Saturday, January 17, 2009

what won't we do for a little publicity?

Today I went to my first ever photo shoot. It would have been a lot of fun to see how this type of thing goes down, but it turns out that I was also in charge of the artistic direction of the photos. I thought we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted going in, and then I just had to work desperately to keep up with trying to learn how to do something as I was doing it.

It turns out pictures are not taken the way they appear on publicity postcards. So after a fair deal of goofing around, our awesome photographer Tom Lovelund, pulled me aside and explained that although the end product was a picture of all 8 members of my cast (for example), the actual photos would be best taken individually and then stitched together. Mind blowing. Honestly, I didn't know how to react... so there was a lot of trusting that went on.

The next most prominent thing to mention about the shoot was that it took place in a HUGE warehouse. And said warehouse ended up sorta, lacking...um... heat. Very chilly. As people were processing through headshots we had a few cast members running out to wait in their idling cars, and many other huddled around space heaters in coats. Then Rob Cutler from Everything Must Go completely lost it and started posing for photographs wearing only a carboard box (large at least) and socks. Real trooper, that guy. Or maybe a nutcase. I really can't be sure.

Fortunately the morning group helped us work through kinks in our system so that the afternoon went quickly and got great stuff for us to use promoting Activity Book. The stories from that session were far more tame, although the photos themselves were not.

We're going to try and get up some photos of us taking the photos on the blog - as well as some short snippets of what a photoshoot looks, sounds, and feels like. Keep an eye for them sometime next week (once I've figured out how to get them off the phone and onto the interweb).

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