Yesterday, we did the first promotional shoot for my new web series project, 2 Girls Kissing.

I have to admit that I was slightly stressed about it all.  The location that I chose was the riverside area around the Southbank Centre.  For those of you that are unfamiliar with my fair city, the Southbank Centre is a huge complex housing 21 spaces of creativity, including Royal Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery.  The riverside area often has street performers entertaining swarms of families and groups of people enjoying the vibe and the views.  And, despite the morning’s torrential downpour, yesterday afternoon was no exception.  Add to this two people that I’ve never worked with and that have never done a shoot of this nature before and, well, let’s just say that I left it to fate to play a much bigger part than usual.

I have to say that my fears all amounted to naught – we had a great shoot, it all ran relatively smoothly and everyone was very easy to work with (the pics below are from my Blackberry).

So, on the offchance that any of you have to undertake a similar endeavour of photographing two girls kissing in one of the busiest parts of the metropolis with the ever present threat of rain, here’s what you need for a successful shoot.

A photographer that knows what she’s doing

2GK is blessed with the creative talents of Gerry Alexis.  Gerry’s day job involves playing with cameras for Sky.  She is also one of the best graphic/illustrator talents that I know – her artwork first graced my schoolbooks when we were eleven years old.  I’ve been wanting to work with Gerry for years and until now has only done my promo headshots, so I’m very grateful that she has jumped on board.



Research

I had originally conceived a photo shoot at night, but then I read about the experience of the Seeking Simone team who photographed two of their girls kissing and decided to can that idea. One afternoon, Gerry and I walked down to the Southbank, which is one of my favourite spots in London, and took some photos around monuments and spots that might work for us.

A cute, comfortable couple

I first met Susan and Jasmin at a gig that Greymatter was playing in London last year, and again at an event for Eurout in January.  I asked them if they were up for being photographed in the name of furthering lesbian visibility efforts, and the rest, as they say…

They are a very cute couple – I thought it was a good omen that they were, ahem, ‘getting some practice in’ whilst Gerry and I were setting up the first shot – and so comfortable and quite oblivious to us that it was a very easy shoot indeed.  I gave them very little direction, save some poses I really needed to get, and Gerry just shot them having conversations and making each other laugh.



An idea of what you need to get

I am developing the look for our website at the moment, so I knew what shots I had to get out of this in order to fit with my concept.  But there were a lot of shots that we got out of this that will probably work much better, especially with some of the print materials that I’ll be developing to support our promotional activities.

A flexible plan

We had planned to do the entire shoot around a circular stone sculpture outside the National Theatre.  However, when we rocked up, there was a group of free runners practicing backflips off the rocks.  Our photographer was running late so we took refuge in the espresso bar at the front of the theatre.  Whilst we were sitting there, I noticed that the wall of the National Film Theatre next door was full of circular vents and thought that that would make a great background image.  It had the added advantage of being away from the main path of traffic, so we did the bulk of our shoot there and moved back to the stone sculpture later in the afternoon.



A disregard of the weather report

It doesn’t matter if the weather report tells you it’s supposed to rain or shine in the afternoon; it’s sod’s law that the worst will happen (this is London, baby!).  We were blessed with no rain and, at around 8 degrees, a positively tropical temperature.  But bring a big umbrella, and plastic bags containing towels for your models to sit on, even if you think it’s going to shine all day.

A sense of awareness

Nothing draws more attention to ‘something going on’ than setting up a long shot. There’s no getting away from it – two girls kissing (or even looking like they might kiss) will cause people to slow down and stare or stop and wolfwhistle, both of which we got.  In between checking shots, I spent a good portion of the afternoon circling our models and photographer whilst they got on with it, watching for people’s reactions as they walked past for anyone that might kick off, quietly telling everyone to hang on, first when groups of the stag party variety bounded past and then when small children were hanging off the stone sculpture, curious to see what we were photographing beneath it (but that was more because I didn’t want to have to deal with an injured toddler).



For all the planning, the meetings, the concepts, the pow wows that happen when preparing a web series, there’s nothing quite like going out and actually doing something or making something to re-inject your excitement for a project again.  

Thanks to Jasmin, Susan and Gerry for chalking up the first ‘making of’ experience of 2 Girls Kissing – here’s to many more!

My favourite social media meet-up is undoubtedly NFPtweetup, a mixer of individuals interested in the potential of Twitter and other social media to further and support the missions of organisations that want to do good things in the world.  People are talented, sponge-like, generous, sharing and learning and are ridiculously down to earth; I always leave feeling like I’ve learnt something new and I’ve been given a blessing and the benefit of someone else’s experience to go out and apply it.

