17 November 2014
Combining the creative talents of two companies working in very different visual mediums to produce fashion editorial spreads. With a focus on “the future” – ideas for two different concepts evolved after several creative meetings between VOGUE, Animal Logic and photographers Emma Summerton and Nicole Bentley!
Gemma Rising
To create the striking cover image and beauty feature ‘Gemma Rising’ with Australian model Gemma Ward, VOGUE and Animal Logic worked with New York-based photographer Emma Summerton to design a futuristic space ship back-drop. The idea was to create a beautiful and unique interior space with a pearlescent finish, featuring windows and two large domes with views to outer space. The design uses recurring circular shapes, and avoids giving the viewer a sense of direction by not defining the ceiling or floor. This supports the concept of Gemma floating in zero-gravity and being shot from a variety of dynamic angles.
Gemma was photographed against a greenscreen at Fox Studios Australia’s, ‘Big Cyc’ over two days. After the images were selected, a rough CG model of the space ship was used to lock down the framing for the final shots, before progressing the look of the images to a polished level.
Self Love
The story of the second shoot, “Self Love”, features two characters – a narcissistic photographer and her subject, an Android who is the idealised, more beautiful synthetic recreation of herself. The series is a reflection on “The Ultimate Selfie”. The clothes define the characters (straight-laced business-style for the phographer; colourful and more flamboyant for the Android), and their relationship is illustrated via their poses and the framing of the shots. The action is played out in an abstract futuristic space – a clean, blue cavern with highly-machined parametric slat walls, with hidden lighting that seems to come from everywhere all at once.
The level of technical complexity for the interior space was high, both characters are played by the same model. Working with Sydney-based photographer Nicole Bentley, the framing of the shots and character poses were defined prior to the shoot, this assisted the VOGUE team in assessing the best ‘frocks’ for the photographer vs. the Android and how their make-up would enable model, Janice Alida, to transform herself from one character to another.
