Flutters of A

Backstage: A Diary of Summer

2010-10-20T11:52:00.000+01:00

I had a wonderful shoot on Tuesday with my lovely, talented Alicia Mew MakeUp and my crazy little stylist Shu Han Kelly Huang in Ruislip Lido. Our models were the lovelyAnya Avonrims from Profile Model Management and Emma Frances Hodgson from MandP Models. Anna has the most amazing porcelain skin and the craziest curly red hair with the biggest deep blue eyes I have seen in a while. Emma is only 15 and has the greatest body with the loveliest hair.

We had a "last days of summer" shoot and it indeed was. We chased ducks with wind in our hair and sunshine in our breath.We danced in the lake and rolled around in sand. It was a gorgeous day. We all travelled to a distant magical land across the water.We climbed onto fences, shooed nasty giant spiders, ran into the lake...As I was dipping my feet in water with my skirt pulled up Emma was bravely laying in it and I was digging my toes into the wet sand as the girls were running splashing water everywhere.

We drank cups and cups of hot chocolate and asked a drunk stranger who turned out to be a photographer to take a picture of us at the end of the day. We were worn out but our smiles were still glued to our faces.

Thank you everyone for a wonderful shoot and being such troopers. x

Backstage: Moonlight of the Fractured Minds

2010-08-29T16:50:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I had an amazing shoot in Hackney with the lovely stylist Cyra Alcock who is beyond talented, my great MUA Alicia Mew MakeUp who I am starting to look like am holding hostage for every shoot and "reflector guy" my lovely boy Kemal Kurtsoy(hihihi:). It was very different and edgy for me and it all started because Cyra wanted to play around with some extra cloths she had from a recent shoot.

We had two lovely models. Flossy who is a dancer and has been modelling for a short amount of time with the most amazing hair when she walked in for the casting I exclaimed "Hair envy!' and Lettice who only modelled once before this shoot who has the most gorgeous eyes and the porcelain skin I have ever seen. We chat and gossiped and ate wonderful quiche that Cyra made from scratch. (Thank you Cyra it was the most delicious thing ever.)

Flossy and Lettice ran around with plum lips and crazy wedges while their hair danced in the wind. There were burnt tires and graffiti with crazy monkeys. Also bags of poo (no not kidding there really were not in the shoot but right next to us -_-), a random vial of blood (not for the shoot again just sitting there ewwww) and passers-by who made weird noises whenever.

I forgot to take a team picture as usual though :( I remembered it after we were done on our way to the Louis De Gama studio and Kem snapped a pic on Alicia's phone at the bus stop. So here we are again in a crappy picture above *sighs*

And more from the shoot

charlotte.

2010-08-29T16:48:00.000+01:00

I had a lovely client shoot for Charlotte Pusey. My lovely team included Shu Han Kelly Huang and Alicia Schutte. Charlie's dad, Kelly's cousin and my boy helped us. We ran around the streets of Oakwood, danced around parking lots, sat on the pavement eating Snaps (which lovely Charlie brought for the team), been stared at by everyone and had the most "interesting" conversations with the most random passerby that kept coming back. I am so happy to have found such a great team and wonderful friends :) This isn't the best photo ever and was shot in "idiot mode" named by Charlie's dad who took it but this is us :) x

Backstage: Entwined Hearts

2010-08-28T19:34:00.000+01:00

   Hello everyone,

How is everything going? Hope you re all having a great summer . :)

We had a lovely but very hard shoot on the 30th of May with lovely Elinor from Tess Management and Gesche from D1 Models as our lovely ladies in the forest. With Maya Lewis as the MUA and Natalie Dale as the stylist.

This shoot started out to be something completely different. I don't know why but most of my shoots don't go according to plan lately. First the stylist cancelled two days ago but thanks to Natalie saving the day we still managed to shoot. Our second problem was with our second model. WIth our first stylist cancelling we waited too long for confirmations and our first four choices were not available. So over all all the clothing and the models changed.

We have some lovely results from the shoot nonetheless. The idea was for me to try something with movement and ambience rather than crowd the scene with props. It was hard but fruitful :)

   The weather was awful on top of this. I was praying for it not to rain but learnt I should pray for no strong wind so my lights are safe and my poor assistant doesn't need to learn how to stop herself from flying. Also a partially sunny day with strong wind = sun one second, overcast the other, It was a pain to shoot!

