Animals Taiwan Calendar Shoot

Last November I was contacted to see if I was interested in shooting a calendar for Animals Taiwan. I have done some video shoots for them before and was keen to help promote their excellent shelter again by raising funds through the calendar and hopefully raising awareness at the same time. Animals Taiwan is an organization that promotes responsible pet ownership and helps rehome rescue dogs in Taiwan.

 

 

We had a lot of things to plan as we had dogs, contortionists, drag queens, yoga practitioners and various other colorful people for the shoot. The common theme through the calendar was cars, so we also had a range of awesome cars, including a Porsche, Ferrari, MG, and Morgan. We only had access to the cars for one day, which meant the entire shoot had to be done on that day. We were planning an 18-month calendar, so this was not an easy task to shoot 18 scenes in a single day while trying to schedule everyone to be there when the light was right for the outdoor scenes.

To get everything to run smoothly, I draw up lighting diagrams for each scene. But on shooting day the flash sync ports in two of my strobes stopped working, which meant that I needed to rearrange all the lighting to shoot in slave mode. This changes things a lot as in slave mode, the receptor cell has to be in line of sight of the light that is triggering it to function, which severely limits the positioning of the lights. It also limits how they can be positioned outdoors as the sunlight wreaks havoc on the receptors ability to sense the triggering light.

I used a Canon 6D with a Canon 24-105 mm f4 lens. For lighting I used three Godox SDI 250 strobes in two brolly boxes and one 180 cm parabolic umbrella. The only exception being a shot at the riverside where there was no power, so I went with speedlites. Besides the riverside shot, the other scenes were inside and around Autocheckers, a garage next to Animals Taiwan.

The idea I was going for with the images was an animated painterly style with cinematic framing. The final calendar was launched last month as an 18-month calendar running from July 2015 to December 2016.

 

Taipei Times covered the launch of the calendar here: Help for the Helpless

 

If you'd like to support the homeless dogs of Taiwan by buying a calendar, make a payment into the Paypal account at donations@animalstaiwan.org and e-mail Liza Milne at liza@animalstaiwan.org with your delivery details. Prices are below:

 

Some pictures of the calendar launch party

 

 

Shooting Video for Animals Taiwan

 A few months ago, a friend, who I'd worked with on a few music videos in the past, asked if I'd like to shoot a video for Animals Taiwan—an organization that rescues abandoned dogs and helps them find new owners. The idea of the video was to raise awareness about dog adoption as well as informing the public about dogs which are not often adopted in Taiwan, such as black dogs, older dogs, dogs in wheelchairs, and three-legged "tripod" dogs.

Models with the dogs at shoot

We filmed six segments over a period of two months. The production was crazy but a lot of fun as we had all kinds of elements in the video, including drag queens, bikers, fashion models, soccer players, a fire breather, kids, and course lots of dogs.

You can see the results below.

Shooting for Haxstrong T-shirt Catalog

The lovely Schoombee family posing for Haxstrong shoot

My friend Gregg Haxton is an overall all-round awesome person. A few years ago he was in a terrible motorcycle accident and landed up in a coma for two months and losing one of his eyes. He made a tremendous recovery despite of his physical injuries and partial brain damage. He fought his way back to health from a condition where many people would have given up all hope. He is a truly inspiring man.

Mei posing for clothing catalog shoot

These days, Gregg still has not fully recovered from some of the injuries, but has a whole new outlook of life. He now runs Haxstrong, a charity that helps people who are in need of medical care both with financial and moral support.

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Due to me living in a different city I'm not able to volunteer with Haxstrong's everyday operations. So I was delighted when I got a chance to help out by shooting some catalog photos for the T-shirt range they produce to raise funds. These have been used in flyers and posters so far but we should be working on the full catalog soon. Some of the models I work with on a frequent basis and friends were kind enough to support the shoots by modeling pro bono for the shoots.

Bean striking a pose for clothing catalog shoot

 For more information about Haxstrong, visit the website at http://haxstrong.org/ or the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Haxstrong