FINALLY

I have finally sent my book off to Blurb.com for it to be printed. I have ordered 2 copies, one to submit and one to keep for myself, with the extra shipping cost to get it back to be quickly I have spent a total of £137 on my book order. My book will be a Large Square 12x12, Hard Black Linen cover, with a Dust jacket and Black end sheets with 50 pages of Premium Lustre paper. I should have my book back to me by next Thursday at the latest. It is such a relief to finally have it out of my hands to have time to catch up on my reflective blog, get my evaluation underway and prepare for my portfolio construction submission, which I have to admit I have neglected while coming to the end of my FMP.

I have heard that somebody failed their Portfolio Construction unit last year for having low quality images in her portfolio, this had made me realise that since having my laptop stolen before Christmas I no longer have any high quality copies of any of my previous work and so I am going to need to do some more shoots to have enough images to submit and it is always better to have new work to show, also with all of my FMP shoots being character makeup I need a variety of other types of makeup to go in my portfolio so myself and Melissa Bush have decided to collaborate and do 6 shoots together next week. We will get together and plan each look and decide who will do the hair and who will do the makeup for each.

Week 14

I took on board all of the advice from my tutor and made the necessary changes over the weekend and I am so glad I received that feedback and took the weekend to make changes, because I am so much more happy with my book layout now. I don't know why I wasn't more creative with my layout in the first place. Here are some of the changes I have made to my pages before the quotes and extracts have been entered:

Images with quotes

Title Page (same as cover) and Acknowledgements

Introduction and Character Title

Week 13

I had originally hoped to have my book ready to send off for print this Wednesday. However, I had not planned to still be shooting last week and had not accounted for how long editing would take. I had then hoped to have my book ready to send off today, this again has not happened. But I have received a quote for shipping prices and delivery dates from my printers and if I pay and extra £10 postage and packaging charge the I can send my book off on Monday or even Tuesday and get it back even quicker than if I had sent it on Wednesday and paid the cheaper postage. It is more than worth the extra money to be able to spend the weekend making sure that everything is perfect before sending off to print. This last week I have been editing and creating my page layouts.

I saw my tutor for the first time since before the Easter break and showed him my page mock ups so as to get his opinion before I sent it off to print.

The feedback from my tutor was that some of my images were quite weak because of my lack of confidence when shooting, but not having time to re-shoot anything I would need to be more creative with my page layouts and more selective with the imagery. For example the images on the 2 double page spreads below are all very similar and so do not show character development like they should. My tutor suggested I make some changes such as zooming right in and cropping just the character's eyes or only showing half of the character's face really close up to make it more interesting. I loved these ideas and plan on getting straight onto rectifying my mistakes. In a way it is a good thing that I was not ready to send my book off to print on Wednesday otherwise I may not have gained this vital feedback and would not have made the changes that will hopefully make my book more successful.

Celia Shoot

Finally it was time to shoot the character of Celia which was supposed to happen on Good Friday but didn't go ahead for a number of reasons. In a way I preferred shooting it now so that I could apply the skills I had learned at the Barbican internship. What I learned there was to work quickly which worked on this shoot as I had 3 looks to do and my model and photographer had work that evening. I also applied the hair techniques I learned at the Barbican, as the story is set in the Victorian era I put into practice influences from the Victorian hairstyle of having it tall at the front and top and pulled back at the sides like their dresses would have been. I also curled the hair to suit the descriptions of the character. I am feeling so much more confident after my run on The Salon Project and as this shoot was supposed to go ahead 2 weeks ago I was more than prepared for it. My model was fantastic. She had amazing skin and bone structure and hardly needed any guidance when it came to posing once she had seen my mood board and I had told her about the character. I am very proud of these images and my makeup skills on this shoot.

Prospero Shoot

After my experience at the Barbican I was a lot more confident with this shoot. I had 3 strong varied looks planned out, a confident model and great costume. I am extremely happy with how the beard and moustache turned out, I feel they look very realistic and suit the character. I felt more confident about trying to portray the different moods and appearances of this character. The best shots were the shots where we threw the top hat into the air and captured it on camera to look as though the character was levitating it as he is an amazing magician. Definitely my best shoot to date and I am proud of the images.

