Luke Hemsley is a photographer from Perth known mostly for his film photography of cars & automotive. We worked with him on a short promotional peice documenting his process.
Production
- Videography
- Direction
- Audio
Post-Production
- Editing (Online/Offline)
- Cataloguing
- Colour Grading
- Audio Clean Up
- Music + Licensing
This shoot was definitely a fun one. We showed up to recce the spot about an hour before Luke came just to kind of feel it out. We had a rough sequence in mind of what we wanted to go down (Luke arrives, takes some photos, watches the sunset) but that was about it.
The location is in Fremantle which is great because it's kind of always beautiful during sunset as it's a port city facing west so you get a lot of drive-able areas right next to open ocean.
The only downside is that you're never alone in watching/appreciating/filming/photographing the golden hour, pretty much wherever you go.
Fortunately, Luke had a little something up his sleeve because his car is small enough to shimmy between two traffic control poles that most cars aren't able to, giving us mostly free reign and very little distractions between his car, the ocean and the sunset.
Once we had lined up what the sequence would be, it ended up being pretty much Luke doing his thing and us doing our thing.
We'd stop and do a couple of takes when necessary, but otherwise pretty much what you see is what you get.
The photos he's taking while being filmed are the ones that are showing up on screen towards the end of the video.
The only point of friction we had throughout the entire shoot was whether to shoot across the beach or towards the beach for the final shot. Towards the beach objectively made more sense; more backlight from the sun, more beach in the shot and the front end of the car rather than the back. However, Ayu pushed hard for the opposite, side-lit, no beach, and facing away. It was a moment on set where sometimes you just have to let the directors' vision speak and see where it goes. And fortunately, we did. It ended up working out much better for the sequence which is made very apparent as soon as you see the final shot when the sun has dipped behind the horizon and the car is driving away from the camera.
What otherwise could have ended up as being a little bit awkward and forced, ended up being a perfect visual metaphor for "Ichi-go ichi-e", or "one time, one moment",
as the car drives away through a digital viewfinder as the twilight sky replaces the golden hour present just moments before.
not reading all that? fair enough, enjoy some 8mm film footage instead:
