My Test Shoot

Before doing a final shoot I tried a mock up/test shoot to see if what I was going to do would work or not. As you'll see in the contact sheet, you'll know things didn't go too well or to original plans when referring to my story boards created earlier.

Contact sheet for test shoot:

 This shows my several attempts at creating the different objects shown on the story boards without success. There are a few reasons for this though, I will talk and explain about them a little bit in depth now.

My first problem was my camera, It was only a compact camera capable of a shutter speed of 16 seconds at absolute maxiumn, it was hard to either finish the illustration on time or i'd finish early than intended due to poor judgement of time. I'm not going to put all the blame on my equipment though, which leads me to my next point.

Drawings and creating a painting when you cant even see what you've done already is hard. Not only did I struggle with this but so did all of my brothers who gave this a try. Needless to say, our frustration and tempter was lost quick, noticable by how many pictures were taken. Bare in mind though, this still took over an hour alone and long with the ones that were so bad that I couldn't possibly wish to share.

In some of the images, you'll notice you can see a lot of the background, this is because of the different lights we had. One light flashed red and blue, it worked really nicely, if we could paint in the air... And the other light was way too bright, i'm pretty sure having to look at it as one of us drew with the torch caused a few headaches by the end of it.

So, what now?

Given the fact that even me and my brothers struggled with creating such basic shapes as a water droplet or bomb, I think its in my best interest to rethink what i'll be creating with light. For example, if I can't do these to a good standard, kids definitely won't be able to, and this will make what i'm basing my entire final shoot on a failure.

My new idea for a shoot is to create various different light streaks and patterns from just swinging and dancing around with the lights strapped to me or something similar to that. Like the spiral seen above in my contact sheet, it could lead to some nice effects and random cool looking patterns. This is good because not only will I be able to do this easily but it will also be easy for the children to do and complete.

I will still use the same two lights I used tonight in this post but believe the whole lighting of the background wont be that much of an issue. I believe this to be the case because the general lighting of the room occurs when the light has been left in the same place for too long, this makes it impossible to do small details and little circles for example.