We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Matteo Mescalchin about their original and creative creative photography design work. Matteo Mescalchin is an award-winning communication designer, that makes our world a better place with their original creative photography works.
Matteo Mescalchin ("MM") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work Bedtime Story 2 creative photography . Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
MM : The main idea for this project came to me in a dream. Over following days I spent some time refining the mental picture I had envisioned and started looking for a real place to create the scene as mentally pictured. Time went by and I put the project in a stand-by mode (as I do sometimes with personal works) waiting for the right time to take action. Than came the day when I’ve been kindly invited by Lighttools.com to work on something suitable to show my use of their products. Being myself an enthusiast user of soft light control tools I was really honored to hold the task and I thought that was a great opportunity to realize my project while showing how to achieve the visual style I was after. On the next step I discussed the visual concept with my team at digitalmovie. Everybody in my team were enthusiast with the idea so we all dove into the project right away. Thanks to my brother’s skills and network, I had a nice location available as well as model, bird trainer, painter, crew and everything I needed in a matters of hours. My goal was to create a series of photographs describing a surreal scene of a young girl painting something like a globe.. doing her painting though, the girl was supposed to pick the colors from a beautiful bird. On my visual metaphor the girl stands for the new generation taking care of the future of our planet inspired by Nature’s beauty and colors. Complementary visual subtexts are about kid’s imagination, simplicity, hope and also about the special connection between kids and animals. From a photographer’s perspective I’ve designed the lighting of my scene with the goal of creating a nice atmosphere, a bit surreal ambient light and yet a perfect tone dynamics on the key elements of my composition. Colors have been also very important as strong connections among the three: the kid, the paint and the bird. On the main shot I used a total of 6 lights. Main source from top was Chimera 5feet Octaplus with 40° Egg Crates, 2 rim lights Chimera super pro plus positioned behind the line of subjects, one active fill light from down below the camera, a square reflector for the effect on the ladder, finally a soft spot light was coming from the right hand side. All that would have offered certainly quite a different outcome if I wouldn’t been using powerful light control tools like Egg Crates. In facts I used light occlusion tools to accurately control soft light exclusively in selected image areas. I designed exposure ratios in order to sculpt the visual elements accordingly with my imagination and that’s magic to my eyes.
MM : As photography lighting designer my main focus was to create a good looking scene using visual depth, nice separation, strong detail and eye pleasing color tones.
MM : It took a few days in preproduction and planning, one full day shooting and maybe a couple of days processing and retouching final images.
MM : As mentioned, this has to be considered a self assigned project although sponsored and supported by my own studio as well as by Lighttools for showing the use and effectiveness of their lighting tools.
MM : Young photographers interested in lighting and maybe in improving their light control skills.
MM : This is my second project telling about kids, dreams, hope and fantasy… this is the reason why I called it Bedtime Story 2.
MM : The use of real talent and real birds in building a surreal and dreamy image.
MM : I really enjoyed to work with great bird trainer Pietro De Gasperini, Artist Illustrator and painter Francesca Dafne Vignana, Videographer Michele Piazza, my brother Andrea Mescalchin as production manager, and my team at digitalmovie.it
MM : Working with kids is kind of challenging as you need to adjust your time table to their need and that’s the easy part of getting them to collaborate.. add to that having a real bird flying around among lights and grip.. I think those have been my biggest concerns.
MM : Being my original design for lighting, photography, concept and style I though it properly represents my professional profile in such a competition.
MM : Please visit my website for more on this project including behind the scene videos and video interviews on lighting design. Thank you.
