How did a particular picture come about? The answer is rarely: easily.
Even with what looks like a simple, straight up portrait often takes a team of people working together. Without a good team you will not be able to produce good results. For my recent shoot for Frontera London collaborating with a great team was of utmost importance.
Frontera got in touch to arrange a photoshoot for one of their clients who produce a drug helping to manage an extremely rare disease called Fabry disease. Fabry disease is, from my limited understanding, a genetic condition in which certain lipids are not metabolised in a correct manner resulting in multiple problems from pain, to cardiac and renal complications. Life expectancy of a Fabry disease sufferer is pretty reduced. Thankfully in recent years a few treatments have helped to improve this. One such drug is Replagal and we were going to make a global campaign to promote it.
The concept that creative director Federico came up with was simple and powerful: photograph portraits of people ageing from their 20s to retirement. Can you see the complication yet? Models are skilled, but they cannot age on request and in order to produce the most realistic results my team was joined by an new member - a computer generated graphics expert named Marcelo Moya. His job was to take my images “through the ages” with his genius skills in photoshop. It was fascinating to see my images changed in this way and so much fun receiving the final files.
I also quickly realised at the start of the project how important clothes are for the perception of age. People dress very differently at 25 and 65. So in came stylist Alice Timms. She turned up to the shoot with piles of clothes to suit all ages. Her eye for clothing meant that our models retained their sense of style but updated it through the decades to indicate the lifestyle changes through life.
To complicate matters more we were all scattered around the world. The client based in Switzerland, the CGI expert in Chile and the rest of the team in London. Thank god for the internet! A clear vision from the start and excellent communication meant it all came together - everyone working towards a common goal. There is no way I would have been able to produce the end result without a great team. Thanks guys.
Massive thanks to all of the team involved:
Models:
Also here are a few behind the scenes images photographed by Liam at
Thirdberg...
Labels: advertising, ageing, campaign, frontera, global, Marcelo Moya, pharmaceutical, portrait, retouching, studio