30 October 2011

Oriental beauty

Ana is a professional dancer with her own dance school “Apsaradhe” mostly focused on oriental dances. Dance is everything in her life and it is clearly that any form of body movement is what makes her tick. When she dances, she forms her own world around her and completely separates herself from reality. For this shooting, as a location we have chosen Maksimir - big and famous park in Zagreb.

It was still morning when preparations started…with awaking smell of hot coffee. Iva was doing Ana’s makeup, and I was listening to the oriental music Ana is going to dance on, putting myself in the mood. (Yep, let's call it by its real name - I was having fun and relaxing while they were working! :) ) When we started taking things to the car, we realized how much of them there really was...still, somehow we managed to shove it all into my beautiful Twingo (that I really love because you can turn it into a van if you need to!). Finally, we have arrived! And then, problem - we had all the stuff with us. There were only three of us and the first set was (of course) quite far...no other option - heavy lifting once more! We were going through the park, carrying several plastic bags, three pairs of Ana's dancing wings, radio, my photo equipment, Iva's makeup and a big chest filled with a really heavy chain (Which is one of my props that I always try to fit into the scene, but somehow becomes an excess. What do you think happened this time?) During our walk through the park several men passed, they all found it very amusing...but God forbid that they might help us!

We positioned next to the lake. I wanted to get Ana on a big stone cube that was close to the shore, wearing a wonderful white costume with silver wings. What I had in mind was to show her as a person in her own world, surrounded by water and nature. She was to be a goddess, doing her enchanting dance. People started gathering and soon we had quite an audience!



Wonderful blue dress, sounds of orient and a wooden bridge. I wanted to include the bridge into the composition as a metaphor of her "dancing into her own world". During the shooting, Ana decided it might be a good idea if she lied down on the balustrade. As it came out, dancing in a lying position on a balustrade is not the easiest thing to do. Luckily, she fell on the bridge instead into the creek! :)


Ana put on her Indian dancing costume. This time we didn't focus so much on the dance as we did on the facial expressions and gestures. Ana was all religious and calm showing us what Indian dance is about.


Finally, the end... or some sort of an end. We had one more location to go to and one more set to set up. But, it wasn't in the park. So we had to drag all of our precious belongings back to the car. Only this time they were no longer neatly folded into the bags. They were all over the place...thus, Ana suggested we take her big blanket we had with us and put everything on it and then pull it all the way. And so we did: three girls pulling a really big blanket with many exotic things across the whole park. Nooooo, people were NOOOOT looking at us strange at all! :)

As for the next shooting, that is a whole different concept so you will hear about it in my other post. ;)

Kisses
Petra

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