Tennyson – Torn

How does one recover from emotional wreckage? What are the steps that lead one from loss to rebirth and back to creativity and art? The first images that came to me hearing this song were of Luke standing in the rain at night knocking on the door, attached to something inside the home but locked out on the outside. But what then? The idea eventually coalesced into the simple act of doing the dishes—the most basic act of repairing the damage. We set up an HMI with diffusion through the window and ran a lot of haze in the kitchen to create a sauna-like, sun drenched morning moment. For the breakup, I wanted to establish a framework wherein the power of feminine intuition could read both ways. Was she bringing truth to bear on an ignorant masculine identity, or was she misguided? Before the shoot, Kathryn and I talked for several hours about how her internal compass would govern her impending decision while at the same time I gave Luke next to no explanation about what was about to come, apart from his being dumped. We shot the breakup moment in one take, then that night Luke and I spent three hours in the cold with him going back and forth on the LRT every ten minutes, until he was in the perfect window seat and I managed to track focus with the telephoto lens as he rode off into the night.

Red Scarlet
Joker 400w HMI w/ diffusion
Hazer