   My models were lovely however. I think as much as they froze they had the most fun running around barefoot, spinning, laying on trees. Elinor is a lovely 18 year old model who has been modelling for 3 years. She has the most vibrant laugh and the friendliest attitude. I love her eyes. We already talked about arranging for me to go to Bath where she lives and take pictures with hot air balloons :) Gesche is a lovely German girl with amazing hair and porcelain white skin. I wish the styling suited her better because she is so gorgeous and I feel like I didn't do her beauty any justice.

   As for the intended shoot, I will be shooting that when I'm back in London August.

   Sadly I don't have many backstage shots for this shoot since Alejandra forgot her camera but here are the ones I took.

Making of: Daydreams of Lost and Found

2010-08-28T16:16:00.000+01:00

Hello,

How has everyone been? I have been a busy bee shooting and shooting after over a year of doing nothing. This is going to be one of the many "Making Of" posts I will be doing about the shoots I am doing. I will go through the planning period to the props to the team to the shoot itself for the ones that are interested.

I have been getting a lot of questions about how the process goes so I figured a full on "How was it done?" entry would satisfy the questions better. I will do my best to keep these up for every shoot I do from now on. Also I will most likely be doing some backstage of the backstage and prop building as well. I don't know how long my camera can record though :)

With the flowers blooming for spring and the heavy showers combined with the daydreams I am having I got inspired to do something. With all that inspiration going on I figured why not try a spring editorial.

A few days after me getting all worked up about shooting because I became frustrated for not doing anything for so long I woke up to a beautiful sunny London day. I just had to go out and lay on the grass. My two lovely dorm friends Jess and Nat decided to come out and chill as well. I grabbed my covers and walked out in pjs. That's how it all started. I sat there watching the clouds and scribbling ideas whislt Jess was practicing her singing. Here is how we looked :)

Here is me daydreaming and smoking is bad kids! :)

My massive sketchbook.

"Look at me mommy! I can draw stick figures when I haz ideas!"

On my left lovely Jess with her gorgeous voice and giggly Nat on my right with her amazing dimples.

So I sat down wrote all my ideas and ran back in to research. I always research prices for prop building before finding the team as I never know how long it will take me to get the items or if I can afford them. Makes it less likely I would have to postpone things and ruin some good connections in the process. (Yes I have done that mistake in the past :))

PROPS

Finding the Items for the Props/The Buying Spree

After making the huge list of ideas (10 shots as I was looking to submit this and wanted a variety) and writing down what I need for the props I went on to research.

The mini list of items to get.

As the shoot was mainly based on flowers being everywhere I went on to ebay and started searching for fake flowers first. I learnt a valuable lesson you get better results when you use fancy words as artificial :) You can find some good deals on Ebay but at the end of the day with me wanting to cover so many things in flowers it ended up being way too expensive. A few days later I got the idea of maybe I would be able to find wholesale places that did artificial ones. And I was definitely right. Global Flowers UK is a very good place to look if you are looking to get some good artificial ones. Some look quite fake of course but I was fairly satisfied with them. As much as it seemed cheaper after a bit I got tempted to check real wholesale flowers and came across Triangle Nursery UK who does wholesale flowers and delivers them to your door in one day so they are fresh.

Water lilies however are a challenge to find. I finally found one seller on ebay that sent them from Hong Kong and tried to rip me off for 150 gbp of shipping -_- I did go all bitchy and said I wont pay if she doesn't reduce the price and it worked! :)This is how my room looked when they arrived with the headpieces and I was like a kid in Christmas morning.

After sorting where I can find flowers I started googling for the pieces I wanted to cover like the umbrella etc.

Than it was ofc left to the last minute. The backstage post explains the loving moments I had with flowers and the glue that I had to pick from m hair for about a week.

CREATIVE TEAM

For such a big shoot working with new people was going to be a huge bet. However I had no choice as I am new in this city and I dont have that many steady team members. Also I need to find a new assistant so it was casting time! There are two good sites you can use for finding new people. There are some beginners but it is like flea markets, if you look hard enough you find some amazing people. One site is the good old ModelMayhem which I often use for MUAs and stylists. To be honest I wasn't expecting such a big turn out but I got a great amount of interest from some amazing people. Here is my very simple casting call as I was looking for testing in general for these few months Looking for Creatives to Test With and got these amazing people April to June Tests

I chose Lynn Huang for my stylist after a brief chat and realizing we have the same favorite photographers. Here is some of her lovely work :)

After she has done some research we got together in Camden to go through my ideas and her styling ones. It was nice to see we were on the same page. Also we had a nice chat over coffee and she seemed lovely.

