyson, it was the alluring opiate that both cosseted and crucified him.
“And down the river’s dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance -
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.”
Here’s the aforementioned video! It’s comedy… for reasons I can’t really disclose (!), but I nearly cracked a rib laughing….ahhh, sigh.
This month of the Roman god Janus has been unusually busy (not to mention weirdly warm) for me and I feel that I have neglected the frog box somewhat. Ribbet. Balance now successfully readdressed. So we move on, and in manner of practicing to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast each day, we cruise from ribbets to elephants, which is not such a wild leaping digression as you might first imagine since both are aquatic. At least elephants are if they know they are, and it’s sad to read in the Telegraph today that only one left south of India knows he can swim. His name is Rajan and he lives in the Andaman Islands and he is the last of his kind. Surely all elephants can teach themselves to swim anyway? They are clever, they can paint and draw and ride bikes (!) and do all sorts of elegant and dextrous things with trunk… I love the physics that the heaviness of water and the high fat content of these particular pachyderms make them graceful and buoyant in the sea, it makes the world seem a better place in my head.
My year started off nicely with a commercial job for a music video for a singer called King Charles (nope, I didn’t know who he was either to be fair…but apparently if you’re young and hip and like Noah and the Whale [which I do, but was still ignorant about Charlie], you’ll have heard of him*) which was very fun and involved six models all of similar heights, heads and hairs dressed up like futuristic android sex dolls. I had to attach some behind the scenes images for full wig/dress/shoe glory. One point that I have to make, is the huge difference in personality types that I feel occupy the commercial sector and the art nude scene. This is a generalisation, not a rule, but I find that in my experience (which is fairly broad) commercial models wouldn’t last five minutes outside on a cold, wet, windy day in North Wales, half way up a tree desperately seeking clothing. Maybe they’ve got the right idea though and art nude models are just a bit too hardy for their own good. The art nude models I have met and know well are certainly not complainers…. They would rather turn blue, risk a limb and work till they drop than ask for a ‘take five’, whereas the commercial bunnies tend to need a good sit down after ten minutes of being perpendicular in a high shoe. We had to learn lyrics for the music video which we had to mime. Ok, they were not sensical. And it would also be fair enough to say there were a lot of words to memorise at only two days notice. You would have been forgiven for thinking we had been asked to recite verbatim the entirety of Dostoevsky’s War and Peace the amount of perturbation that descended on our number in the green room before the first take. Either way the experience was great and I can’t wait to see the video soon, apparently it’ll be on the MTV too, whatever that is.
* Yes, I know, most people reading this blog are probably not young, which I believe these days in a marketing sense, the ‘young’ demographic is aged between thirteen and twenty-one. And if you think you’re hip, who am I to contradict?
Yay, we’re back at The Cottage Studio for another weekend of dance snazz! Here’s the flyer and the tme slots, contact me or Joss as per the flyer for info and bookings!
Dance and art and bendy is the theme of the weekend….
Slots available still: Zero! But contact us for our reserve list incase a slot becomes free.
Saturday 24th March (Fully booked)
10.00 to 11.00 BOOKED
11.10 to 13.20 BOOKED
13.30 to 14.30 BOOKED
14.40 to 18.40 BOOKED
Sunday 25th March (Fully booked)
10.00 to 12.10 BOOKED
12.20 to 13.20 BOOKED
13.30 to 14.30 BOOKED
14.40 to 15.40 BOOKED
15.50 to 16.50 BOOKED
17.00 to 18.00 BOOKED
18.10 to 19.10 BOOKED
Hopefully see you there!!
