Developing Treatments & Mood Boards
Lesson 16 from: The Ultimate Photo Storytelling WorkshopFinn Beales
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Developing Treatments & Mood Boards
Lesson 16 from: The Ultimate Photo Storytelling WorkshopFinn Beales
Lesson Info
16. Developing Treatments & Mood Boards
Lessons
M0 - Introductions
1Series Introduction
01:30 2Introducing Finn Beales
01:34 3Q&A Coffee With Finn & Alex
09:48 4Welcome to the workshop
02:31 5Gear
06:56M1 - Storytelling 101
6What is a story?
03:50Essence: Location
05:19 8Essence: Character
03:52 9Essence: Events
04:51 10Photography as a Medium
02:27 11Recap
00:44 12The Importance of Shot Type
08:53M2 - Prepare For Success
13Prepare for Success
00:59 14Asking The Right Questions
05:18 15Identifying Your Locations
03:27 16Developing Treatments & Mood Boards
07:19 17Creating a Call Sheet & Shot List
04:59M3 - SHOOT
18Meeting Your Subjects
04:19 19The Board Room
10:12 20Location Recce
05:24 21The Roadtrip
06:13 22Surf Day
06:14 23Shooting Technique 1: 50 & Stitch
07:13 24Shooting Technique 2: Tracking Shot
05:36 25Alex Shoot Day
13:36M4 - Edit. Better.
26Introduction to Editing
03:21 27Making Selects
08:52 28Grading in Lightroom
09:15 29Analog Film Elements Using the Exposure Plugin
09:58 30Building the Story
10:59 31Using Squarespace to Display Your Work
08:55M5 - Q&A
32Q&A: Q&A: Editing
25:44 33Q&A: Pricing Your Work
22:36 34Q&A: Shooting
33:20 35Q&A: Photography Today
24:17 36Stuff That Alex is Curious About
14:38Outro
37Alex
02:09 38Finn
01:12 39What Alex Learned
02:12 40Bonus: Finishing Touches in Photoshop
13:04Lesson Info
Developing Treatments & Mood Boards
Okay, all's going well. We've agreed, budget parameters. We've agreed, creative specs. We've identified our locations. Where do we go from there? My next step is to create mood boards or a treatment. I wanna shift away from the email language and I want to get into visuals. I'm much better talking in pictures than I am with words. So developing a treatment deck is a really good first step to getting on the same page, to getting your client on the same page, as you are. Sometimes I'll ask my client for a mood board themselves just to inform my treatment. It's worth an ask. They may have something already developed. They may have some example imagery that you can use to inform your treatment. I'm gonna walk you through an example treatment that I might send to a client. And within that will be an example mood board. Also, within that, I may start developing a color grade for imagery based on image research. I also reference that coming up in the next session (piano notes) Okay. So I'm go...
nna walk you through an example treatment that I created for this cool and vintage shoot. This document goes to my client before they've actually commissioned me. This is, you could call it a pitch deck in a sense, it's a treatment it will show the client how I approach my photography and also, how I will approach their brief. So it always opens with, and I'm gonna go and just expand this, always opens with a title slide. So it's my logo. Pretty clear who I am and what I do. Second page is a picture of myself and a brief introduction about me and why I'm interested in this campaign. It's just a personal note. You don't have to include this, but I quite like it, sort of personalizes the treatment. Second page is my approach. So this details things like how I would scout locations ahead of my shoot. How I would work with models, especially if they're not professional. How working quickly on set to keep things looking natural might be important. It also references my thinking regards looking for leading lines within the landscape, creating third dimension, drawing viewers into the scene. I also touch on color grading and retouching within these paragraphs. Talk about establishing color tones and managing client expectations from the outset. I finish up here saying "my aim throughout is to ensure we end up with a cohesive set of campaign images that resonate with the target audience, listing emotional response from the viewer," that's at the heart of most of my work. Then I go straight into a mood board. So this is example imagery that I have pulled off the Internet that I think may suit our campaign. I'm gonna jump out of this PDF now and just show you a couple of websites that I used to find that imagery. This first one is called designspiration. It's really, really old. I've been using it for many years back when I was a graphic designer. It basically is a hub for creativity and a tool for collecting and sharing ideas, much like a search engine but it's sort of curated Google images. So I'd bang in here some search terms, vintage, Land Rover. It's gonna throw up a whole host of search results. You know, I like the look of this. I like this color. I like some of these old shots. This will just, all of this is inspirational material. Similarly with vintage surf ads, surf posters. This will give me ideas for compositions that also give me ideas in color palettes. I'll also use Pinterest. Wealth of stuff on here. It's easy to overlook Pinterest but it's actually a really great way to search visually. It's got a big user base, so there's lots of imagery on there. And also, a good old Google images. So what I then do is pull these images into my treatment and just build out a mood board. So this just gives my client a good idea of where I'm gonna go with this shoot. Good mix of angles. Good mix of transition images, reveal, details, lighting concepts. Also, as you can see down here with this surfer guy, I love this light leaking effect, and I might use that as a retouching reference for the shoot. Remember, this is a cool and vintage vibe. I really want to tip this into a sort of Polaroid, old school kinda look. So moving on from that, I'll also use the aforementioned websites to build out my color grade. And for this shoot I've been looking at old Land Rover adverts, old surfing adverts. So in a similar fashion, I'll build out a mood board for the color grade. And then within Photoshop, I use this nifty little trick that I used to use when developing color palettes for websites. I go to filter, pixelate, mosaic, make the cell size about 150 or even bigger maybe, click OK. And that will average out the colors within my color grade inspiration mood board. So then I can use the color dropper and start to pull out color values that I can use for my grade. I might drop these earthy tones into the split toning panel so that the shadows are more tipped towards this color. And the highlights tipped towards this color. So what this is doing is creating a grade based on the heritage of my product. So it will feel correct. It will feel right, when it comes to the final grading images. Final page is my biography. So this is just a quick rundown of who I am, who I've worked with. Always include a select client list, lends a little bit of gravitas to who you are. I'll also list my agent, my website, my Instagram account. And common courtesy is to say thank you after everything you do. Very British. All being well, your client will deem you a professional enough photographer to handle their brief. And we will go through the next steps in the process, which is developing a shot list and a call sheet to run your shoot from. (piano note)
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Ratings and Reviews
Brent Morris
Fantastic My thoughts on the storytelling workshop. The short is; it’s fantastic. The long is I loved all the details covered, from shot types and the ideas behind them to the call sheets and shot lists, and the whole process. I felt like I had a better understanding of how to schedule a professional shoot and I really felt like I had a much better grasp on many ideas and concepts, and I believe I’ve been able to improve my photography with them, so thank you and Finn. It really is fantastic.
Oswaldo Martinez
A path to better stories Very happy I got this workshop. Finn and Alex do a great job at teaching highly useful methods and specific advice to help you improve your own work, and more importantly, tell better stories that are meaningful to you.
Tommaso Selleri
Simply the best This is simply the best workshop out there on photography and storytelling. Finn is awe inspiring and so real and authentic. A pleasure to watch, a joy to learn from such master. I really hope a volume 2 is coming soon! Thank you for this one!
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