PROSPERO THE ENCHANTER

 






Black velvet cape lined with shockingly white silk cascading behind him

Tailcoat… Waistcoat hangs unbuttoned over his lace-edged shirt… Top hat which featured prominently in his performance sits on a hat stand nearby

The man appeared younger on stage, his age buried under the glare of the footlights and layers of makeup

The face in the mirror is lined, the hair significantly greying. But there is something youthful in the grin

The announcement in the paper states that Hector Bowen, better known as Prospero The Enchanter, entertainer and stage magician of great renown, dies of heart failure in his home on the fifteenth of march

The figure hovering by the window turns. Where the sunlight hits him he is all but invisible. Part of a shoulder appears to be missing, the top of his head vanishes in a flutter of sun-caught dust. The rest of him is transparent, like a reflection

What is left of Hector Bowen reads the note and laughs delightedly

“Though perhaps he is better known as Prospero the Enchanter”

“Absolutely brilliant, completely mesmerized every audience. Never seen anyone to match him, never”

Week 12

After my week at the Barbican I have a lot of catching up to do to get myself back on track. I got back to Southampton very late on Monday night after the show had finished and so I missed my FMP tutorial. Tuesday morning I went straight in to Brent's I.T session and remained there all day editing the images I already have and starting on my page layouts. I have my final 2 shoots to do this week, at last. First will be my shoot for the character of Prospero The Enchanter on Wednesday and Thursday I will try once again to shoot the character of Celia. While at the Barbican I worked out that to get my book printed and sent back to me in time for the deadline, I will need to have it completed and sent off by next Wednesday 17th April, which does not leave me very much time to put it all together. Fingers crossed these final shoots go without a glitch.

Week 11

This week I have been in London doing an internship at the Barbican, working on a show called The Salon Project, put on by Scottish company Untitled Projects, part of the Barbican's SPILL Festival.
It was not a normal theatre show, it was immersive theatre in that the audience was the main feature of the show, a recreation of the popular social gatherings of 19th Century Paris.
The vision of director Stewart Laing, the audience (roughly 60 people per night. 20 people every half hour - 6:30pm, 7:00pm, 7:30pm), enter backstage where they are immediately swept away to get transformed into period costume (10 people to dressing first, 10 to hair and makeup and then swapped over). After half an hour of getting pampered, poked and prodded they enter The Salon where Laing plays host, and along with guest speakers and Barbican workers as guides (all in period costume), provokes conversation about the future, with drinks and music being played throughout the night it seemed like such a fun experience. The show running from 4th-14th April.
Us interns had a full training day on the 2nd April where we were shown around and taught several different period hairstyles and the signature makeup look created by the show's costume designer. All makeup was provided by the show but we had to bring our own brushes every night. With costumes ranging from Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian and 1920's, the makeup look for everybody was a pale base and a wine stained lip, with some eyebrow definition and eyeshadow as appropriate to the person's wishes, outfit and face. This basic look went well with all of the costumes regardless of the era.
With the hair we were taught a style to represent each of the eras of costumes. We were told if the client already had a well cut and styled modern style just to leave it as it is as they were all for the contrast between the old and new, otherwise to create all of the styles we learned it required a lot of volume to the hair and with a maximum of only 15 minutes per client there was no time to curl the hair to create this volume so a lot of backcombing and hairspray was required. We learned that Edwardian and Georgian dresses were big and came out at the sides and so the hair would match with the styles the head makeup artist called the mock bob and the onion. Whereas Victorian dresses were narrow at the sides and came out at the back and so the hair would match being tall at the top but scraped back at the sides with the styles called the poodle/the elvis and the top knot. The 1920's hairstyle was the classic finger wave at the front of the hair with the rest being sleek and neat.
Taking a week out of uni work to do this internship has set me back slightly with my project work but I am so glad I have done it, it has been the best experience I ever could have received. I feel I have learned so much here in regards to hair styling, proper industry work and working to a strict time frame each night. I have 2 shoots remaining when I get back to Southampton this week and I feel very confident about them after this experience, I will definitely be taking lots of what I have learned here on board with my final shoots.
Here are some images from the show nights I worked on: