Golden Age of the Silver Screen: Sarah Moore

Golden Age of the Silver Screen is Distant Era’s vintage series celebrating the aesthetics of Hollywood’s heyday. It began as a limited series in January 2025 and continues as commissioned work and as an add-on to sessions clients book with Distant Era.

We still have a few Silver Screen sessions to show from 2025, going all the way back to July. However, because it’s her birthday, this week we’re doing things a little out of order and showing off Sarah Moore’s Silver Screen look from her November 2025 personal brand session with Distant Era (which we’ll share in the next few weeks on The All Worlds Traveller).

Sarah Moore

I think this is only the second time game writer and performer Sarah Moore has appeared on The All Worlds Traveller, which is a little odd because we’ve been friends for many years and many shoots together, back to our time working with Crescent Moon Nerdlesque. We’re making up for lost time in January 2026, when we plan to share Sarah’s personal brand session and its Golden Age of the Silver Screen component, as well as her Persephone from Distant Era’s Gods and Heroes of the Aegean series, photographed in 2023.

The Process

For Sarah’s Silver Screen session, we started with a fresnel equipped with barn doors in order to shape the light as we pleased. For this look, that meant a focus on Sarah’s face and upper body, with the rest of her in soft shadow, sometimes with a splash of light on the background.

Toward the end of the session, we experimented with a spotlight and some restricted light.

TOP: Using the fresnel; the final shot (left) and the behind-the-scenes shot (right, from assistant Jacque Bischoff).
BOTTOM: Hollywood legend Sarah Moore.

The most notable change in process from this session was an editing upgrade that allowed me to be a little more accurate with my color tone. The old Hollywood photos I’m referencing for this series are seldom purely monochrome, and many have a tint closer to the images we made in Sarah Moore’s session. I think it’s a subtle distinction, but it nudges the series 1 percent closer to the style and period we’re working to emulate.

The Team

Sarah brought makeup artist Lauren Keating for her session. We’ll show off Lauren’s gorgeous work in full color when we share Sarah’s personal brand images. I also hired Jacque Bischoff as a production assistant for Sarah’s session; Distant Era’s primary makeup artist and production assistant this past year, Jacque was of great help angling lights and reflectors, flinging fabric, acting as a second set of eyes on the incoming images, packing up the studio, and cat wrangling.

Another behind-the-scenes comparison as Jacque prepares to fling fabric.

A frequent co-star of Golden Age of the Silver Screen, Garrus the Cat, was also on set. Longtime Garrus the Cat fans may observe him looking a little sour in the behind-the-scenes image above. Rest assured he got plenty of attention (with a fair bit of wrangling).

All told, we made a variety of different images with our friend Sarah Moore for the Golden Age of the Silver Screen part of her personal brand session. Many thanks to Lauren Keating and Jacque Bischoff for their work on Sarah’s session. And a mountain of gratitude to Sarah Moore herself for bringing her best to this post-session time travel session. Look to see a whole lot more of her in The All Worlds Traveller in early 2026!

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.