Four Letter Lie at the Stake

Now I remember why I stopped writing blogs... I suck at it. Well here goes. I'll start by showing the final image of Four Letter Lie burning at the stake.

Now, your first instinct probably tells you this shot is fake, and assembled in Photoshop with the band safely out of harm's way. Right? Wrong, bitches. While it's true I'm usually a safe person, and don't like risking injury, I'm also extremely lazy. And when it comes down to it, I'd rather see John Waltmann or Brian Nagan actually burn to death in my backyard than have to sit down compositing a shot like this together in Photoshop. So, here's how I went about doing it...

The shoot took place on 12/19/2006 in Mesa, AZ. At the time, I was living in a real dump of a house. I'm understating here to spare some feelings, but let's just say the backyard could give the Clampett's original home a run for their money. We had this fire pit permanently back there, and that ended up serving as the main fire for the photo. But how do you engulf a band in flames without actually hurting them? It's pretty simple really. Retardedly simple, shocking simple. It's just a little bit of trickery with perspective. For starters, I headed down to Home Depot and bought huge wooden stakes, rope, firewood, and a fire extinguisher. Once the stakes were setup, we arranged the firewood in a circle around where the band would be. I put the fire all the way around them, shot low from the ground, and it made it look like they were actually inside the flames. The actual fire was about 3 feet away from them on all sides. Here are some pics of the setup to get an idea.

Logan Doub and a surprisingly small fire pit

Paul Norris, Logan Doub, Conner Kelly from FLL

Four Letter Lie tied up

Logan arranging the firewood

Smoke was a huge problem

See? (notice Douche in the background)

Etti and Toivo masterfully handling that tarp

I had a lot of help on this shoot, and a lot of people annoying the crap out of me while it was going on. It was wing night, so the usuals were over for some halo after wings at native new yorker. Logan was helping with the firewood. Douche (his real name is Chris but everyone calls him Douche) was in charge of the lighter fluid. Looking back, I don't know why in the hell we thought it was wise to have him be in charge of that. If you keep up on my blogs, it's pretty much just as dangerous as trusting Joe DeFuria to operate the forklift on the FFTL shoot. 

Anyway, obviously we couldn't just light the fire and let it keep going. The band would get burned worse than when AP reviewed their first record. So we had to do it in spurts. Douche would douse the ring in lighter fluid, light it up, the band would pretend to be burning for a few seconds, and then Paul would put out the fire. I guess on the surface it SEEMS like this wouldn't be such a big deal. Each time we made an attempt, I was worried for the band's safety, yet we weren't getting enough fire. So I had Douche use more and more lighter fluid and newspaper. This was introducing a new problem. Smoke. Being the genius I am, I forgot to think about the effect the smoke would have on blocking the members of the band not only from the camera, but from my lights. So, in most of the shots pretty much all you can see is billowing smoke. 

But aside from that, we had these huge flames going everywhere, and the dozen or so people watching wouldn't shut the hell up every time there was a burst. And I was worried about getting too much attention from the many neighbors who would easily be able to see flames coming from the backyard and call the fire department. Remember I said it was wing night, so Blessthefall was there, Aimee, Gab and some other randoms. They're my best friends, but after a while I was ready to kill them. It's like, ok, we get it, there's a fire... the flames get big. you don't need to scream "oh my god" every time there's a burst. Although, to be fair the flames were getting pretty big, and were scary at times for the band. They really were troopers though. I've put together a little animated GIF of some of the outtakes so you can see how how the flames got (check the back ones behind the band) and you can see how the smoke was screwing me up.

Sort of an anticlimactic ending, I know... but nothing else really exciting happened. Oh except for Kevin getting mauled by my roommate's pit bull. 

Playing Catch-up

Hey everyone. So I finally bit the bullet and made a real blog. I'm hoping to keep up on blogging about my shoots with some behind the scenes shots and videos. It's been about 2 years since I posted a behind the scenes blog, so I have a lot of catching up to do. The good news is I bought a little video camera just for documenting shoots, but the bad news is I'm having problems capturing the footage. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the camera or my Mac, but let's hope it's the camera after all the Pro-Mac propaganda I've been spreading. 

I've been really busy over the past few years, and I've chosen a select few shoots to write about to get back to the current time, and then I plan to post blogs about all new shoots as they happen. 

And without further ado, here are the shoots that have happened already, that I'll be posting blogs about: Four Letter Lie, Calling of Syrens, Saosin AP cover, Soma City Ward, Every Time I Die, Chiodos AP cover, Head Automatica, Rise Against, Chiodos (again), Fall From Grace / Fear Nuttin Band, Finch, The Rocket Summer AP cover, Blessthefall, Confide, Mindless Self Indulgence, Escape The Fate, The Medic Droid, Every Time I Die (again), The Stiletto Formal,Rise Against (again), A Rocket To The Moon, The Frantic, The Maine, Sunset Shootout, and Back Ted N Ted. Woah, that's 26 blogs I have to write. The original plan was to do a blog about EVERY shoot. Thank God I gave up on that! I will TRY to do one every other day or so... but forgive me if I can't.