Once again, we return to the epic seven-hour colored gels session we did for filmmaker Drew Matthew Beyer’s film Even’s Elegy back in February. (Drew’s latest film, Morning Is Broken, is currently an official selection at the Museum of Pop Culture’s 18th Annual Science Fiction + Fantasy Film Festival.)
Ultimately for Even’s Elegy Drew needed four finished portraits—two for the film’s wanted posters, two memento photographs carried by the characters in the film. Rather than shooting four looks, however, we photographed seven—two for each character except for the character of Marl, for whom we only made one. Previously we examined Quinn Leary’s portrayal of the character Mercer, both in a teal-magenta look and a red-blue look. This time, we feature actor Caroline Kidwell in her role as Naomi in Drew’s film. Naomi is one of the characters that will be portrayed on the wanted posters, however this purple look isn’t the one that will be used for the posters.
Photography
For Naomi’s alternate portrait, we chose a purple and blue theme. In this particular setup, we placed a light with a blue gel to the right of the camera and another light with no gel at all to the left of the camera, manually flagged by Drew holding a piece of black Cinefoil. Behind the subject, we placed a light with a purple gel, firing at the gray background. Because we needed Caroline to sit very still while we specifically lit one part of her face while blocking the light to the rest of her face, most of our portraits look very similar, with the shadow moving a little to one side, a little to the other. Caroline did an amazing job keeping so still while we photographed this sequence. Since this was a potential WANTED poster, Drew directed Caroline to look rough and tough around the edges.
The gel techniques, as well as the gels themselves, came from fashion photographer Lindsay Adler’s The Magic of Gels class.
Editing
For our main image, we manually retouched the portrait, emphasizing highlights and shadows with a stylus on a Wacom tablet. To finish off the look, we added a splashy lens flare overlay. But for some of the extras, we leaned into the purple hues of the image, leaving Caroline’s skin a bright, neutral white where the light touches it. The blue has a subtler effect in these extra images, cooling the shadow tones without overly saturating them.
Many thanks once again to Drew Beyer for bringing Distant Era in to photograph Even’s Elegy, to Dyllan Rodrigues-Miller for her makeup, and to Caroline Kidwell for her exceptional patience sitting very still for long periods of time under all those lights!
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