MODELS

I always search through websites such as MM before going to agencies as I really like building lasting personal bonds with the models but in this case I wasn't lucky. Now before everyone gets their knickers in a twist you can actually get models for test for free for agencies which most people don't realize. Just ring them up and ask if they have any new faces that need the experience and the exposure, show them your portfolio and voila. Most will say yes and give you amazing young women you can learn together with. And if you test enough with them you can even start shooting with them, Some agencies I have been shooting with and are amazingly nice are Profile-Models, Zone-Models MandP Models...

For this shoot I needed a young model that had that innocent look that captivates you as soon as you look at her. So i looked through their cast picked some names, gave them the basic details of the shoot and emailed them. Gave follow up calls as most agencies get loads of emails and even though they know me it is faster to let them know by phone as well.They got back to me with who is available from who I picked and more for me to pick from.

We contacted 14 agencies who sent us something around 78 girls at the last count. Because it is a two day shoot it wasn't as easy this time. D1 sent an amazing selection but nobody really fit the bill exactly. Profile Model Management said girls can only do one day so we weren't so enthusiastic about that. I didn't like the models Oxygen sent. Also the ones Bookings sent as amazing as they were didn't fit the look. By the third day of casting I started panicking on the model issue. I had seen some amazing girls I would love to shoot but none of them fit what I wanted. That's the problem of a very specific feel you want of a model.

In the end even though D1s models didn't fit what I had in mind I couldn't resist how lovely dear Hannah was and I have to say I am very content i couldn't. She was such a delightful creature and fun to work with. Don't need to even mention how gorgeous she was :)

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So this was the before of the process for the day before the shoot and the shoot days jump onto the Backstage post.

It is the first ever process blog I tried to make so bare with me while I get used to this :)

x

Backstage: Daydreams of the Lost and Found

2010-08-28T15:44:00.002+01:00

Hello munchkins,

How has everyone been?

We had an amazing shoot. Of course there were mishaps and I was nervous as hell. You see, I haven't been shooting for about 6 months now and the last shoot I did was disastrous. So I was expecting this one to fall apart. After all completely new creative team and new assistant. 10 piece shoot. I wasn't sure of the model and blah blah blah.

I will be writing the making of post very soon about the process before the shoot. This blog entry however is just a backstage view into the shoot itself.

I had the chance to work with some amazing people this weekend and possibly had the best personal test I ever did. Lynn Huang was the lovely stylist, Hannah Horn from D1 was the main model, Holly from MandP and Victoria from D1 was there as well, Lauren Hynes was the amazing MUA.

Friday

After obsessive planning by me the day to get the props ready was upon us :) I woke up at about 11 to of course turn my alarm off -_- Alejandra being the most amazing assistant I ever worked with was right on time and gave me a call which luckily I heard and woke up to.

We carried boxes and boxes of artificial flowers to the common room of my dorm flat with people staring at us and asking what on earth we were doing :) We started sorting them by colors and by the time we were done the room looked like a little garden. Before starting to build anything we needed to get the fresh flowers of the post. They were supposed to be delivered before 11am so we went to search for them in he Accommodation Office. They weren't there! I panicked so bad. There was a thousand thoughts going through my head from what a waste of funds that would be to if I could pull the ideas of without them. The flowers were from a wholesale place and there was no way I could replace them for Saturday. We got told that if they did arrive they would be at another building. The lady that helped us was lovely and promised to send the caretaker to check on it as if they didn't the flowers would get to me on Monday!

So I walked back to the common room with Alejandra slightly dreading the possibility that I might not have my precious flowers and started working on the artificial ones. By the time we were done with sorting the colours it was 2 30 and I was starting to panic about if we were going to be done. We went back to check up on the flowers and they were there! Phew. So we carried them back and I dug into the boxes to sort them. Most of them didn't look anything like the pictures. The was far larger than the pictures so I couldn't use them on the knickers. Anemones were too small so they were wrong for the umbrella and some of them haven't bloomed yet. They didn't send 40 lavender bunches they sent 10 stems and carnations were not enough. I stared at the room wanting to cry and thinking to myself "I really keep biting more than I can chew." and felt like crying.

After a bit of moping and panicing I snapped out of it though. I was there. Everyone was booked. I had to suck it up, find another way around and do it. I switched the flowers around, put the anemones in water and into the sun to bloom and we started working.

Than I learnt Alejandra had to leave at 7. It was already 5 30 and only the front of the knickers was done. This was taking so much more time than I thought! I mean when I thought about it my mind kind of went "It's just sticking flowers, how long can it take" but I was so wrong. Everything was so delicate. The glue killed most of it. They kept falling off. We didn't have enough glue. No matter how bad I was stressing I had to continue and get whatever i can get done.