A few weeks ago, I heard that they were getting their own t-shirt, so, when NFPtweetup’s Rebekah Hah extended an invitation for me to attend the next event, I leapt at the opportunity to get in the queue for a t-shirt.  Rebekah suggested that I propose my own design, so, one snowy afternoon, fuelled by hot chocolate and ice cream, I had fun coming up with the designs below.  They don’t exactly fit with the brand, but I’ve always wanted to use my own rendering of a Twitter bird and this gave me a great opportunity to do so.

They are a little varsity inspired because – let’s be real – such t-shirts always end up being worn at the gym.  Married with the whole learning theme, it was a bit of a creative fit waiting to happen.











The official t-shirt for NFPtweetup was released last weekend and a very smart design it is too – I want one!!

** Just to clarify...**
Thanks for the tweets, messages and DMs about these.  But just to clarify, these were done on a lark, and the official t-shirt for NFPtweetup was produced by the beautiful people at Beautiful World (and I still want one!).  I won't be printing them, however, if an ethical t-shirt company wants to come forward and donate their services, I will happily licence these to be sold in support of NFPtweetup... :)

Three months in the making, Bee Charmer Productions recently unveiled its first fully comprehensive website showcasing all of their audio and video production work.  It's one of the biggest design projects that I've undertaken to date and, I have to admit, has become one of my favourites.



You’ll notice that I appear on the team page; this is because, in my other life, Regan Latimer, BCP’s owner, is also one of my production partners.  So it was interesting working with her in a different capacity.

This post summarises the elements in the new design.

Identifying the audience

The first step in my design process isn’t a sketching session, a trip to my mood folders, or even a brainstorm – it’s all about the research.

I jumped online and looked at the websites of audio and video production companies in Toronto to identify potential competitors and to get an idea of the industry standard in terms of design, style and tone.



I then looked at BCP’s clients and spoke to Regan about the clients they would like to attract.  BCP has a range of clients, including charities, arts organisations, financial institutions and schools, as well as blogs, productions companies and actors.  One of the challenges of the design was to appeal to such a wide range of potential clients while keeping BCP’s personality. 

I also went through their visitor data to ascertain which browsers their visitors use in order to identify any coding considerations.

Theme and style

Although I had previously designed landing pages for BCP in keeping with the style of their logo, Regan wanted to move away from ‘Web 2.0, slick and shiny styling’.



Instead, the new BCP aesthtetic needed to be more organic, natural, colourful and creative, reflecting BCP’s way of working. 

Headers images

I decided to use the imagery of the bee and its natural habitat.  I chose different photographs of beehives for each section of the website.


Homepage header


About Us header


Services header


Portfolio header


Clients header


Testimonials header


Contact Us header

Colour

As the predominant colour in each header is green, I chose a dark green to use in the header text, and blue and yellow as highlight and accent colours.

Hand drawn elements

To contrast with the polished photography, I decided to hand draw elements on the site to evoke a creative ‘work in progress’ feel.

Each bio photo of BCP’s team was made into a Polaroid and I doodled over them different ways of attaching them to an imaginary wall.



Each section of the portfolio has its own hand drawn icon.



The quotation marks used in the testimonials are also doodles.



The footer is the only part of the website in which bees appear.  Because actual bees look slightly scary (!), I drew some cartoon bees and placed them alongside photos of flowers.



These bees are also repeated in the header of BCP’s blog, The Beehive.  The Beehive is a self-hosted Blogger blog (the URL is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site) and the theme was adapted from the Blogger Minima theme to fit in with the rest of the site.  The Google based platform also allows users to leave comments using their Google user name as well as OpenID.

Layout

One of the challenges of the portfolio was displaying the sheer amount of content without resorting to javascript or Flash carousels.  The layout of each portfolio section was inspired by the four column anchor layout of Rob Morris’ Digitalmash portfolio.  ‘Back to top’ links improve usability and take the user back to the full portfolio offering.

One happy client

"Our website had a difficult brief - an organic aesthetic with a playful but professional feel - but we are absolutely thrilled with the result.   Rochelle was very patient in guiding us through the whole process and suggested solutions to issues that we hadn’t even considered. I was impressed at Rochelle's ability to think holistically about our site's design and her decisions were always well-researched. I am looking forward to working with Rochelle on BCP's next website!"
Regan Latimer, Owner/Executive Producer, Bee Charmer Productions