Look up / grab everything

Final editorial comp

This is a funny one. I'd had always liked the idea of messing with the physical principals we live our lives by. Toying with gravity, depth perception or mass dynamics fascinates me because my brain is so tied to these parameters, that when they are challenged, it somehow accepts a suspension of belief in a more complete way.

I always wanted to put someone on a ceiling or walking up a wall - the Spiderman fan-child in me will always want that - and the second I heard Pandas & People's song Grab Everything, I knew I'd found the right act for this idea.

carpark

The prep for this involved a little mathematics - I mean, it went out of the window in the end, but I knew that I needed height in this, that I wouldn't be able to get in a studio. Also, I needed to shoot this outside so, in the end, I decided to take the band and the crew up to the top of a local mult-story car-park that I knew had an open split level.

fun in colour

I found what I thought was the perfect street in Birmingham City Center, measured the distance from the base of the tripod to the wall and then approximated the distance the band would be from the ground to half way up the wall. I then took the width and flipped it to be the height and the approximate height to be the width and took the shot according to those calculations.

The problem was, the image looked distinctly un-sexy. The problem was the street in Birmingham - it was too deserted and modern. There was no real history and no cultural significance. Downhearted, I put the whole image on hold while I decided what I should do - I had toyed with the idea of just scrapping it until, walking back from a meeting in Soho, London, I found the perfect street. I drove back the next weekend (I was still living in Birmingham at the time) with my camera and took the shot. This meant my previous calculations were totally off but a little bit of photoshop 'warp' and it looked a whole lot better. As a final touch, I rotated the image to correct the viewers perception of the band themselves and I found the final look.