In October / November, we had a number of tasks involving advertising. The very first advertising assignment we got was an optional one. It could be for anything. With or without text. I had an idea for a commercial poster, but I didn't have the time to finish it and sending it off to my teacher before the deadline. So I didn't get any feedback for this one.
My idea was having blood in this picture and making it sort of brutal, but funny. Of course not real blood, but ketchup or tomato sauce or something. And if you do all this, what can you advertise for? Well, you can make a commercial for tomato soup!
The brand I chose is an American brand and it can not be bought in a regular grocery store in Norway. So I had to "cheat" a little bit. The idea was using a tin can. Usually in Norway tomato soup comes in bags as powder you mix with water. We don't eat soup out of a can. Therefore, I decided to use an American brand. I got a tin can from the store that contained chopped tomatoes. I ripped off the patch that was originally on the can and photographed it without any kind of label. And afterwards (in post-production), I found a picture of the logo of the tomato soup I wanted to use, and photoshopped it onto the can. The model I used is a boy from my class. Thank you, Tom! It is not always easy to find models who would like to do things like playing dead for a picture.
It was a soup to die for! Here is the picture:
It is fun to look at it now, almost three months later. I would of done it a bit different today, I guess. But I still like it. I do not know where you should place the text of an advertisement, or what kind of text it should have, but in this assignment it is really mostly about the image itself.
The next project we had was creating an advertisement for alcohol. It could be for any brand of wine, beer, spirits, etc. I chose to use a Hungarian brand this time, since I am originally from Hungary. You can read more about this liqueur here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicum
"This super bitter, bold taste herbal liqueur is mainly consumed as an apfertif before meals or a digestif after meals." - Wikipedia.
The only problem was that I did not get hold of a bottle of this specific liquor. I had to "cheat" again. Did about the same thing as last time, only that this time the model was holding a lens bag, and not a tin can. I photoshopped the bottle afterwards.
My original idea was to play on the positivity that this brand is using as a campain nowadays. Their "be positive" attitude was something I wanted to capture by letting the model's hair stand up and some of the hairlocks to form a plus. It didn't end up quite as I planned, and I was not too happy when I did the first retouch. Therefore, I used a different picture. You can see the picture I choose to hand in here:
During the holidays I had some free time on my hands, so I decided to try to photoshop this picture again.
I also had some extra pictures from this shoot that I thought were good, but for this project I already had a photo. So I tried to crop some of these extra shots into regular portaits. Here is one in black and white and one in color.
This color photo is more of a beauty picture because the model's skin and hair is retouched in a special way, with a new technique I learned just before Christmas. It is a very finicky technique, and I actually used a whole day retouching this picture in Photoshop. The reason for this is because I zoomed the photo all the way in until I saw the pixels. I painted/brightened/darkened all of the pixels that were "spots" and "lines" in the face. The shadows on her cheek for example is applied in Photoshop with this technique. It was a valuable experience doing all this finicky retouching. I should definitely do it more often, so I'll use less time on beauty retouching. The lighting was not all that exciting in this photoshoot. The purpose was to light for an alchol commercial, and not for a compelling portrait. But I still think that there were some good photos taken at this shoot.
We also had a commercial workshop just before Christmas at school. We were divided into groups and given projects we had to do in a week. This workshop collided with another project that we had to complete almost at the same as the workshop. Will tell you more about that later.
So we got an advertising assignment that we had to solve together. I teamed up with my friend Glenn (check his facebook page "Photographer Lucido Cutamora"). https://www.facebook.com/pages/Photographer-Lucido-Cutamora/167673816607829
We had to do a perfume commercial, without a perfume bottle, without text and without logo. Only a photograph that could sell a perfume.
In the beginning I could imagine a healthy girl jogging as an idea. Maybe some happy colors and urban backround. A bit like Puma's commercials. But then we thought it'd be cool to try something darker. A bit like Nike. My idea was to do something sporty. A sporty fragrance. So we talked about making a sporty and tough but yet feminine commercial. We wanted to have muscles that shines, urban environment, and colors like in the movie '300'.http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2839449344/tt0416449
Since we were not allowed to use an already existing perfume, we were free to choose it all. Model, location, style, everything. We got some hairdressing help from a very nice girl called Mai. The model we used, Emmelie, was a sporty and lovely girl. For the post-production, we got some tips and pointers from Glenn's brother, Dennis. Here is the result:
"No matter where you run, you leave a trail of your scent."
We dropped the dark style and instead we went for a fresh, sparkling look. And as you can see there are goats, palm trees, mountains, city and sea. Cause wherever you run, you leave your scent behind you, right? It was a fun project, and it was fun to work with Glenn.
As I mentioned earlier, we had another project almost at the same time as the workshop. It was a fashion project that we had to do connected with a fashion workshop around November. I did this project with my friend Cecilia Månsson (check out her blog) http://ceciliamansson.blogspot.com/.
The location was inside and outside a garage at Nydalen in Oslo. The theme of this shoot was "French New Wave". We had an amazing team: stylists Lise Petersen and Isabel Solér , MUA and hair Malin Pousette, assistant Peter, and models Marianne, Elise and Tibor from Pholk model agency.
French New Wave, or La Nouvelle Vague in French, is a genre in French cinema from the 50s and 60s.
Here are some of the photos we used as inspiration in addition to watch movies.
And here are some of the photos I took for the series:
The five other images of this series were photographed by Cecilia, and you can probably see them later when she posts them on her blog. We presented all the pictures of our French New Wave series to our guest lecturer, and we got good feedback from him. The project was truly a learning experience. It was our first major production, and it is always a challenge when you do not have the money to pay for anything. Everybody worked for free and did their best. It was a good atmosphere throughout the day. We couldn't be happier!
And I must say that I liked fashion photography. I had some negative thoughts about it first when we started out with the fashion workshop, but eventually it became more interesting. Do not know why, but I think I'm bitten by the bug (Norwegian saying)! It means I like it. Looking forward to making more exciting projects!
At least but not last, I wanna show you something I made today. Do not know if it's a bad picture or not, but at least I had fun making it. It will perhaps be used for a web page as a wallpaper, but it is not decided yet.
In my next post I'll show some of the photos I took for one of my exams and maybe some pictures that are inspired by nature. Stay tuned!
