Xango Cover Shoot in Wisconsin!

23 October 2009, Reality Shoot

Just got the green light for publicity on one of my latest productions. Check out this post to see my version of a Wisconsin countryside.

Blogged By:

Bryan

When I was a kid, I remember playing with those brightly-colored farm toys, that would teach you the names and sounds of all the farm animals. I usually found them in doctors office waiting rooms, in that big blue crate next to the fish tank; you know, so while your little head was about to explode with constant earache pain, you could learn the beautiful sound a cow makes, OVER and OVER, as the wheel always managed to end on that wonderful milk-giving creature. I seem to remember lots of farm puzzles too. Most of them had soggy, rounded edges with teeth marks in them, which made it difficult to know whether it really was the right piece for that space after all. Regardless, the images painted on these toys always seemed very bright and vivid to me --quite surreal-- with wispy clouds, and perfect rolling hills in all directions. Even as I got older I knew they were just imaginative places...places that couldn't possibly exist in reality... or so I thought.

As I left my hotel room the next morning, after arriving in Green Bay Wisconsin late the previous night, I started having flashbacks of those toys. We had driven about 40 minutes North to a town called Manitowoc to meet with the client, and scout locations for my latest Reality Shoot production.The sky was unbelievably clear, with only a few puffy white clouds strolling along high and silently above our heads. We cut through several side streets that took us through sections of endless corn fields, and oddly familiar rolling hills. Some of those hills were striped with freshly cut lines of grass, spotted with the occasional chubby red barn, and a gleaming silo standing proud in the near distance. The realization that I was driving through the very source of the images from those children's farm toys of my past, was solidified as a gigantic tractor with massive treaded tires, (standing at a height of that just above our rental car), passed us on the road in the opposite direction. It shuttered by at a whopping 10 miles an hour, and included a friendly wave by its driver.

I may cringe at the thought of what those toys were coated with back then... after all they were played with by nothing but sick children all day long and thrown into a crate at the end of the day, but I can not deny the existence of a real place on this Earth that truly is like one of those toys, and puzzle pieces from my childhood.

Ironically enough, on the day of the actual shoot, it was pouring rain... yes pouring. With that in mind, try to imagine capturing "bright rolling hills", and "saturated red barns", with sky so dark you and your assistant had to block the camera and tripod from strong gusts of wind, as you waited for the self timer to trigger the shutter. Needless to say, I ended up shooting through the windows at the airport to get those clouds, just as we began boarding. So without further adieu I present one of my latest installments in the Reality Shoot portfolio... I give you the Welch Family!

ŠCopyright 2009 Bryan Niven

This image was created for XanGo, for their magazine "Go", and is featuring one of their top distributers Eric Welch, and his family. To see a larger version of this image, and for some behind-the-scenes video of the production check out my new blog I am working on here.

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