De Stijl.
Vision & Verve photo for Fort Worth Weekly.
In December 2019, we were asked to be interviewed by Fort Worth Weekly for a story that ended up being the cover story. When they asked for a photo of all 3 of us, we realized that we didn’t have a good photo of the entire group since Penny had been hired. There wasn’t much time to get a photo, so we just got a nice group photo in the upstairs of the new studio that Wesley has been building in his backyard, called Eureka Studios.
Wesley had an idea for a good group photo that we wanted to get once we would have more time. The concept was inspired by De Stijl paintings, and the White Stripes album cover for their album De Stijl, but we wanted to create it with translucent blocks of color floating in the studio.
To better explain the concept Wesley was picturing, he made a crudely photoshopped example so we could all work off the same page. Here it is below, along with the inspiration.
We got some lumber, cut it, assembled it into rectangles, and painted it black. We went to a local shop, Magic Etc., to get large studio gels that we stapled behind the blocks. The photo studio downstairs of Eureka Studios had just been completed and painted white. We bought white coveralls / overalls for the shoot to somewhat blend in. It took us a while to hang the blocks of color just right off the rafters and avoid reflections as much as we could. Then we set up our equipment for the group shot for some more context that we’re a film & photo production company.
We got some group photos in various arrangements, with each of us as the center of attention. And while we were at it, we took turns taking each others’ photos to get our own headshots to use. We all had a fun shoot, and it’s always a delight building our own sets for shoots.
