Location Scouting a Lost Boy Shoot Part 1

Finding a little free time our creative director (JamesC) decided to break away from his usual duties of admin and management to do some location scouting for a 3 part story built around The Lost Boys concept, with his trusted point and shoot camera he walked along the promenade and into town to find some specific locations that would fit the brief and in doing so has settled on 3 distinct locations that will add a touch of drama to the shots (with a video being planned to add to the drama of the scene).

“The images themselves will be built around derelict buildings, waste ground, and a fractured symbolism of nature. Each model will have his own story that will hint at both the inspiration of Pans Lost Boys to the more dystopic visuals of the backdrop to fit with the ‘council estate boys’ look of the models.”

A full and detailed explanation of The Lost Boys shoots can be found by clicking here. We are really excited by the concept and the fact we have the support of fellow Creative Director Shakti Sood founder and brand manager of The Sons of Adonis and the amazing Lord and Berry makeup line, both seeing the potential of what we are working on.

Lord and Berry Touch Up Blotting Powder

When it comes to makeup for fashion Lord and Berry has set a benchmark that is hard to beat, the range is a staple of various fashion weeks and additions like the Lord and Berry Touch Up Blotting Powder add not only to a professional backstage kit for LFW but to that of the working artist such as our creative director JamesC whose eye for commercial detail is drawn to the brand for its credentials, quality, and an array of savvy products designed for fashion and available to the world.

From a purely practical stance, JamesC prefers pressed powders for their convenience: you can slip them easily into a working kit box/bag, they take up less space, and in the form of the Lord and Berry touch up powders they offer a simplistic solution to minimizing your kit without losing quality. The 3 shades are ideal for a working artist kit and offer a multifaceted and cross-gender solution to finishing a look for print or video.

• TRANSLUCENT: it is a white-toned powder meant for just about every skin tone because it turns invisible when applied to the skin.

• BANANA: it is a yellow-toned powder which works its magic to offset any redness, illuminate the skin, neutralizes dark under-eye circles, and set makeup – and the best part is that it works on any skin tone.

• JUST PEACH: it is a peach-toned powder designed to give brightness to a dull complexion, to neutralize blue tones and set makeup. It works on any skin tone.

On a purely practical stance, these 3 powders have been tested at various fashion weeks making them perfect for a downsized kit and suitable for a working professional who needs quick solutions to on shoot problems. *Well worth noting that a pro discount is available making this an even more appealing brand for the professional arena including those in bridal, film, TV, and fashion (from live events to print).

To learn more about the range see:

Lord and Berry Website.

Lord and Berry Instagram.

Lord and Berry Facebook.

Lord and Berry Twitter.

Editorial Makeup Submission Featuring World Fashion Media News

Frustration is really kicking in for a lot of the creative talent out there (understandably) and it is gratifying to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel for those who are returning to salons and for the photographic community this also means we can push forward with plans and marketing strategies with fresh, exclusive content for the digital market. The online magazine and long-standing supporter of the Lost Concept, World Fashion Media News has been hard at work creating new avenues for creative talents and revamping the website to better showcase artistic work from catwalks to individuals. Submitting your work has become a much easier prospect in the last few years and we (like many others) are getting our work collated ready to submit, promote and showcase our inhouse creative talents such as creative director JamesC.

While we are going down the exclusive route there are options to have editorials, covers, and tears with magazine logos that can be used to create not only a stellar portfolio of work at a low cost but a chance to experiment with new ideas and stretch your artistic muscles.

Our primary focus is going to be about exclusive content and will be shown across websites and as you can imagine with our ties to the HOD TV team, Horror concepts will be played alongside some other fashion portraits and of course we will be doing a full series of images and conceptual work with exclusive to our websites in amongst this.

In our capacity as a creative team and with the support of our partners in Nepal Film Production, we are structuring this to be a wider campaign based concept with a series of long and short term goals to be met over the next 12 months.

*To learn more about submitting to World Fashion Media News Click here.

Project Planning With Nepal Productions

We really do owe a debt of gratitude to our team in Nepal especially Digbijaya Bharati from the Nepal Film Production team, who has been patient during the lockdown and happy to continue working via Whatsapp so we can as a team which gets our work moving forward, not just with media but other elements and promotional avenues we are exploring. As our regular readers will be aware our plans are geared toward Intenet TV, in particular, the horror and Thriller genres with a sideline in the editorial market to boost marketing via social accounts and strategic placement of ads.

For us, it has become planning and strategy that allows us to focus our energies in new areas of business and develop further as a business although at heart we still love makeup work and our creative director JamesC is part and parcel of the ongoing plans, we are all on board with changes being made to the business and have some smaller elements such as the facecharts being brought back in (the JamesC facechart will be available again via his site soon).

