In late February, Distant Era did a seven-hour session that was perhaps our most technical studio session to date. Employing multiple colored gels for each image and precise placement of light and quality and shape of shadow, we conducted seven different lighting setups among four different subjects. These images are for Even’s Elegy, an upcoming short science-fiction film by Drew Matthew Beyer.
Previous visitors to The All Worlds Traveller may remember Drew as “The Tataille” in The People of Light and Shadow series, or as the leshy Harrowhawk in last fall’s Gala of Everlasting Change session. A veteran playwright/screenwriter/prose writer/film editor/actor/producer/designer (Drew wears many hats), after a few years working in film production in New York City, Drew has lately begun to produce his own short films in Chicago. His latest film, Morning Is Broken, is currently an official selection at the Museum of Pop Culture’s 18th Annual Science Fiction + Fantasy Film Festival.
Even’s Elegy
Drew’s upcoming film, Even’s Elegy, is a short cyberpunk science-fiction tale that takes place in the same world as one of Drew’s previous theatrical scripts, Down the Rocky Road and All the Way to Bedlam, produced in 2018 (and featuring Distant Era MVP Elizabeth MacDougald!).
Drew wanted to create some images to be used in the film and for its advertising, and this is where Distant Era comes in. Having created cyberpunk material with colored gels previously (in our fourth official series, the cyberpunk-and-Blade-Runner-inspired Chicago: November 2019), Drew had us in mind for this project, and as fortune would have it, actor and model Jacob Bates (featured here many times before!) would feature in both.
Mercer
In Even’s Elegy, the character of Mercer is portrayed by Quinn Leary, last seen in The All Worlds Traveller as “The Muse, Urania” in The People of Light and Shadow.
Mercer is an offscreen character in Even’s Elegy, only shown in a photograph—and therefore that photograph needs to show the essence of who he is and establish an emotional association with the character, both for the actors and for the viewing audience, so that we can have some onscreen physical reference for what’s at stake for the characters and what matters most to them.
The Photography
We photographed two looks for Mercer, and as ever Quinn was a marvelous subject. The fantastic Dyllan Rodrigues-Miller created Quinn’s makeup for these portraits. We’ll examine one look in this post and check out the other in a future one.
For this first look we used three different lights. To the right of the camera, we placed a light equipped with a diffused deep white umbrella and a magenta gel. To camera left, we placed a second light equipped with a reflector and a blue gel. Finally, behind the subject, we placed a third light equipped with a 3 x 4 softbox and a teal gel.
It was especially cool to see how, when we turned up the light from the softbox behind Quinn, that light went pure white, whereas in the places where the light touched his form, it outlined him in the hue of the teal gel. Thus you see a sort of teal outline around him on the same side the magenta gel fills in.
The gel recipes we used for the Even’s Elegy portraits, as well as the gels themselves, came from renowned fashion photographer Lindsay Adler’s The Magic of Gels class, guide, and product.
The more I photograph, the more interested I become in once intimidating technical aspects of the craft. While I’m happy with previous experiments with gels, Lindsay Adler’s explanation of how they work, and how light works with them opens the way for more deliberate and more creative experiments. We’ll look at several more from Even’s Elegy this spring, as well as the other look we did for Quinn Leary’s Mercer portrait.
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