“silence” by noel eileen cover shoot (nov 2023)
Noel and I became friends while working at the same restaurant in 2021 and we bonded over our love for reality television and house music. She moved to LA to pursue a singing/songwriting career and she often shared the progresses of her works with me. Following the death of her father, she wrote a incredibly heartbreaking poem while sitting on the beach and about a year later she turned it into the lyrics of a house song that she produced as well! I was so thrilled and proud to be a part of this project.
The Mood Board / Inspo
Noel wanted to be facing away looking towards a busy background that would be the main focal point. I felt inspired by movement, lights and motion blur and I also wanted to incorporate lots of blues. We ultimately couldn’t decide between a beach or a city location so we settled on wandering Santa Monica, a solution that combined both scenery, and also the place we had met and frequented.
The Photos
We started at the beach right around golden hour and stayed through sunset until blue hour, capturing shots right along the water. As it got darker, we shifted our focus to the city lights and played around with colored LED gel lights along the cityscape. At the end of the night, the battery for the lights had died so we wrapped our cover shoot and grabbed a few more spontaneous shots using my Jeep headlights as flood lighting (last row) that would later be used on Noel’s Spotify page.
The edits
When it came to the design of the graphics, we wanted to take a simple, minimalistic approach to let the photography be highlighted. We played around with many different ideas and eventually decided to just leave it untouched with no text. These were a few of my favorites from the options.
