002 | The Long Weekend
I hadn't planned this as a narrative when I shot it, and I'm so happy with the results.
Short Short Stories is a column focused on my personal projects: stories told on film and motion film with an accompanying script, and they’ll be released in chapters (though they are not connected in storyline). We look at how the project came together: sending out the initial emails; casting the right person, filling the creative team, the equipment used on set. It's a case study of sorts.
Sometime last December (summer in Australia), I shot a concept called The Long Weekend in my home in Sydney, on 35mm and super 8. This concept started off as a test to see how the lighting performed in this house which I moved into two months before (I had the idea of shooting a larger personal project in there). Being a small shoot, I had a small wardrobe planned, with four looks, and it wasn’t meant to be anything more than a simple test.
But I’d been getting tired of shooting only test shoots, where the outcome didn’t aim for more than images with some reel-like super 8 video. Since the released Summer Pastoral, the feedback had been positive, that I knew instinctively that’s the direction I wanted to head towards — at full steam, but sometimes these things have a pace of their own. And I didn’t have that plan going into this shoot.
Approaching any shoot, including a test, I needed a concept. I generally don’t like shooting without one, even if it isn’t for anyone else; I realise it helps me direct better when I know overall what I want. For this project, inspiration was in the idea of a long weekend spent at home, happily so; it came from all the times I’ve heard people saying “I need a holiday after my holiday”. So what if someone chose to spend their long weekend in leisure in their home, lounging about on the couch, reading the paper with a coffee until midday, hanging out in the kitchen eating fresh fruit.
On shoot day, I hadn’t considered this story to become a scripted narrative. At most, I could see the story in my mind, I knew it was about someone lounging about their home on a long, sweltering weekend, eating fruit. Weeks after I received the film rolls and super 8, when I had been editing the footage in Premier, I felt the footage felt incomplete. It was done, practically, close to done, the cuts and crops where made, but I couldn’t export it. There was something missing. So I wrote down what I imaged the atmosphere to feel like in the story to accommodate the post in the Instagram’s description box. But that wasn’t quite it either. I thought about what the character in the story would be saying, who she would be talking to, and wrote down a draft, then edited it here and there, looked it over a few times, before finally sending a DM to the model (who had long left Sydney and was in Europe) to see if there was any chance she would possibly be interested in recording a few lines over voice recorder and send it to me. Lucky for me, she did.
I kept the team small, and consisted only of myself, the model, and hair and makeup. We began shooting around midday to catch the sunlight as it went above my house and start to fall through the skylight in the kitchen. We shot in four hours. I pulled styling from Ilio Nema (a young Sydney brand with high-quality material and beautiful styles; I picked these up directly from the brand), Sommer Swim (I contacted the brand for a loan and, instead, they gifted me two bikinis from a handful of months back, I was waiting for a cool idea to finally shoot them), and Après Studio (styling bought at their pop-up). I try to be mindful when borrowing looks from brands. I shoot with the idea that not only are they generous enough to loan out these looks when they have possible PR they can send it to, but that I want to show them my best work, their designs tied to my ideas.
Makeup and hair was kept natural, and I love and appreciate so much when a makeup artist nails natural skin. Rather than using so much colour for eyeshadow, lips, etc, natural skin was what was right for the story, and Johnny made her glow. Post-shoot, my boyfriend played guitar, his idea for a theme on a blissfully aimless long weekend. And once I had that, it all came together nicely. Enjoy the full story here.
Creative, photography, production, direction by Atorina Saliba | Model is Anastazja Romel at Chic Management | Hair and makeup by Johnny Beresford | Wardrobe supplied by Sommer Swim, Ilio Nema, Après Studio.
Equipment used: Canon 1v, 50mm EF lens | Canon AE1-program, 50mm FD lens | Canon 814 super8.