..or how to get that “in-flight” look without leaving the ground !
A very wet Tuesday morning saw Karen and I in the Sussex village of Lavant, loading cameras and a full lighting rig onto a Boeing 737 . Well, not exactly, as this was a fuselage section owned by Leki Aviation, who had kindly allowed us to use it for a day’s shooting for our client, Alan Mann Aviation. I’d done a location recce a month ago, so I knew the “look” we had to achieve – regardless of the weather outside. The product we were shooting was a child restraint system and our brief was to provide some convincing images of the product in use onboard an aircraft in flight.
Scouting shots – on a sunny day !
The crew from Leki had already fitted the seats we had chosen and hooked up the 240, so already our shell was beginning to look more recognisable. All we had to do now was to light this somewhat restricting space convincingly…
Nice seats … now where are the models ?
Kate, Barry and Kevin from AMA arrived around 11 o’clock, by which time we had rigged the remaining lights, checked all our levels and finally managed to stop the rain from coming in horizontally through the cabin door ! Our aircraft was now warm and cosy – at least I tried to prove this by working in a T-shirt for five minutes – before finally agreeing with everyone that this would have been more pleasant in the summer – and putting my sweatshirt back on !
Before the babies arrived we shot a series of detail pictures illustrating the storage and assembly of the seat . .
The children arrived bang on time at 1 o’clock and (wary as ever about the old adage of working with children and animals) we planned to get the next stage of the shoot done before either of them got to bored or too grizzly. Our two month-old was first up and he sat contentedly throughout. The smiles were doubtless attributed more to wind than my witty banter, but we achieved the desired results before he was whisked back down to his Mum for a feed !
Next up was our two year-old, who took a little more persuading to climb into the seat until Kate’s timely intervention with of a packet of crisps – which did the trick !
This little lad was rather more patient and with an i-Phone video playing just out of frame to keep him amused, we shot away happily achieving exactly what we’d set out to do.
Here are a couple of the final images to show just what can be obtained from a situation like this with careful planning. None of our final images have had any Photoshop work done on them other than level and colour balance corrections. What you see is what we shot !
Special thanks go to Andrew Newell and his team at Leki Aviation. We couldn’t have done it without you !
Alan Mann Aviation http://www.alanmann.co.uk/
Leki Aviation http://www.lekiaviation.com/
