Photography: Wellcan, Hair: Hauns Korpela, Make-up: Rudy Miles

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The amount of work that goes into the production of a photo shoot is often completely unknown to the general public but is also the most important part of creating the magic that appears in the final images.

For instance, trying to light the enormous wigs in this series was a difficult task.  Not only did we have to make sure to highlight the various textures that were integral to the creation for each of them, but their enormous size took several different approaches when it came to light set up.  As well, the sheer weight of the wigs was so heavy on the models’ heads that members of the creative team had to stand behind them to help keep them upright.  The average person wouldn’t normally think about these things just looking at the photos, but problems like this are quite typical.

“NO MATTER HOW MUCH PLANNING GOES INTO A SHOOT TO MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS RIGHT IN-CAMERA, SOME THINGS SIMPLY CANNOT BE ACCOUNTED FOR.”

With Thanksgiving having recently passed and the holiday season soon upon us, we have been incredibly busy with planning, travel and deadlines over these past few weeks. As promised though, here are the remaining images from the “After Hours” series:

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We have recently confirmed with Hauns that we are set to begin production for his 2012 NAHA submissions beginning in January.  It’s always a pleasure to work with him so throughout December we will be highlighting the second series from his 2011 submissions, entitled “Dark Beauties.”  Just wait until you see these!  They really take conceptual hair design above and beyond.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving with family and friends and is preparing for the holidays like we are.  All of us here at Wellcan can’t express our gratitude to our clients and supporters enough for giving us the opportunity to  do what we love, so thank you!

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“You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, of sight, of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas...

For many years, mannequins have been used to reflect the inspired fashion of the day. Each draped with not just clothes but the hair and makeup of the time. They are stored in warehouses and basements when not needed. One has to ask what they might be up to when waiting for the next moment they are on display…

Photography: Wellcan, Hair: Hauns Korpela, Make-up: Rudy Miles

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In the Twilight Zone episode “After Hours”, it showed us that they joined the human race on a monthly furlough where they came to life to explore what they could never otherwise experience… This was the inspiration for the collection, to show off the spin that can be drawn from decades passed. Each mannequin represents a modern version of a period stemming back from those years where hair and makeup made statements, which were very much considered the fashion of the day. Beauty influences much of what designers create and acts as more than just an accessory that woman want to reflect. It has to translate to everyday, every outfit, and the mood women experience within their life. The reflection of time is a great mirror to the future that inspires the “what’s next”. We can create to press the fashion that worn by many including the mannequins that dress our many fashion houses. As you look to each of these mannequins, is she coming to life or stepping back to be come a reflection of time? 

"To capture the essence of these defiant yet undeniably sexy characters...

my team and I draped all three models from head to toe in hair, allowing for the different textures and movement to showcase their sense of freedom and boisterous fashion styles.  To further enhance the drama, we utilized a fresh approach with makeup to give new life to the pin-up culture that I was very intrigued by during my own childhood as well.

To complete these looks, each image was digitally enhanced to create an aura of illustrative fantasy that enchanted their spellbinding personas.  Being able to recreate their attitudes and embellish them with these creations, the Dark Beauties series was truly an inspirational experience for everyone involved.” 

““I have always loved the darker side of the villainous vixens in childhood stories we’ve all grown up with, so I wanted to take a few of my favorites and bring them from the story book pages to the theatrical stage of avant-garde design and pay homage to their larger-than-life personalities.””

"Once you know what you want in your photo, all you have to do is create it...

Some times that is easier said than done.  We had a theme and a certain direction in which we wanted to go with in this series of images. The main thing we wanted to do here was to showcase Hauns’ hairstyles for his NAHA submission.

The first thing we had to do was find some unique mannequins and some how make them come to life. Standard old/aged mannequins wouldn’t work for this shoot, and we knew that at some point some Photoshop would be required. Prior to the shoot we actually tested several approaches and shot them to see how they would look on camera. Once we had a look that worked for us we began prepping for the actual shoot.

One of the main challenges for this shoot was finding enough mannequins to keep each image unique; we actually had several gold, silver and white mannequins in both male and female form. Lighting the metallic forms of the mannequins, while properly exposing to capture the details in Hauns’ hair styling required custom and detailed lighting for each one of the models. This was complicated further by differences in skin tone, height differences, changes in angles and particular positions on location. The greatest difficulty was actually keeping the light consistent from shooting the mannequins to replacing the mannequin with our model and finally matching them up in post when merging the images. While trying to keep all of these things in mind, we still had to try to light things interestingly enough to enhance the environment and keep our surreal aesthetic.

