My current personal project I’m working on while here at school is a screenplay for an original short film I hope to shoot by the end of the second year. I want to spend my time steadily growing my writing skills in my free time while networking to find a solid team of people I can trust to shoot this project. I’m hoping this project would cost 10,000$ that I can raise through working, which I anticipate I’d be working most intensely in the summers in order to make this happen. I’ve also been looking at applying to artist grants as an additional supplement.
In addition to time, money and a reliable crew, I’m hoping to find and network with ambitious young actors looking to collaborate with aspiring writer-directors like myself. Due to the story itself, I’m also going to need a horse. While I’ve got a horse wrangler friend in mind, I’d love any opportunity to find ways to shoot with my favorite animal….
For my lighting final last quarter, I knew I wanted to push myself to reach out to a modeling agency and begin working with other collaborators I’ve never met before, in a professional capacity. I planned the hell out of it, creating a mood board and creative brief, sharing my plans with my instructors for advice, scheduling a lighting test with stand-ins to prepare for the shoot and pulled money from my personal savings to make sure we had the right make-up, hairspray and other necessities for this shoot. The agreement I struck with the chosen model, was that I’d shoot these photos for my assignment, and also two other looks of her choice.
Above are four key pages in my completed creative brief after nailing down a model, the setting and lighting plans, and performing a lighting test using my classmate Ethan as a stand-in. Ethan later agreed to be a PA on this shoot, luckily for me, since he had already seen the set up process and was familiar with what we would be doing.
We had 4 hours during our shoot to get everything we needed. Due to unfortunate circumstances outside of our control, the model wound up coming in about 45 minutes late. We attempted to get through her first two fashion looks with the thought that those photos wouldn’t take as long as the assignment photos, though for this shoot I kind of wish I would’ve been a little more selfish in this regard, because by the end of this shoot, my crew had gone home and I was too tired be my best creative self. The next set of issues we had, was that in an attempt to save time, I shot photos of Esther’s fashion looks on the same hunter-green seamless I wanted to use for my project, and used an Amran light attached to a soft box too small to avoid having too much fall off for any full-body photos. The end results made a lot more work for myself in the editing/ retouching process.
I feel I have a lot to be proud about in these final images I made for my Fall final in Matt’s Lighting class, I traversed a lot of new territory, and had a massively important learning experience working with a new model who challenged my directing skills in the best way.
As a first-time food photographer for this assignment, the goal I made for myself was to make something simple and clean, and as appetizing as possible without letting any added retouching or elements get in the way of the focus being on the food itself. Luckily, my partner is a chef, and on a night that he cooked dinner for us both, I got the opportunity to take my plate down to his at-home studio to shoot. We both love eating healthy, and I allowed my partner full creative reign, while I acted as a documentarian in the process. Since it was my first time shooting food, I’m not very satisfied with the outcome, though the final output I think definitely reaches in the direction of my intended goal.
If I could do this over again, I’d find ways to better eliminate the shadow coming from the right side of the frame, while balancing out the glare from the light on the table mat noticeable in the left side of the frame. I also should’ve taken the time to wipe the oil from the sprigs of Thai basil that garnished the dish for a more consistent texture throughout the leaves and a better sense of contrast between the different textures on the plate. I also would have made sure that my depth of field was wide enough that the entire plate of food was in focus. The lighting setup was a simple constant light in a soft box, with a white canvas bouncing that light from the right side of the frame (though not placed close enough in my opinion.) Something I do like about this image, is that the design of the plate and the little black specs of seasoning on the dish blend together in a beautiful – very subtle – way.
I kept my post production process limited to Lightroom after finding what I wanted to be my final image in adobe bridge. Something I noticed about food photography is that to get what I wanted, the majority of that was found in simply boosting the whites in the image to get that “appetizing” look.
Three of the principles of leadership according to Amazon that I believe I enact in my own professional life contain having a backbone, disagreeing and commitment, Curiosity and eagerness to learn, and inventiveness and ability to simplify.
