Final Two-way Mirror shoot

The previous shoot granted me technical success regarding the lighting and the reflections. But there were a few things that needed addressing before I tackled the final shoot. The framing was a bit too tight in the previous images – sometimes just cutting off the top of my head (part of this is due to the fact that some of the poses involve a tension throughout the body, and hence my head tends to vary its position within the frame). The simple solution to this, was to zoom out for the shoot and then crop back in tighter, in post-production.

The other issue with the previous shoot was that my performance felt a bit ad hoc. It was essentially just a test shoot - but it drew my attention to the fact that I needed to plan my poses. I was aware that I had already rehearsed the poses (without really meaning to) in my engagement and play in front of a normal mirror, and there were certain expressions that I wanted to capture. I wrote a list of my ideas: 'make the face as vertically stretched as possible', 'as squashed as possible', 'every feature big and swollen', 'small and thin', 'this side up and the other down'; and then drew up a quick guide with simple diagrams or words to represent my ideas. This then served as a rough guide and reference point for the performance. It wasn't a complete instruction manual, because spontaneity in front of the mirror ('going a bit wild') was a useful method in this production.

Here's a contact sheet of the majority of the shoot (minus some errors and repeats). The difficult decision-making process of which ones to exhibit now begins.

I also shot some video on the day. The first is a video performance alike to the photographs. It is a combination of the rehearsed expressions from above, and spontaneous play acting similar to that found on the Gorgeous Georgeo video blog. The second video is a technical explanation (or 'making of'), of how the two-way mirror images were produced.