Pretend ur high

We wanted to create a story. As pathetic as a 'story' sounds, we are really determined to make the 3 images, that we exhibit on the last day of term, to be less of a series but more of a distinct, refined narrative: a step 1, 2 and 3.

For the execution stage of our FCP triangle, we were instructed to take 5 words that we would use to describe the Vogue Editorial we were given (which in our case was Native Nomads from March 2015) and create our own photo shoot based on these. Our 5 words were: fragmented, next day come-down, psychedelic, unhinged and urban.

This was my favourite image from the series. And as it turned out it was a lot of people's favourite from our work. Before the shoot I was determined not to use these stairs; I'd planned it before and well, I'm a sucker for unique perspective and composition. As many times as I walked past these on our shoot, I just wanted to see what it was like.

In my head, the stairs represented the actual 'coming down' part of what we were aiming to convey to an audience. I'd tried the model in several same colour outfits to be in keeping with what we observed from the Juergen Teller editorial, New Nomads. The orange outfit worked amazingly with the yellow detail of the stairs, the lines creating an almost pattern in which I could enhance the glasses against. In addition, the glasses themselves become distorted and fragmented to be in keeping with points that we made about previous images.

Working backwards, this image is supposed to be the one that represents her night on drugs. The white space to symbolise the loss of memory, the things that won't quite add up in the morning. Here, I fully took advantage of Rose's instructions to be experimental with this brief. I wanted to test out framing and direction, use of darkness and light. To show knowledge of the product we places the sunglasses in different locations were people might keep them throughout their day: on top of the head, tucked into the top and pockets. I encouraged the model to loosen her body, to act like a puppet on strings, someone who barely has any strength in their legs to stand up never mind walk forward.

The first image was a favourite of one of my team mates, she loved the colours. We decided early on that this would be a big factor of our execution as colour is very distinct and considered in Juergen Teller's work for the Vogue editorial.

I used three images of the model to illustrate the way people slip into highs. Adding lo-fi lights to enhance the psychedelic factor of this shoot. I used this room because of the photos in the background, not quite full of photos but the photos to illustrate memories and how someone can start the night with all of their shit together and then easily end up half dead on the yellow steps by morning. The Moschino glasses were the most bold and aesthetically pleasing glasses to 1) match her outfit 2) also act as a nod to the 60's psychedelic era that we researched and 3) add character to the image.

Overall I was pleased with our commitment to our 5 words. We produced different images yes, ones that may not necessarily work as a series. But we managed to tell a story, without making the attempt laughable.