Have you guys met Tony Li? You should.
"TONY LI is an American Photographer and Creative with an emphasis in fashion, commercial, editorial, and model development. He is a design graduate of The Art Institute of Dallas with an 11+ year background in the apparel industry ranging from management to visual merchandising." - via thetonyliproject.com
I first caught Tony's work something like 15+ years ago while I was still in school. Luckily we've been able to start working together the last few years. This short fashion film for the Kim Dawson Modeling Agency is probably our biggest collaboration at this point.
We'd been looking for something to work on together – i.e., me constantly pestering him about shooting something till he wore down. He does a ton of work for the Kim Dawson Agency and they'd reached out about doing a fashion film featuring Cassius Simpson for their 2017 Model Search; That's where I come in. Tony did the heavy lifting with the concept, styling, and putting the team together, then leaned on me and my narrative storytelling experience. I also shot and cut the piece, but we don't have to get into that.
One thing I will mention is how freakin' awesome it is working with on-camera talent who know what they're doing on camera. No disrespect for those I've worked with over the years, but there's an ocean between the talking head pieces with corporate types running major organizations vs. professional models whose livelihood depends on their look and how they deliver on camera. Good lord just look at these beautiful people...
Tony killed it with the location and wardrobe. Seeing as how I wear a limited rotation of hiking pants, t-shirts, and running shoes, there's no need for my fashion input. We'd planned to shoot a few hours in Tulsa and then head out to the Tall Prairie Reserve outside Pawhuska, OK. The shoot somewhat felt cursed seeing as how our main talent's flight got pushed three times and cut our crazy long day in half. We had to nix the Tulsa part of the shoot and just make it up as we went outside civilization in Pawhuska.
When I can, I try to be crazy intentional in the gear and creative choices made. We shot with my RED Weapon Helium and Zeiss CP.2 lens set (25/35/50/85) – mostly at 8k widescreen at 60 frames/second. Widescreen was a good fit visually for the flat, wide-open location vs. a narrower frame. Going handheld (with a rented EasyRig/Serene Arm setup) let me move quickly from shot to shot and setup to setup vs. the time it would've taken to shuffle around with a tripod and/or dolly setup. Shooting at 60 frames per second gave me the grace to fake smooth-ish-looking camera moves too. We had a couple PAs on set, but anything camera-related was on me. Shoutout to PA Hans for making sweet haze love by stirring up gravel road dust via a gas-powered leaf blower. It made everything look like heaven, but I'm still cleaning that nonsense out of my camera innards.
I will say I beefed it with the polarized filter I was using. I knew we’d be out with big skies filling a good deal of the frame and I was primarily focused on using a polarizer to help deepen the blues. They're basically useless if you're shooting into the sun, but we did get a few shots where it was helpful. The problem though is that I ended up needing to direct a good part of the shoot and move quick to make sure we got what we needed before we lost our light. That being said, making sure my polarizer was in the correct position for each shot was honestly the first ball to drop in the additional responsibilities I was juggling. In some of the pre-dusk frame grabs you can see the darker blues in one corner of the frame thanks to the polarizer not being set properly vs. the more consistent sky color once I stopped using it closer to dusk. My bad…
Post-wise, those freakin' 8k files at a 12:1 compression were monsters. In total, we shot just over a terabyte of footage during the 2-3 hours on set, and this was back before my "oh hey, let's edit with proxy files" days. Thank goodness I've started cutting with proxies so the full-resolution files aren't bogging down my computer as bad. I hate not being able to edit as fast as I can think because I'm waiting for my computer to catch up. Plus I'm not having to pray my shots are in focus because proxies let me watch the clips at a higher playback resolution on my editing timeline. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize again to my MacPro and Premiere setup; Glad I've matured and seen the light.
CREATIVE DIRECTOR & PRODUCER - Tony Li
DP & EDITOR - me
MODELS - Cassius Simpson & Marisa Harbert
HAIR & MAKEUP - LB Rosser
STYLIST - Tony Li
STYLIST ASSISTANT - Sarah Eliza Roberts.
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT - Hans Kleinschmidt
MUSIC - "Longing" Max LL
SPECIAL THANKS - Kim Dawson Agency, Musicbed, East + West Tulsa, My Mod Mess