PART 1 - Sketches and Concept
BTS pre-production sketches of “The Taken” with Josh Andrus
A look at how “The Taken” came to be.
Our team here at Ruby Bird Studio was in the process of planning an event with Hasselblad and Broncolor to demo new gear and show off our amazing studios in the Greenpoint Terminal Building in the Historic Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. The concept was Ruby Bird Studio x Hasselblad and Broncolor Space Voyage, and would take place on an alien planet. We were asked by Hasselblad to create a series of images for the event using their latest Medium Format H6D 100MP camera. We wanted to document the power and brilliant color space of the new digital back, as well as the new Phocus software and wifi capabilities to transfer these impressive raw captured images in real time.
The series idea came to us late one night at the studio during a discussion on how to make the event a memorable and visceral experience, we jokingly considered using a spotlight as a tractor beam to randomly abduct members of the audience. This idea made us consider, “How would the everyday person react to being abducted by aliens?” We began to sketch characters associated with everyday archetypes. We wanted to express our subjects last thoughts as they were taken from this planet and from their highly cultivated and controlled routine, and approach the unknown.
The Series, ‘The Taken’’, was a fitting title and each individual image title reflects the characters final thought in reality. While some are stricken with fear, others fight the pull of artificial gravity, another embraces this new adventure with eagerness and hope.
Jim Reed over at Hasselblad was kind enough to let us shoot the entire project on the new H6D100MP medium format camera, and Scheimpflug hooked us up with all the grip & lighting to produce the entire job and event. Our team at Ruby produced the entire shoot, from root to fruit - concept, art direction, production and retouching. The portraits were shot over two days here at Ruby Bird in Brooklyn in Studio 510 and the backplates were shot over the course of a week in our Greenpoint neighborhood.
