Project Overview

Project Overview

Calming the Storm

By Gemma Seager & Heidi Wood

Our brief was to create a film to promote designer Marko Mitanovski’s Autumn Winter 2010 collection, in a melancholic way, with the element of wind. We began researching our designer who we were instantly inspired by. We chose to work together as we are equally determined and motivated. Due to pre-booked holidays we strategically made our own timetable to split the workload, which was effective. Through constant contact and working together on weekends we successfully produced Calming the Storm. In contacting Marko Mitanovski we were invited to view his promo film in London. This was extremely valuable for our styling and creating his look. We came away enthused by his film and to create an amazing representation ourselves. Focusing on key shapes from Marko’s collection our styling evolved into a black morphing into white concept. Powerful, constricting, flowing, beautiful, fierce were how the garments had to look to be Marko worthy. Steadily we achieved this!

Through tutorials and lessons we gathered starting points for research walking away with a large list of films. In splitting the film load we were able to analyse in depth then report back to each other with specific clips and reviews. This way we could target the most influential and important aspects faster. Directors Peter Wier and David Lynch, had the most impact on our vision with their unique techniques in powerful layering, fading, blurring and flashing imagery to create awareness of time and place.

Our concept grew into a love loss story that developed through 3 storyboards and even changed whilst editing. Immediately Camber Sands was the perfect location, with vast unforgiving landscapes, romantic sand dunes and stunning skies nature was clearly going to be the second character. The story starts with a melancholic individual whose unrequited love for Marko and his creations transforms. The story moves from a black constricting over whelming out fit and head piece combo, moving through stunning sequences of roses and dripped ink, hand written mysterious love letters and illustrations. They work in the narrative loosely to build the characters thoughts out loud and filmed using techniques Lynch and Wier have. Through myself being the character for our film we were able to develop the looks to perfection, and I was able to translate what was in our heads affectively, reviewing the footage all the way.

There were days of re shooting, car injuries, and makeup disaster due to weather. Writing lists and itineraries helped to maximize the use of our time daily in relation to the tide of which we wanted as far out as possible.

In editing, the film transformed with the sound track by Muse. The combination of fierce clothing, melancholic emotion and scenery, was further enhanced by the tracks soft melody. The process was exhausting including fluctuating moods of being extremely proud, to plummeting disappointment. The editing was the biggest challenge on top of the filming adventure. Selecting the most amazing pieces we layered the visuals adding cross dissolve affects and what we refer to as our ‘Lynch’ moment, a flashing beam of light to create a story that builds with emotion and ends with serene peace in a beautiful way. I have learnt a huge amount, having no previous skills with final cut I found it a struggle to learn in lessons only, but with Heidi we over came this and learnt the key techniques to produce the effects inspired by our influential directors.

Finally we produced a Look book for Marko’s ‘Black Collection’ this little book contains the most stunning shots from our film and rounded off the project nicely as a part of a press pack. I found it extremely easy to write a press release with Heidi bouncing ideas off each other and a press pack seemed an enjoyable finale to our project, complete with DVD cover and little hand crafted accessories.