Bones And Marrow. Katariina Kuure (L-R), Joni Nyberg and Tuomas Jaatinen.
Alright! So it's 2017 and I had a chance to kick things off with a really nice one-day shoot with a local band called BONES AND MARROW. Instrumental skeletal rock is what they play, but you probably figured that out already.
I ended up on this shoot because I took some guitar lessons from Joni last summer and I didn't know him at all. He's a great guitarist and plays in a bunch of bands and teaches a lot as well. We got to talking and turned out that he wanted to get some video done for this project. I don't shoot video at all, but I got him together with the really talented and all-around great guy Kalle Jurvelin, who I have done a number of projects with. Kalle is a pro and I knew he would get a kick out of this. (Two kick-ass examples of Kalle's work: a video for DARK COUNTRY and the trailer for TORNI—THE TOWER.)
Joni needed promotional imagery for the band and that's what we decided to do. Kalle would shoot the video and I would shootthe photos for B&M. They need stuff for online, posters, cover art and whatnot as they are just getting ready to build their visuals.
I sat down with Kalle to write a script for the video because I can help out with that. We hashed out a few ideas, talked to Joni about them and got our shit together over the Christmas. It was going to be one day of building for the band and one day of shooting. We would shoot the video and the photographs on the same day.
Photo: Akukon
We shot this in the concert hall of the Oulu University of Applied Sciences. It's a medium-sized space for live music and we were able to take advantage of the house lights for the video and 'live' photography. The band set up their stuff on stage and I put up a white seamless on the floor in front of the stage. Having a lot of space meant we could easily have two sets going at once: even though we would be taking turns shooting video and stills, we could set up, figure out angles and lighting and all that in the meantime.
Let's talk about the look. I had never seen B&M play. I only had a few of their songs on Spotify and two cell phone shots of Joni's and Tuomas' make-up. The guys had a get-up that's kind of shock rock meets Grim Fandango (which I love). Especially Joni's make-up is very graphic and just by getting a feel from all of this I decided pretty early on that this would be in black and white.
Still there are plenty of options besides black and white. Do I want to go high-key? Low-key? Shoot them on black? White? Black background with rim lights? Spotlight on a dark background and them inside the circle? Tack sharp or through some plastic to blur and distort?
In the end I decided to go with the white seamless. It's a page out of Zack Arias' playbook for sure. It's a classy look and versatile for later artwork. A graphic designer can easily swap the background for whatever later, a graveyard, Ninth Circle of Hell--anything their black heart desires.
Anyway! For some reason I was thinking of this photo that Nick Fancher had shot of Deafheaven:
Deafheaven. Photograph by Nick Fancher.
It's a gridded flash on the band and a flash on the background (in my case, two speedlights on the background and one on a boom for the band). He went very tight on the key light and let most of musicians' bodies go to deep shadow. I wanted to have something going on in the shadows and also I wanted to have Bones And Marrow standing on the seamless for easy compositing later, if any needed to happen. (By the way, Fancher is a great photographer and has put out a ton of photography how-to's and tutorials online, especially his Studio Anywhere project. I will be back to steal from him in another blog post!)
Time was also short on the shoot. Shooting video always takes fucking ages which meant I couldn't have that many looks happening for them without having it become a hassle. (I did try some motion-blur stuff, but decided it was too time-consuming for now.) So white seamless for the group shot and single portraits!
Bones And Marrow, this time sans instruments.
Some single portraits of the musicians.
Joni emailed me and Kalle their logo and I did a quick mock-up of what some options for show posters and cover artwork and whatnot. Now I am not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, this is just apukoululaisen Wordillä tekemää, but it gets the point across.
Soon playing at a venue near you!
A square composition.
Oh, and Dad was there for the light test, here standing in for Kata the bass player. 'Just checking the exposure, no need to pose!' They sure didn't.
Good times were had! Kalle is editing the video (which will feature a short scene of a photo shoot with me in an 'acting' role) and it will be out soon. In the meantime, here is a sample of the photos I shot of Bones And Marrow performing.