It's crazy how quick we've already reached our 'execution' brief in our first term module at university, where I am studying Fashion Communication and Promotion (for those of you who have missed my previous blogpost).
From the trend research, big idea, creative concept to the execution. Out of all these briefs I have to admit that the creative concept and execution hold my interest the most. This is because they allow the expression of creativity to the fullest.
We were asked to create a series of images that were based around an artist and an object. The artist given to us to take inspiration from was Craig McDean and his series "Game, Set, Match" which featured in Vogue - March 2016. Our inspiration from him had to be applied to an object focus of shoes.
We sat down and came together with 5 key words that we thought best described McDean's series work. This allowed us to grasp a clear focus on what ideas, moods and feelings we would chose to express through our images. Therefore, this insured we portrayed a sense of his work in ours through having these keywords to reflect and reference back against.
Overall we had an eye for the detail held in McDeans images of Roses and Sportswear. Upon our own research, we found that all of the production staff for the images, including McDean, were British. Due to obtaining this information, we decided to give the images a British touch through our floral choices of a 'English Rose' aspect and a British brand choice of 'Reebok'.
Despite being told that the images did not have to have a clear focus on a model, upon evaluating the "Game, Set, MATCH" series, a clear figure was present. Therefore we decide to incorporate a model, but still centralised the shoes in order for them to still hold a place within the emphasis of the image.
We worked with two wallpapers combined, one with dull colours focused on nature, juxtaposed to a baby pink background with red love hearts. These wallpapers express the idea of the love for nostalgia, that we agreed on about McDean's series, due to the old branding being used, as well as older styled prints that steered away from the modern day. In regards to the concept of the 'English Rose', we differed from McDean's illusional take and instead took a more literal approach, but still kept it in the central focus to add a clear acknowledgement.
In regards to styling, we kept outfits plain to avoid overshadowing the object focus of the shoes, ranging from neutrals to plain darks, where we tried to avoid blacks due to it being more of a harsher hue - Navy worked well with the backdrops and the shoe, where it kept the image as a whole, in sync. This is due to the colour being incorporated in all of the above. Styling, facially, was kept plain and within the post-production process a fade was added, in order to add a slight wash out and contrast to the colours of the shoes and wallpaper. This helped to emphasis on the true focus of the images (being the shoe), as well as holding references to the "Game, Set, MATCH" images, where the contrast of the washed out model is used to emphasis on the colours of objects.
We also created one image, with the same background and props, of the shoes only. We went ahead with this approach to present a full focus on the branding and apply our creative inspiration from Craig McDean in our own way; without a model.
As a team, we used the help of props and styling to achieve a clear perspective of the work published by Craig McDean, in order to lower time spent during post-production. This allowed us to be more hands on with our creativity and allowed our ideas to be bought to life, which allowed a sense of "realism" to be conveyed more.
With joint creativity and trial and error methods of our test shoot, as a team we figured out what worked to really bring out the creative concept behind Craig McDeans "Game,Set, MATCH", as well as our object focus of shoes. In the future, as a point of improvement, I believe we may have been able to juxtapose the realsim of the image, to illusions such as 'holes in the ground' to take more out of our inspiration from McDeans work further.
Overall, I loved this brief because as a team it allowed all of our strengths to combine. Therefore lead to create the perfect idea with the balance of interpretation of McDeans work and individual touches of creativity, in regards to the presentation of our object.
The Execution stage is definitely something that interests me as a field of work, as it brings creativity to life and expressing myself creatively is something I priorities highly, within my work and outside.
I'm enjoying Uni very much and this module as a whole has proven this is the perfect course for me, here's to what's to come... hint hint: NEW YORK CITY. - Stay tuned for a blogpost coming soon on my travels.
Love Always,
Misha XO
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