The Awakening

The Awakening - I remember cycling through Hyde Park and trying to put all the elements of this story together . Main element was to create a series of 3 images which would be working as stand alone images , and i think that was successful. Next thing was to add some key / secret elements which would link the images together but would be almost invisible to see without the story ...Lets start form the beginning.

The Idea for the first shot came to me as a dream ...so long ago i don't even remember how young i was . I have only used a small part of that dream and i have added more characters and changed some other stuff to fit the bigger story . In my dream it was a camera man trying to make a movie about a camera man making a movie about a camera man ...and so on ..pretty mad ...an interesting thing i took from my dream was the way how my character was moving around from scene to scene ...it was so surreal on its own ...imagine a empty room with a small table and an ashtrey ..the camera slowly hovers and across the room as you can now see an ashtrey from the top, slowly you lower down , lower and lower ,the ash becomes more visible , the ashtrey becomes now full screen , but you are now going even lower and the ash becomes a surface of some unknown location now something what was extremely small became a human size ...

I have used this element when planning my story , but we will get there a bit later .

Getting ready for the photo shot .

Model : I knew i need a great model to pull this off. I have worked with Michael Coghlan in the past and knew that he would be the perfect .He is very keen to work with photographer so we quickly managed to arrange the session date . I kept Michael up to date with what i was planning , mostly that there was more to the session that just one location .

Location : I found this restaurant in Central London , Covent Garden .It looks different now ..but the way it looked at that time was very important ..you will see soon why .

The Shot :
We had to start early to avoid kitchen staff interrupting with shooting . The idea was very simple . A EOS 30 loaded with Velvia 50 28-135 IS on a tripod set to manual focusing was meant to be placed in one secured location and 2 rolls were going to be exposed.

Michael was doing very well , and we were moving smoothly trought the planned scenes. I have used a simple lighting provided by one Bowens 1000W flashgun with an umbrella. I moved the light many times lighting the restaurant from different angles .