Dos & Donts | Learned the Hard Way

I was thinking about yesterday's very, very fun but bordering on disastrous (at least on the styling side) shoot and I realized that there are so many little things that don't occur to you until you're actually there, having your legs bitten by ants and trying to get a model's hair to part in the middle and realizing you left your comb at home--which is a 4-5 kilometer drive from your current location. 

 I've decided to write down a couple of the things that I learned about planning photoshoots and managing stylist practicalities that might come in handy for any of my fellow-aspirants who are learning these things in a trial-by-fire manner; DIY-ing the styling experience, so to speak.

1. Do Prepare A Fixed Schedule

This applies especially if the business you're shooting for is your own business--making you both the stylist and coordinator. Yesterday, we ran late because we winged a lot of things: we didn't allocate specific time slots for fitting the looks and doing make-up so as a result, it cost us extra for transportation rent (overtime) and caused everyone to be unnecessarily pressed for time.

2. Do Invest In A Belt Bag

Trizh and I kept on missing stuff yesterday--this ring, that headband, our cellphones--and this made things terribly inefficient (or at least not as efficient as they ought to be). The thing about styling people is you always have your hands busy--fastening a pin or emergency-hemming shorts--and a belt bag is perfect because it lets you go "look Ma, no hands" and focus on what you ought to be doing.

3. Don't Forget The Water & Snacks

This is crucial for outdoor shoots in Philippine weather (as I so painfully realized yesterday afternoon). People work well when they're well hydrated and are as comfortable as they can be; depriving them of badly needed H20 and energ-izm just breeds hot heads and anxiety. 

4. Do Assign Tasks

While everyone yesterday did a splendid job despite there no being real assignments--aside from the models and our dear photographers, of course--I think this is something that could cause potential disasters for a team not quite as lucky as ours. Everyone should be working and helping each other out so it would be helpful to delegate them tasks so that they can concentrate on one thing. Certain roles (excluding our photographers and models) that we played yesterday were the following: stylist (me and Trizha), BTS (behind the scenes) documentation point person (Sammy & myself), ingress/egress point person (Keav & JC). :) 

I was thinking it would also be handy to have a sort-of production assistant to help deal with things like the refreshments that might be forgotten at home as well as face towels and tissue.

5. Don't Overload On Your Concepts

Because this shoot was the product of me and Trizha's endless mental stimulation over these past few months the things we wanted to do were a little bit crowded--from dry-ice fog machines to soap bubbles to stereoscopes--and deciding last minute what to do upon realizing that we were pressed for time was a pain in the neck. So yeah: start simple. We ended up going with Trizha and Cat (her sister, one of our beautiful models)'s very innovative (and super fun) dry-ice fog machine which went very well with the feel of the photos.