Crash is Broken

"I need you to shoot it as it's thrown out of the window."
"What window?"
"That one at the top. On the right."
"And it'll land on the concrete there then?"
"Hopefuly..."
"Okaaay."

And so began one of the stranger shoots I've been involved with for a while.
My friend Melanie is an author, she's working on a new novel, the plot of which requires that a cello is dropped, from height, to its demise.

Melanie asked the group of photographers that I regularly drink and shoot with to help her stage and shoot the scene. So, last Sunday morning a quiet street in Guildford was the filed with the sound of numerous high speed shutters capturing every detail of the flight and impact of various household objects, and a couple of musical instruments*

I was nominated to deal with the falling/tracking shot. This meant finding a suitable shutter speed and viewpoint that gave decent background blur but let me keep the falling objects sharp. Luckily the sun came out so Manual mode metered of the palm of my hand in the sunlight and a few test shots got things in the right place (1/200@f10, iso100)

[my pick of my shots**]

Others were shooting the impact zone, silhouttes, sequences etc. and at least 4 of us had G9s (and GF-1) gorilla-podded to fence posts and masonary to ensure the entire event was captured in HD video!

All of our raw images and footage have now been passed to one person who has been tasked with the editing, grading and compositing of the final multimedia presentation. **That's why there's no image above, I'll add one on release of the finished work.



All in all I had great fun and while the shots are pretty abstract when viewed on their own, I can't wait to see them in context. And, I can't wait to see the other shots that captured all teh other angles too. I'll update this post as soon as the link are available.

In the meantime you should check out Melanie's blog, as well as info about the reasons behind the shoot, there's also more info about novel, the plot itself. Also, Melanie gave me glowing endorsment recently so I'm more than happy to return the favour: Go Subcribe To Her Blog. Now.

*note: no working instruments were harmed in the creation of the production. Think of it as one last glorious performance ;o)