Some people asked me last week about the work I'd posted in the Work in Progress category when the site launched and I realized I needed to give some clarification about the material I'm currently posting and what I hope to post in the coming months. To do that, let me give you a quick timeline of where we've been in the last year and a half since I jumped into this photo project:
- Nov - Dec 2010: Held auditions and cast four actors to play two romantic couples.
- Jan - April 2011: Rehearsed in my apartment as much as six days per week to create consistent characters the actors could play.
- June - Dec 2011: Shot 19 different scenes over 12 shoots.
- Oct - Nov 2011: Ran my Kickstarter Campaign to raise support to shoot more images.
- Jan - Sept 2012: Wrote a 30-35 image script, at first building on and then moving past the original story to something better.
- Aug 2012 - Present: Scouting locations to match scenes in the script and organizing shoots to execute them over the next nine months.
So despite the fact that I'm posting images I haven't made any images over the last eight months. There's been the occasional rehearsal photo, but I'd gone back to the drawing board in terms of the story (sorry if that comes as a surprise to any of you; I've talked about that a little bit in my emails to my donors). So at this point all the pictures you're seeing me post are from the summer and fall of last year, some of which I'm proud of and some of which fail to do what I'd set out to do and some of which were at least striving in the right direction with at least some elements working in their favor.
Then I'm currently gearing up to shoot the 30-35 images I've scripted into a concise, linear story with a beginning, middle, and end, something the previous images I feel lack, and we can talk about why later, so that's where I'll be putting my efforts over the next year from now until June of 2013 when I will most likely lose several of my actors to moves and changing life directions and so forth.
So part of this site and the responsibility I feel toward you, my friends, patrons, fellow photographers, and art lovers is to catch you up on where I've been in this long, long journey. The difficulty of that, however, is trying to tell you a story I'm still in the middle of and one I'm unsure of where it ends. So many of the posts over the next few months I'll share with you our process for developing the characters you see in Version 1.0 of this project, some of the crazy things we did throughout our rehearsals, and share the adventures we had in staging and shooting pictures "out in the wild." And then gradually transition to telling you about the long writing process I've gone through over the last year, how good it has been for me to develop a writing life and the disciplines that go with that, and share with you the new adventures we have making whatever Version 2.0 of this photo project looks like. Thanks again for coming along with me on this journey!