Behind the Image: Outdoor Festival

"You guys planned all of this?" As an art director, this is music to my ears. The Outdoor Festival shoot we took on this summer was not something we typically do. We don't typically book 60+ models. We don't typically spend hours discussing stage rigging (yah, way more complex than you think). We don't typically have to shoo onlookers away from sporadically participating in a scene.

These shoots are rare, risky, but often the most fun. And this image of our entire crowd really sums it up for me. I had a certain aesthetic in mind for which we assembled all the right pieces (and I must take a moment here to call out our super-producer, Kathleen, and our ultra-stylist, Ghyslaine, for their hard work and creativity to help pull this off) and then hoped that the weather and the enthusiasm of our cast would play along.

Well, play along they did.

After an initial thunderstorm-y start, the skies cleared as we moved through themes of festival camping, gate admission, crowd control, merch tents, and finally the "headliner" performance. We had speakers pumping tunes, coloured smoke effects, a whipped up crowd, and our talented shooters to capture it all.

The images from this shoot have the looseness, the realness, the spontaneous feel of a real event, which I think elicits the "you planned all this?!" comment that makes me so proud of this shoot and our team.

To see all of the images from this shoot, check out the entire title.