We already have several scripts in play for development in the realm of TV and will be working on a range of new images and behind the scenes work while the weather is good and allows us flexibility, the new guidelines for production work will be a big part of how we move forward ensuring everyone involved is safe and the work is handled carefully.

As our previous blog has stated we are going to also look at skills development for our in-house team to allow us to multitask and keep the crew requirements to a minimum and safe.

*Change in how the media and fashion industry will be massive and we are doing all we can to ensure that our staff is safe, the team (both the UK and South Asian) are up to date on the latest changes.

Taking Online Courses

Continuing education has become a much easier prospect in the last few months with courses available in a wide array of subjects including suitable training for those in the media industry that professionally add dimension to your work and are well worth taking the time to do (roughly one hour for health and safety training). We are really pleased to say that our creative director and head of makeup JamesC, has completed and passed the Safe Sets COVID 19 Level A certification on behalf of The Lost Agency to ensure that our team is leading the way forward and ensuring that all of our staff are safe at work.

We would really like to thank the team at The Makeup Armoury whose blog details options of different training including Barbacide certificates for salon and freelance workers.

At this time we are advising our partners to share and take the course themselves for future work and we will be taking additional online training in other areas of both the fashion and media business to expand on our creative work and give our team an extra edge as we move forward in 2020 into 2021 allowing us to be more cohesive and offer a better service to our clients.

Our plan is to take on photography and creative direction courses to augment our work in editorial and later add to this with courses in direction for film and TV.

Pushing forward we do recommend and will be asking for the Safe Sets COVID 19 Level A certificate as part of working with our team *as will many companies so it is worth doing to ensure that you are up to date with your health and safety training.

Creative and Editorial Research Featuring Lola Makeup

Over the last few weeks, we have been working quietly on new content designs and running not just our various blogs but also some research into styling for planned shoots (suggested by our media partners Nepal Film Production and coordinated by our creative director JamesC), focusing our energies on commercial concepts and the behind the scenes elements that will be showcased as part of the planned expansion of The Lost Concept, more on this later. What has really hit the right marker for us and our partners in style terms is the look of the Lola Makeup channel on youtube where whose campaign videos are a stellar example of how it should be done to showcase not just the cosmetics but the minds behind the work. A leading light of the Euro scene for both fashion and media, Lola Makeup is a brand that has captured artists' attention, designed to meet the needs of the consumer with the attention to the details that draw in makeup artists of all stripes.

For us, as a creative team, we are working on new editorials and do have some work to be edited and will be using both the still images and behind the scenes as a part of our upcoming marketing alongside our partners at Nepal Film Production.

We will be working on more designs over the next few weeks that will incorporate different elements of beauty and editorial from a commercial stance and nodding to more creative concepts that will push the boundaries a little more and take us away from the simple and clean into the more fashion show look (the Lola cream shadow pencils will feature heavily in this).

At the moment for simplicity and ease, we can work with smaller teams on editorial concepts, we are focused on fashion but we do have other projects in the works and as we push forward behind the scenes is going to become a larger part of our work which we are really excited about.

To learn more about the Lola Makeup range and why we are using them see:

Lola Makeup Website.

Lola Makeup Youtube.

Lola Makeup Facebook.

Lola makeup Instagram.

Starting The Ball rolling

The last few months have been a creative dead end for many in the arts and now we are starting to see a relaxing of the rules and feel that we can open up a little more our core UK team has begun putting together small shoots and will continue building up a whole new portfolio including videos for an upcoming new site and as a part of the current slate of Lost Media work, all headed up by creative director JamesC. At the moment we do have a small amount of work that is being edited (inhouse) being prepped for submission to a very specific selection of magazines and we are looking closely at the options for creating our own logo and branding around the Lost Concept that will expand our reach further into the future.

Naturally, we are still working with our South Asian contacts especially Nepal Film Production who has been instrumental in the most recent changes to what we are doing and helping us with details like our web presence which we are extremely grateful for.

Keeping the flow of work going has been difficult but thanks to a combination of social media like Instagram, Facebook messenger and of course Whatsapp, we have been able to continue working and the Lost Project, in particular, has been really gathering attention and support thanks to our resources and contacts in New York at the Sarah Gargano Agency, who are a fantastically professional team to work with.

Overall, the ideas that we had to set up our own small studio and continue have been shelved instead we are going to focus our energies on a more mobile version of this with our main work being done on the computer anyway from the running of the various sites and social accounts we have to the editing work for our shoots it has become more about practicality as we think of ways to minimize our footprint and give us the freedom to travel, move quickly and of course provide a service.

Lost In The Horror

We are in the midst of what would (and most likely will be) the source of many new thriller and horror film and TV plots, the lockdown is the start of a refresh of the industry which we will be taking full advantage of and have been in all honesty planning around for a long time as Horror is the genre of choice for us both artistically and commercially, more than ever with the support of the HOD TV team (submit your films here).

