ESCAPE

PHOTOGRAPHY EKATERINA MALTSEVA - STYLING & ART DIRECTOR ANASTASIA TUMANOVA - H/MUA DANAYA CHE - MODEL AKSINIA AT AQUARELLE MODELS

ESCAPE; a project shot during lockdown exploring the world within the digital sphere

Ekaterina Maltseva;

"I believe that good preparation matters. And our team was carefully preparing for this project during a long period. We understood that this photoshoot would still be an experimental one with an unpredictable result. We wanted to reduce the number of possible surprises, so we made a detailed presentation with comments, storyboards, makeup sketches, and notes regarding set design for each look. We even had a preliminary conference call the day before the photo session, and we tested everything we were going to use.

But! Despite all of that, when I started taking pictures (making screenshots) I realised that I was controlling practically nothing. Theoretically, I could decide over the shooting point, light, suggest some poses, but it was still completely different from the situation where I would be standing in front of the model. And for me, the most important thing is the quality of the picture. Then I thought for myself (or rather talked myself into it) that if we can not control the quality of the picture in such a shoot, it means that it should not really matter.

Imagine a world of content where most of the photoshoots are organised in this way. Of course, we are no pioneers here. There already were a lot of such shoots long before 2020. But given the situation where we are limited in the choice of tools and instruments... does this mean that visual content will change forever? Or will we happily go back to the studio and the locations?

Now I keep asking myself more and more how much will the world change after this self-isolation."

Aksinia wears vinyl bodysuit PRETTY LITTLE THING

Anastasia Tumanova;

"From the beginning, we simply wanted to try to make an online photoshoot. As we felt bored without any other projects going on during isolation. But after we had a talk and agreed that Zoom and FaceTime were just tools (and not very good ones to be honest) we realised that we wanted to do something bigger, and by that we mean a full-scale artistic story with an idea behind and an interesting implementation. And not about the quarantine, please. Of course, the on-screen quality is not great, but it would be strange to expect that you can paint the same way using a simple pencil compared to oil paints. Therefore, we had to consider our possibilities and limitations and come up with solutions that could work great in our situation.

I'd sent a suitcase to the model. Besides clothes, it contained different lamps and light sources, a projector, a lens, and a piece of fabric, and all of that occupied half of the suitcase. Basically, we used everything I could find in the current situation. It was a bit uncomfortable that the number of clothes and things was limited, and that I could not quickly adjust or change something. The photoshoot took 4 hours, but after it, we had a feeling that we had spent all 10 hours on set. Probably we were affected by the constant strange feeling we got from the process. Well, my eyes were hurting from the screen since everything was stuttering from time to time, it was very hard to see everything on the screen and I had to zoom in and watch carefully the details. The sound of the screenshot really helped us because it reminds the sound of the camera shutter, so at least somehow we could understand that it was a shooting going on. And of course, the role of the model in this session was simply unreal since half of the functions fell upon her. No doubt this project can be called a 100% creative collaboration."

Aksinia wears high-neck top A.W.A.K.E MODE; skirt COLLUSION; sandals PRADA

Danya Che;

"When Anastasia wrote to me and proposed to take part in this project, I felt some rejection instead of fear. I mean, how am I supposed to do the makeup? To mail the makeup products? Or does the model own something similar? And if the model does not know how to hold a brush in her hands? So I refused.

As you can see from the result of our work, this is a story with a very happy ending. My curiosity overcame all the obstacles (which I wish to all of my colleagues because now is the time to try something unusual and different). We immediately agreed that this photoshoot is an experimental session for the whole team. But the level of preparations of the rest of the team quite overwhelmed me. During one preliminary call, we went through almost everything, and a few hours later a courier with all the things necessary for the project was already at the model’s place.

For me it was another challenge, i.e. to think through make-ups and hairstyles in such a way that one; a person with minimal training could do them and two; they would easily change one into another so that we would spend minimal time on changing looks. Already during the session, my fear completely disappeared. For me, it was like a “self make-up” lesson with one change; we moved from the dressing room to the Internet. Of course, the quality of the picture was failing a little, but it was a small issue none of us could solve. The model precisely repeated all the movements and worked so quickly that it took us 10-15 minutes to prepare the make-ups.

I think this is a great alternative to get our blood going and keep us on the hop considering the period of self-isolation and almost complete stop of our professional activities."

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