Location is everything; we needed a location that felt like an appropriate “home” for our after hours friends. It needed to have some age and at the same time look like a place frequented by someone/something but forgotten by humans. The particular location we found had that special character we where looking for. In each image we tried to show off different aspects of where we where shooting to bring more character to each of our mannequins. Thankfully, from the help of our friends at the Columbus College of Art & Design, we were able to get into this great location on the CCAD campus that was in the process of being retrofitted and updated.

Coordinating and bringing everything together required the skills and talents of multiple individuals. From the hair and make-up, the props, the location, the talent, to our own individual skills behind the camera and in post, this collaboration wouldn’t have been possible without the dedication of everyone involved. One of the things we are most proud of at Wellcan is having the privilege of creating these types of images with such a great group of people.

Thanks again, stay tuned for more soon…

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60,000 PEOPLE GATHERING TO HELP 1.8 MILLION

The Black Eyed Peas and friends are joining with Robin Hood, the largest poverty fighting organization in New York City to raise funds to help the 1.8 million New Yorkers living in poverty. 100% of the profits will go to charity. We’ll raise funds, awareness and raise the roof at the same time. (Okay, Central Park doesn’t literally have a roof, but you get the idea.)http://blackeyedpeas.robinhood.org/​

Music & Media - Alone in NYC...

I was recently hired by friends in Vidaroo to create video content for the Black Eyed Peas European tour. First show was to kick off in Nyc for the Robin Hood fund raiser.

My flight landed earlier than the rest of our crew, I was greeted in baggage claim by a bald suited  man with a sign. He grabbed my bags and we walked silently to his Lincoln and rode silently into the city.

It had been a year since I had been in New York so I went sight seeing! AKA the apple store, where I had to resist buying an iPad 2.

On my walk to get some BBQ popchips and other necessities from CVS I snapped a couple photos of what was in the area.

The work week starts tomorrow. Going to be several all-nighters of clicking the mouse and making visuals. As usual working with a great team of friends and artists. 

"We met the deadline, completed the work.. the show was ready to go off without a hitch, then came mother nature...

We were all exhausted from several days of animating and sleeping next to our workstations during renders. Our closest convenience mart for quick food was a Dunkin Doughnuts gas-station where taxis fueld up, needless to say we were running on fumes. The only light at the end of the tunnel was the adrenaline rush you get watching your work in front of thousands of people as an integral part of a multi-million dollar production. An hour before the show like a gang of zombies, we ​drug ourselves across town from SIR Sound Stage to central park as lightning and rain threatened to come crashing down and it did... 

“The Black Eyed Peas understand a thing or two about second chances.

The “Boom Boom Pow” hit makers were met with unexpected news this past June when an impending thunderstorm caused them to abruptly cancel their summer performance at Central Park.

”You have to understand, we drove up and there were thousands of people lined up and we felt like we let everybody down,” band member Taboo told the Daily News in a phone interview. “We were devastated but we didn’t want to put any lives in jeopardy or take any chance of people getting hurt.
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This year the team at Wellcan was subcontracted to create video content for LMFAO’s “Sorry for Party Rocking Tour” In May we were presented with a 4 hour long audio interview of the artists and management discussing the visual approach for each song during the show. LMFAO  requested video content  that was high in energy,  humorous, and contained their retro design sense. A two week production time line began; that brought together design elements ranging from hotdog carts, bar scenes, and green zebra stripes, to pink palm trees, disco, and bikini basketball. This month we had our work cut out for us.

It was a diverse mixture of approach and style. We hired a team of six additional freelance artists to assist in meeting the challenge. While some of the techniques for obtaining the footage might have been a little less than the “industry standard,” they uncovered some colorful ideas. 

Due to the lighthearted nature of the client we were able to try some ridiculous techniques. "

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“How about that.. you can get paid for flinging hotdogs at glass” ”

We tested a lot of silly animations that we might not have otherwise had a chance to play around with. *SEE ABOVE* On day one the first thing that we tested is the concept of the dancing hotdogs and flinging hotdogs at the screen for the song, “Hot Dog.” 

 We also created content for the dance epic, “Quest,” which was an 8-minute montage of video, dance, and music. Shawn and Andre had to utilize a large portion of the first day trying to map out the storyboarded ideas the quest crew and LMFAO had outlined for us. 

The visuals for quest involved a lot of stock footage, warm colors and very little 3D so we were able to knock it out a lot easier than if we would have had to try and make everything from scratch. They wanted a large amount of the focus to be directed towards the stage and dancers and  less attention on the screens so we kept a lot of the animation minimal and shape driven.

