OH, ALREADY THESE ANIMALS! PROJECT “WE LIVE ON ONE PLANET”
To draw attention to the protection of endangered species of animals is a worthy goal. First of all, it was her who was persecuted by the famous Moscow photographer Oleg Tityaev, taking part in an unusual charity project “We live on the same planet.” However, curiosity played a significant role. To remove actors, athletes, TV presenters painted under the most different animals, birds and other our smaller brothers is not often brought. Ksenia Sobchak, Anton Komolov, Alexey Mitrofanov, Roman Trakhtenberg, Mikhail Grebenshchikov – more than 50 media people reincarnated into the “bestial” image.
On the one hand, the question was to draw attention to the actual problem, on the other – to make a bright interesting project in show business. The result of symbiosis is the project “We live on one planet”. I was invited to take part in this project as a photographer, and body art artist was Anastasia Durasova, well-known in this field. Initially, we planned to limit ourselves to images of animals from the Red Book. But, a person can be decorated not in every animal. The image recognition also played a significant role. Therefore, the range of smaller brothers was expanded to wildlife in general.
Our first “victims” agreed to become a producer Nastya Kalmanovich and singer Misha Grebenshchikov. For Nastya, we chose a more feminine, cat-like image of a snow leopard. And Misha was masterfully decorated in a colorful bright iguana. At the same time, he so artistically portrayed her – crawling, jumping and jumping on a log specially designed in the studio, bit the scenery from the leaves, and the shooting was entertaining, and the photo came out bright and interesting. These two test shots were the starting point. Looking at the result, the other stars are much more willing to cooperate with us.
The shooting itself was quite a shocking event for the participants. The easiest thing was to work with the actors, because they are people accustomed to play, ape and portray anyone. Difficulties arose with musicians and sports stars. But if we somehow could ease the task for athletes by choosing images for them where to hang, jump and they had the opportunity to play their part thanks to the movement, then it was difficult for singers and singers. In addition, before starting to “wriggle” in front of the camera, playing his little performance, it was necessary to undress and endure the lengthy procedure of body art! Therefore, the atmosphere of stress, shock and drive was present on the set almost constantly. Ksenia Sobchak even came to the studio in full confidence that all this was a joke and had been looking for hidden cameras and a hiding film crew for a long time. But, being convinced of the reality of what is happening and allowing me to repaint myself with a zebra, I got so familiar with the image that I went out into the makeup and in the guise of a zebra I went further to defile in Moscow.
The main technical difficulty of implementing the project in life was that we decided in principle to abandon the processing of images in Photoshop. Naturally, with the exception of “painting” some elements of nature: 50 shots with perfectly-built decorations would significantly exceed our budget. Therefore, sometimes additional leaves in the frame appeared later. But in terms of shooting the man himself, there was no digital processing! The idea was to create an image of the animal directly on the set – the horns, ears, tail, etc. were attached really, and not with the help of computer art.
A difficult task faced Anastasia Durasova. It seems to be a lot of animals. But, for example, it is almost impossible to decorate a person in a horse. While the same zebra, tigress, monkey have quite recognizable features. Naturally, all women wanted to be cats to show their plasticity, grace. Therefore, on the cat images lined up! With men it was easier – paint, they say, in whom you want! Roman Trachtenberg, we originally planned to present in the form of a rhinoceros. But instead of a rhino came a monster. Therefore, he was urgently repainted as a monkey.
But it was not enough to draw all this, to make the scenery. Before the person there was also a task to artistically depict an animal! It was clear that, for example, the writer could not completely transform into a fox (Oksana Robski diligently “played” her). Nevertheless, it was necessary to look for such angles, so that a person became as close as possible to his character. This was achieved by a huge number of duplicates. Here Trachtenberg behaved insanely artistic in front of the camera!
