Evaluation

This project was comprised of a series of 3 images shot to a creative brief which are to be displayed in bus stops to reach my target audience of able bodied British people in order to promote the idea of giving blood.

All of the images are constructed images and the subjects are aware and have agreed to be photographed in the studio.

I have mixed feelings towards whether or not my project was a success. From a technical point of view, I am very happy with how the images look. I shot the images with a canon 5dmk2, canon 85mm 1.8 lens using F8 and a shutter speed of 1/125sec. I feel the lighting is perhaps the best I have ever achieved which help the ad's to look stylish, professional and clean. The high power studio lighting allowed me to shoot at ISO 50, I think the image quality achieved by this shows through in the final images.

I feel like I did stick to my creative brief but it would have been nice to have included some female characters to appeal to a wider audience. I feel rather foolish having not noticed this until my project was completed.


I also feel like I stayed too safe and could have taken the project further creating a riskier series of images which played further upon the viewers emotions, making use of colour, symbols and connotations to create an edgy, cutting edge advert.


This project has sparked a passion in myself for advertising however and since undertaking this project I have applied to intern with some of london's top advertising agencies to better understand the industry and improve my skills and experiencee in working to a creative brief.

The final images which went to print

 

I wanted to keep the adverts very clean with a very simply design, choosing a plain black background and plain white text. I didn’t want distracting colours to take away from the message of the ads.

The use of the silly faces aims to create a sense that the viewer has a higher status than the characters in the advert. It turns the characters into a bit of a joke which makes the viewer think, if this silly guy can be a hero and give blood, I certainly can too.

The advert deliberately denies or disregards the hospital and needles side of giving blood. Nowhere in the advert is there a reference to hospitals, medical personnel or needles. 

The tag line "Some of us were born to be heroes" attempts to poke fun at the characters as they come across as silly but yet has a serious not which associates blood donors to heroes.

 This image is perhaps my favorite of the series.

It aims to be ironic, the guy is pulling a real funny, silly but over all very happy face. It attempts to show in a very light-hearted way the pride and happiness that giving blood makes you feel.

 

 This image shows an older guy which tries to appeal to the older generation. The funny face lightens the mood and attempts to grab the attention of the viewer at a glance. It is almost a juxtaposition mixing silliness with a serious cause and a guy who you might guess due to his age would otherwise be a serious character.

This image shows the modesty in the character, his expression is almost saying to the viewer, it was nothing which is a value I wanted to portray, that giving blood is no hard thing.

Selecting the final images

Here was the short list of the image I had to choose from to include in the final advertisement.

Selecting the final tag line

The 2 tag lines I had to choose from were

" This man saved a life today"

and

"Some of us were born to be Heroes."

in the end I chose to go with the later as I liked the idea of linking blood donors to heroes.

Processing the final shoot

I edited my images in lightroom first reducing the colour temperature from 5600 kelvin down to 5295 to cool off the images giving a fresh, cool tones. I then reduced the saturation to around half and increased the vibrancy to just over 60%. I increased the blacks by about 20% to increase the shadows and make the image a little more contrasty. I then increased the fill light to about 40% to bring back some of the details lost when I brought up the shadow detail. I then increased the clarity to 90% and reduced the exposure of the raw file by nearly a stop leaving me with the final processed image I wanted. I then sharpened my images and exported them into photoshop where I did a light retouch removing any major spots or blemish’s using the spot healing brush

 

This is the original image

 

This is the same image after I had finished processing it. 

more behind the scenes of the final shoot

This image demonstrates the tape I put around the flash lights to flag them from my subject and the way I flagged the backlights from hitting my background. (the image was actually taken from a different shoot but demonstrates the same technique)

I stood behind my subject to better see the positions of my lighting to fine tune it to how I wanted it to look.

Shooting my final images

The images were shot in the studio using a large polystyrene board which had been painted black as a background and using a 3 light set up. I lit my subjects from the front using a 24” softbox which I positioned directly in front of my subject, raised slightly higher than the camera angled down at about 45degrees to the subjects face. I then flagged off the edges using black flags which I held in place over the softbox leaving only a strip of light in the middle which lit my subjects face in the middle and then rapidly fell off evenly on both sides of the subjects face. I then lit them from the back using 2 400w bowen studio strobes which were flagged off from the black background by black flags and positioned slightly behind my subject at an angle slightly more than 90degrees.

I then flagged the edges closest to the subject applying black tape to the edge of the light to control the spill and reduce any flare caused by aiming the strobe light towards my lens. This created the specular highlights and rim light present at both sides of my subjects faces. I fine tuned these lights until the highlights wrapped around the edges of my subjects faces but didn’t continue on to their nose.

I continued to shoot portraits of my subjects getting them to pull silly faces as I snapped.