Generations

Generations is a pretty important print for me, for a bunch of reasons. It’s taken a really long time from conception to closure. I think it’s done now. Here’s the story.

Conception

A few years ago I was thinking about how to tell a story about how music is timeless and important. In my life, music is pretty important; I’ve been a piano player for about as long as I can remember, through all of the highs and lows, three round-the-world relocations, all of my school and uni and single and married and parental life. I thought it would be cool to capture that somehow, and I was thinking through ways of showing a piano and its passage through time.

(Side note: Why do I have to love photographing pianos so much! They’re a massive pain to move! How about a nice guitar, or a harmonica maybe?)

I was working through ideas about seasons, or the evolution of a single place around a piano. Then the idea of a multiple image story popped in to my head, structured around a piano that moves from left to right as time passes. That quickly grew in to a story about the boy that belonged to that piano (or vice versa?) and how he grew up and changed. The story grew by itself, until the main building blocks were there.

I remember driving with Wanda, explaining each of the four panels one by one. When I started on panel number four, she started crying, because she knew exactly what I was going to do. I guess that’s good 🙂 The main impediment at that stage was skill; I was pretty sure I didn’t have the chops to shoot it, light it, and composite it to make it happen. I’d recently worked on a poster for a production called Critical Hit involving similar composite work, but I wasn’t quite ready yet. So I parked it for a couple of years.

Planning

I like to sketch out my ideas first. It helps when there are iPad sketching apps with lovely watercolour brushes that make your work look half decent. (I use Paper by FiftyThree.) So here’s the sketch outlining the general plan.

Execution

Next step – location scouting and casting! The location part was tricky; I couldn’t quite find a location that met the brief. Enter our amazing clients, Aimee and David. We’ve had the privilege of photographing their wedding as well as their ever-growing family on a few occasions. Their house nearly fit the bill. They did most generously allow me to remove all of the furniture from one of their rooms and shoot it from a few angles to get enough to composite it in to a bigger room. And voila, one room.

Now for the casting! Aimee happened to be quite significantly pregnant late last year, and that’s where the casting started. A bunch of people jumped in with both feet, and I am very appreciative of their time and effort! That goes for the piano too. Even the window shades from my parents’ place in Las Vegas made an appearance.

Can I say a massive thanks to everyone that appeared in this project: Aimee, Fiona, Roger, JC, Declan, Aaron, Tara, Gabby, Michael and Rose. You guys completely made this possible.

Shooting was anywhere and everywhere – loungerooms all around Brisbane were turning in to studio spaces for this project.

 

Speeding it up

Generations got over the line at the Queensland awards with a Silver award, and that was very cool indeed. I did get quite a bit of consistent feedback from judges along the lines of… “AAAAH, Right! I get it now! I didn’t see all of that when I was judging, but NOW I do! Hey that’s great!” which to me is code for “Nice job, but takes too long to read – make it faster!” That advice, plus advice from a few trusted mentors, resulted in a bunch of changes, including losing the girlfriend’s friends (agh sorry guys), reshooting the boy’s older family (c’mon guys, you looked pretty young before), and removing a few elements that cost more in reading time than they gave back in story and understanding, like the text on the boxes, the box on the piano, and so on. The new print felt a lot faster to read – still very full of detail and story, but hopefully something that the judges could see most of in the limited time they have with the print.

APPA!

At the judging, this one scored a solid silver on the first round, with four judges in the mid-80’s, and one judge in the low 90’s. I’m very very happy that the 90’s judge challenged, spoke passionately about the print and what they saw, and on rescore helped a few other judges to move up as well, bringing this up to Gold! A gold award is pretty exciting. I figure it’s going to be a rare, rare feeling to earn one of those. I’ve probably put more work in to this print than any other print in my life, and I’m glad the work was rewarded 🙂

The evolution vids have been getting a good rap, so here’s the evolution of this print… Enjoy!