When Alejandra left we had completed half of the umbrella and it was clear we didn't have enough flowers for that either/ The jacket looked horrible with the amount of carnations we had so I decided to leave that out and continued sticking things to the umbrella. Than I ran out of glue!!!! It was 8 pm. All stationary shops were closed and I was nowhere near done! Being in an drom that is filled with art students I figured I can find some glue after some thinking and started knocking on people's doors and asking. They only had pvc glue and it didn't agree with the fabric. I went Tesco, no glue. So I went to ASDA and bought every single glue they had. Better safe than sorry eh? ;)

I had to redo the knickers cause the glue killed the flowers than I continued on the umbrella. It was 1 am and I was tired and nowhere near done. The shoot had to start at 8 am and I needed my sleep. So I decided to wing it and get help from people in the morning and went bed feeling horrible. Sadly the feeling horrible bit didn't help sleeping so I ended up falling asleep at 65 40 -_-

Saturday

I was supposed to wake up at 7 when my assistant arrived and continue on the props which I did manage to surprisingly enough. It was a lovely sunny day which was nice but also slightly worrying about the strong sun as I almost never shoot in summer and used to overcast days. I also received a phone call at 7 15 from a model saying she is at the station. I was baffled. One I was sure the girl's name should be Hannah not Holly and two she was supposed to be there at 8. Alejandra went to pick her up from the station and when she arrived we found out there was a big mix up. Holly was from MandP and we talked to Amelia and said we liked her she said Holly can only do one day we canceled it. However Amelia had to leave early and the other booker didn't get the note so he sent Holly! I apologised to her a million times but she was the sweetest. She didn't mind at all. She stuck around chat to us, helped us.

Alejandra was building props and we got make up done on both Hannah and Holly but Lynn still wasn't there. She overslept! So we had to wait for her for a fair bit. But once we got started everything was lovely. Hannah looked so gorgeous. The props were amazing :) We got 4 sets done that day.

We shot the first one next to the mansion. It was eventless really and made me so happy. She was gorgeous, the flower knickers looked lovely. I loved the light. Holly actually fell asleep on the bench which was so cute :) Than we went back into change wardrobe etc. I shot a small set with Holly in the mean time since she was already there and so lovely :)

Than we ventured into the forest with my mosquito net. Found a tree, hung it with tremendous effort. Aka every time we tried to toss the thread over it landed in the lake so we had to climb down to get it without getting wet! The one time i went down somebody pointed out a condom wrapper on the floor and my initial reaction was "I hope the condom isn't here". Well it was and I have sat on it! Yuck!

When we got the mosquito net up though I realised my huge mistake. There was a tree behind me so I couldn't get the shot! That set failed miserably :(

Than came the umbrella which was so heavy poor Hannah was getting tired but the shots ended up being amazing.

I should have done 6 sets that day including Holly's but I was dead by than so we called it a day.

Sunday

This time Alejandra overslept. The props for the day weren't ready! We had Victoria and Hannah arrive on time and got the make up done.

It was a very full and tiring day but not as eventful.

Victoria's portraits turned out great she is such a good model. Hannah's hammock shoot was lovely even though we had a bit of a hard time lighting her face decently. The tree/bow one went lovely. I think the only funny one was the lake one at the end.

First I got everyone lost trying to find the spot -_- Alejandra was there doing the flowers but she didn't have her phone on her! When we found her I realised we didn't have enough flowers! Again! (There were people around and asking us if we are selling those lol) It was muddy. I was slipping and the pipe was impossible to walk on. So I first tried to walk, than crawl than decided "Fuck it. I am going into the lake." God, it was freezing! Still feel ill because of that. But the shots look so nice it was worth it :)
We also met some random fisherman that wanted some pictures taken with Hannah I think they kind of disturbed her haha :)

Over all on sunday we go 6 sets done on that day and we were done by 6 pm when it got very windy!

There were mishaps in this shoot and I had to toss out some ideas that I had. Ended up with 10 sets regardless but not the 10 I wanted. Therefore the style ended up being a bit all over the place. (a.k.a no submitting to magazines) But in the end I ended up working with an amazing creative team getting about 500 shots that are perfect to pick from and very good friends.

Hope you are all well too and enjoyed reading my messy babbling of a blog.

Take care and here are some bkstage shots from the end to the start :)

xXx