Since the pandemic, I’ve worked in restaurants as a host and server working late hours in downtown Seattle for the last couple years. I’ve regularly advocated for the safety of hourly employees, and advocated for better safety measures with some results. At my current job in a restaurant inside a hotel, after an incident with an intoxicated stranger, I advocated for front desk hourly employees to have security’s phone number posted on the desk. Despite some initial pushback from management, we had it the next day, as well as the agreement that we can use it as we see fit.
This past spring, I was a PA on a special episode of Deadliest Catch shot in a warehouse in Seattle. I had the opportunity of working with the Art Dept. to create concrete-looking panels made of canvas in the first day on set. Then myself and two other PA’s designed the set to look like an “Abandoned Fisherman’s Shack” as ordered by the LA producers over FaceTime on someone’s iPad.
I think on film sets is where my curiosity and eagerness to learn really shine. Later, I made friends with the DP, and he introduced me to Shot Designer, and he had me create our lighting set on his device after we built it, which gave me the opportunity to get to know the lighting setup and diffusions we used. Below is a photo of the design in the Shot Design app, and an example of the results.
That’s me!
It was through this experience I got to exercise my inventiveness from everything from crafty set-up to lighting design, and I really loved the opportunity to be mentored closely by a kind DP. Really a dream come true.
I remember a moment I said yes to a big opportunity I was very ill-prepared for. I was interning at a production company in eastlake at the time, called B-47 Studios. It was run by some-what of a Guy Feirri lookalike named Michael. It was just before lunch, and I was filing some last papers before my break, when in walked Michael along with a man whose name I learned was Bob. Bob worked at Microsoft, but he was hungry to create something of his own. When Bob first saw me, he spat on my cheek when he waved his arms and yelled, “You’re perfect!”
I was 18, no college degree, and Bob had just proposed to me on the spot that he wants me to be an “On-Camera Journalist” along with three other women set to join the team. It was for a company that would go by the name of Penta Tech, and it was supposed to be a news company that reported on technology developments in the field and culturally. Pretty soon we had a team of four young women, though all older than me and with a legitimate degree in journalism, who worked with Michael and our studio tech to shoot up to five stories per day, some were from on-going series, others were one-offs. All our videos ranged from 1 minute to eight minutes, and each journalist chose, wrote, produced, edited and completed each story on their own. I became a “hard journalist” that reported on developments on AI in the realms of VR and AR while simultaneously going digitally undercover to report on weapons deals being made on social media platforms. I certainly wasn’t very educated in journalism and spent a lot of time cringing at myself among these other grown women. That also happened to be my first time working with a startup, that ultimately crashed and burned in six months due to bankruptcy.
Looking back, this is an experience I would never take back. Its actually one of my favorite stories, and I learned some valuable lessons I’d rather learn as early as I possibly could.
As an aspiring writer / director of fictional films, I believe my work focus falls under the higher informational density end of the spectrum, for a fairly broad audience. It’s very important for me to maintain creative control over my own films, though one major caveat is that funding is also a major driver in what makes these films possible. Creatively, there’s pressure to write and make films that cater to a broader audience for a better chance at making money for and/or from these projects. Independent Filmmaking in my experience is usually more labor intensive per crew member, since we typically run in smaller teams to perform the same level of informationally dense product.
Something that I think would make it easier to find success navigating the industry independently, would be to work for a larger production company in a capacity that would allow me to learn how a production business is run. I’ve worked with a few smaller companies and businesses for freelance work In the freelance world I’ve noticed that a lot of projects fell flat due to lack of funding or care.
Realistically, I see myself after just graduating, spending some time at a production company of some kind, in a position where I can get close to the director or the camera department. I think it would be critical to gaining an understanding of how the business is run, before I were to jump off and do my own thing. I also see myself starting a part-time freelance photography business that grew to full time, until I could afford to take breaks to write my own scripts and make my own films.