The night before the show we hit render and  kept a watchful eye on the farm as the content baked.

At 6:00a.m. the day of the show...

 We received new audio-beds. Up until then we were under the impression that we already had the finalized version of each of the songs. This threw everything into disarray. We went into an editing frenzy and reviewed all of the content to be sure that they all timed out. We finished the last cut one hour before LMFAO hit the stage. 

The final hours, after spending the whole morning backstage in the "Green room" with our laptops, we were finally able to step out into the crowd to watch the show unfold. Too many beers and some great people watching later , Corbin was able to spend a few moments with one of the stage prop zebras.

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“this is how the pros do it...”

On October 24 Hewlett Packard hosted a private party, called The Sound of Touch, at Terminal 5 in New York City to highlight their latest touch-screen laptops and other devices. The party included hip-hop electronic group Far East Movement and Grammy music blogger Arjan Writes.

Playing a crucial role to the event was the development of interactive video content to demonstrate the ease-of-use and seamless artistry of the latest Windows 8 OS running on HP products. Wellcan Still & Motion Media was hired by Infinity Marketing to handle this job.  We were also given the opportunity to fly in some very familiar faces to the Wellcan team to help us make this project a success.

The team also produced original cues for the Far East Movement hits Rocketeer and Like a G6, displayed onscreen behind the performers during their live show at the event.  The results were a hit.

As we reached the end of the deadline Corbin, Miguel, and Trevor went out to the gun range to relieve some pressure.

This was a quick promotion video we built for Scott J Salon. Upon returning from NYC from the terminal 5 event, we went directly into this project with the goal of finishing it before christmas! The 3d elements were created in Maxon C4d, and composited with Aftereffects.  Our goal was to create a world that housed the clients variety of fashion and hair photo-shoots in a clean crisp container while maintaining the salon's brand values. The video was produced by two artists over a five day timeline. 

 For the past month I have been working with my good friends in Good Theory on the LED wall content for Maroon 5's 2013 Tour. I started with a bit of work in Columbus, previs and style frames.

connection in Houston

The first stop was Chaos Visual in Burbank, CA. Where we spent several weeks of long hours in a non air-conditioned warehouse with at least 8 box fans blowing on our open mac pro towers to keep them cool while rendering. The render Farm got to live in the upstairs air-conditioned office. Lucky render farm.. 

trevor hard at work between renders checking for quality pants.

the office

830 am to 1230am 7 days a week/sometimes more, Through thinning sanity and lots of survival junk food. We later moved to the Galen Center for stage construction and rehearsal. 

a shot from one of my favorite scenes. 

During the final week, approvals on our content were almost totally complete. With the exception of a few. The show was ready to roll! Maroon 5 Posted the last image here right before the tour left for St. Louis!

Be sure and check out Maroon 5 and our content if the tour comes through your area. The band is a rare mix of professionals they truly are talented musicians & showmen. 

Recently, I was hired to assist the band Starset in creating a music video narrative for their new single "Halo" With virtually no time for preproduction, we hit the ground running on this, assembled a team and shot off into the desert of Utah to begin shooting. A 30 hour journey non stop into darkness. We camped in tents in the rocky hills just over the bonneville raceway in 14 degree weather. No civilization in site. We shot all day every day sun up to sun down and later, we drank beers by the fire to stay warm. We ate dehydrated food packages like spacemen. I took a dump in a thorny bush. We had the benefit of one shower at a hostel style privately owned truck stop with attached diner. A giant mexican lady gave us towels and took us down the poorly lit hallway to our stalls. The showers were warm. She was gentle. I could not complain. 

Understaffed, exhausted, covered in salt, sometimes snow  our team truly lived the experience of the story's main character "Thomas" as he traveled across the surface of a martian planet. 

I have focused all of my time lately working for MAGNANNI. A Spanish mens luxury shoe company. A beautiful handmade product, with a great story/history to tell. Here is a short we did recently in Almansa, Spain (the land of Don Quixote) that features the "Sounds" of shoemaking. Hope you enjoy! 

The Father of Magnanni, Pascual Blanco in his hometown of Almansa, Spain, in the region of La Mancha. The land of Don Quixote. Where the Magnanni product continues to be handmade today. 

Had the opportunity to shoot some campaign imagery for Magnanni Fall Winter line. The following images are some of my favorites from the sequence. Always much room to improve, but each one presented its own challenges and proved to be a great learning experience.