Fortress
Finding Jade
Some projects start with a concept looking for a face. Fortress started exactly that way, and finding the right face changed everything about where it went.
A good friend, a fellow photographer, recommended Jade. He knew the kind of work we wanted to build and told us straight up that she had the energy for it. He was right, and not in a small way. We brought her a handful of concepts we had been sitting on, ideas brewing for who knows how long, and she did not just pick one. She nearly signed up for all of them like she had already lived inside each character before we ever pitched it to her.
We landed on Fortress as our debut project together, with the understanding that it would absolutely not be our last. The original vision was a character in the spirit of Harley Quinn, someone who had built a fortress around herself, except the twist was the direction of the protection. This was not a fortress keeping the world out to protect her. This was a fortress keeping her in, to protect the world from what she had become.
We found a warehouse location just outside of Austin that had more room configurations than we could count. Most projects would have made use of several. We needed exactly one. The jail cell.
Behind The Bars
Makeup is not our trade. We will say that upfront. But applying fake blood on ourselves for this shoot made the entire process feel real in a way that pure direction from behind the camera never quite achieves. When you are physically part of the chaos you are building, the energy on set shifts.
Shane Production joined us for this one, running a Sony FX30 to capture behind the scenes footage while we focused on the stills. Once the cameras started rolling, so did we. The photoshoot portion turned into an unexpected lesson in lighting control. A jail cell is a small, enclosed, reflective space, and light bounces off nearly every surface in a room like that. Positioning the key light became a constant negotiation, and we leaned on post production to clean up what physics did not cooperate with on set.
Jade made every bit of that effort worth it. Every single shot, every single wardrobe and emotional change between setups, she delivered completely. She was built for this role in a way that is genuinely rare to witness firsthand. Watching someone fully embody a character that started as nothing more than a loose idea in our head is one of the best parts of this job, and Jade gave us that in full.
Once stills wrapped we moved into the video portion, which doubled as a field test for the DJI RS5 Pro, fresh out of the box and getting its first real run. Retiring the Moza that had carried us through years of work was not an easy call. It was the right one. The RS5 Pro proved itself fast, and the motion footage from this shoot reflects it.
Every Frame Counts.
