Motherland Chronicles #25 - Raven Girl
Photography: Zhang Jingna
Hair: Junya Nakashima
Makeup: Gregg Brockington
Model: Germaine Persinger
Photo Assistants: Ngoc Vu, Ernie Chang
Feather dress from Xiaolin by Julia Chew
Necklace by Harlequin Romantique
Backdrop from Savage Universal
Blog photo credits:
Work-in-progress of dress provided by Julia Chew
Behind-the-scenes by Ernie Chang
At the beginning of Motherland Chronicles I made a few posts calling for designers and models to collaborate with on the project. Julia was one of a number of very talented people who reached out (and she's only 18!), offering her collection for me to shoot if I wanted.
Amidst her designs there was a feather top that I was immediately in love with, and so I asked if she would be open to customizing something exclusively for the project... and she said yes!
I went over her designs and pointed out things I liked from her existing pieces, then sent some references and suggestions on what would look good for what I had in mind for the photo. She came back to me with a sketch of the design and her plan for the dress in terms of materials a couple days later.
And then it was madness in getting the dress done.
1000+ feathers and a few months later it arrived in my mail.
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| The finished feather dress |
It took me another 2 months before I found Germaine to model for the picture.
And then of course because my shoots can never be completely smooth-sailing, Germaine fainted on set. Ahahahaha. /shot
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| Look at all that pretty curls before we fluffed it :D |
So I shoot in my apartment and use the living room as a home studio. Because of how much I was travelling I thought perhaps I wouldn't be shooting as much at in NY this summer, and it'd be fine if we don't buy an AC cuz Motherland pictures are always single shots and don't take very long.
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| Junya's probably thinking, "Jingna stop asking me to do 50 options and make up your mind!" |
And so of course once I was on set I only focused on the shoot only and kind of forgot to feed everyone food and water. :( Plus the dress had a corset bodice underneath so it must have been pretty tight on top of being really warm in the studio with no AC.
Towards the end of the shoot Germaine was like "Um can I have some water..." and then before any of us could react she started to lean back looking like she was going to sit down, but promptly went supine on the floor like sleeping beauty in all her gorgeousness and head of hair.
We were like omg omg oh crap are you okay!? And she was out for a little bit longer than I expected so I panicked a little for those very long, stretched seconds (it was maybe 5-10 seconds, but I'd thought she'd immediately come to).
When she regained consciousness she looked a bit lost and asked "Oh hi was I out for long?" and after the phew and water we all started laughing and commenting on how gracefully she fell hahaha.
I bought an AC immediately after that. :(
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| Goethe's Sämmtliche Werke! ♥ |
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| I like adjusting details on set personally to get things perfect. And Harlequin Romantique necklace! ♥ |
All in all besides the incident it was a great shoot and I really enjoyed working on the picture. I'm super happy and can't gush enough about Julia's dress, the necklace from Harlequin Romantique (which I used as headpiece for MLC #2), the Monsoon collapsible backdrop from Savage Universal (used in MLC #12, #18, #21 and a few others), and the Goethe book I bought in Toronto a few years ago, which I just knew would come in as a beautiful piece of prop one day. Ahh it's perfect.
Toby's picture of the week also features Raven Girl telling a giant baby (and I mean GIANT) stories from the Goethe book. But creepy picture is creepy.
In other news, we're hitting the half year mark for Motherland Chronicles next week! Can you believe it!? I can't believe we lasted this long. Like, seriously, I've never been so consistent in my life (besides air rifle practice and my time in primary school, probably).
I kind of want to do something uber special for it but unfortunately I'm going to Pennsic and even with a new shoot I might not have time to retouch the picture in time. :(
Sigh so many sad faces in a blog post, but you can tell I'm pretty darn happy right? I can't wait to get Kickstarter for the book going. If only I can find the time to sit down and look through our video footage sighhh. Well soon, we're almost done designing the MLC logo!! :D
And! Half year (almost)! Hooray!!