I shot about 200 Polaroids for a music promo today with Ashleigh Taylor Silverman (model) and Brandon Adamson (musician) for his upcoming single, “Apricots and Afterthoughts”. The idea is to stitch the photos together on a video timeline and create a nostalgic slideshow animation effect. I’m super happy with the results. I think with a little color correcting, it’s going to look very nice.
The day started out with a bit of a snag, my light assembly got all jacked and wouldn’t lock down. I was unable to point it in any direction other than straight up. This was remedied with copious amounts of blue painters tape, which at times I use en lieu of gaffers tape, problem solved.
Most of the film carried an expiration date between 2002 and 2008. Because it was bought from multiple sources, it was impossible to know if it was cared for properly. Brandon and I did do some test shots earlier this week and to be honest the results were mixed.
I would say that the shoot today had an 85% usable shot rate. Whereas, the other 15% were throw aways do to the emulsion being dried out. Once more, the practice shots we took represented some of the poorest examples and by firing those we actually got rid of some of the bad roles rather then shooting them during production. So everything worked out great. Also, I should add, Ashleigh takes beautiful pictures. This was a major contributing factor to the high usable footage rate. And she is a sweetheart to boot.
I also took some 35mm stills, after I scan those I’ll post a couple here.
In other news: today is my birthday.