Behind the shoot

4 min read

One colour, one gesture

[ Journal ]

Red Room was built on a single rule: one colour, one dancer, and no second idea allowed on set.

Hollis & Rye sent a pair of trousers and one word: movement. Everything else was ours to decide. We painted a small studio wall and floor the same red, hired a dancer instead of a model, and agreed that nothing else would enter the frame.

A single colour sounds like a limitation. On the day it works like a metronome. Every pose is measured against the same background, so the only thing that changes from frame to frame is the body.

[ Journal ]

Let the trousers do the talking

Wide trousers only read when they move. We shot at 1/500 and asked for jumps, falls and slow turns, then kept the camera at hip height so the fabric filled the lower half of the frame.

The best frames came after the dancer stopped performing for us. Around the second hour the movements got smaller and stranger. That is where the sitting and lying pictures come from.

[ Journal ]

Editing to one colour

Red is unforgiving in the grade. Push it and skin turns orange, pull it and the room looks like brick. I set the red once on the widest frame, copied it to every picture, and only corrected skin after that.

If the colour changes between two frames, the story changes too.

[ More notes ]

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