For us and our partners, Horror has all the potential we need to feel fulfilled as an artist: our actors can play the character and develop the narrative, the writers are loving the scope of the human mind for fear, for our creative director JamesC, it’s about the makeup and of course our remote teams it’s all about the locations (our Nepal production contacts are delighted with this idea). There is something in this for each of us to get our teeth into and we have room to work together as a collective to push an agenda that suits us and it does also open up other potential aspects that could be realistically deemed vanity projects with a slight commercial twist.

With many magazines and film festivals dedicated to the Horror and Thriller genres, we can easily utilize different suppliers and resources to keep the costs down while maintaining the gore and chills.

Talking of Keeping the costs down, it is fairly straightforward and can be augmented by companies like Monster Fx or the supply house Red Carpet FX (who stock our favorite IPA palettes from Ripper FX).

The future is in our hands and we are taking our own direction on this with plans in motion to do both editorial/print work in this darker style and of course TV projects that will be at the heart of the work, a commercially driven but still artistically driven venture.

Keeping The Creative Flow Going

While many are rethinking their place in the industry and how to progress, ranging from selfies to blogs, we at The Lost Creatives are working hard behind the scenes and taking time to reevaluate (as you will guess by our previous blog). A complete overhaul is underway and along with our partners in Nepal, this is pushing us to think about how we want to be seen in the market.

As you can imagine, social media plays a heavy part in this and it is really exciting to see Nepal film Productions opening a new account with Instagram which is a step forward as we see the restrictions being lifted and people slowly returning to normal and business becoming a part of their thinking again.

We are also putting the social media plan into action and will be reviewing our work and creative plans, led by our creative director JamesC, with a view to pushing forward which as we have previously stated means we will be looking at investment into editorial marketing with tears and covers which we are excited about and have to admit the design process alone is worth it to help clear our collective headspace.

Our film and TV plans are on standby and we are extremely grateful that we have HOD TV on our side with their platform for horror and thriller distribution. Which we fully intend to make use of and recommend those who have projects they want to sell check the link here for submissions.

As time moves forward we are going to push to show more of a commercial stance and stay away from more theatrical styles as we just feel it doesn’t suit the working look we want to create. From the portfolio plans to the film and TV projects we have in mind our goals are strong and we are pushing forward progressively and with mutual support from our remote partners.

Creating Something Fresh: A Portfolio Journey

In the last ten years, the media industry has changed and we focus our energy on creating curated websites and social media accounts that (especially in the UK) are designed to be our portfolio and showcase our work. However, we at The Lost Creatives can see that changing and the physical portfolio book will make a comeback for those in makeup and photography in particular. There will always be a three-tier system in place when it comes to business and we have our goals and understand that we will need to go back to an earlier incarnation of how we worked.

We have been quietly discussing this in the background in our WhatsApp calls and Facebook messages as something we need to really push forward with hence our editorial plans. *Because we work primarily in-house (with thanks to creative director JamesC for his support) we can keep the team small and with the options available in the digital market it is possible for us to completely change our outlook to fit a new audience which is a major plus. We will maintain the websites as part of a larger marketing campaign but for meetings, we want to be able to show our potential clients or collaborators a book of work that will allow them to look at images which admittedly we have not done in many years and it is an exciting challenge to be in a position to create something fresh.

For this we do have a plan of action in place and have started working out exactly what we want and which magazines we will shoot for, there will be two portfolios of work focusing on key areas of the work we do and keeping them distinct and separate.

As our primary focus with any shoots will be marketing we will be starting with our fashion and beauty folio which will be geared toward tear sheets and covers (we have done some digging and can make this happen fairly easily), with a film/TV book being secondary and scripts being chosen to shoot for festivals to start and of course an array of Commercial projects that will include a showreel of the work done.

Something to consider as we move into a whole new arena of work in the coming months will be how to stand out in the market as an artist.

Choosing our Editorial Path

Editorial is often used as a means to test new styles, try new techniques and work with new people but if you are smart it can also be a way to create new business and a smart proactive tool that will draw attention to your business and bring new clients to the table. Which for us is the primary reason we are being selective about the magazines we are choosing and calculating our approach carefully and strategically to ensure we get the maximum from the work. When we look at a magazine we have certain criteria that we are looking for and markers that will put them higher on our list:

• Branded tears.

• Covers.

• Minimal costume requirements.

• Minimal image requirements.

• Cost of submission.

Starting with these factors we then spend time pouring over their content and style as part of phase two, of our plans, we prefer simplistic and clean looks with priority going to men’s magazines at a ratio of two shoots for our male models to one for our females. *The reasoning for this is simple, we have core team members who are actors and models and they are our priority in marketing as this will have a knock-on effect in the spread of our work over time with social media advertising. Our preference is for digital magazine first but we will (for certain clients) be working toward print at a later stage. The reason we prefer online is fairly straightforward: reach. A print magazine can have an overall reach of 20,000 in terms of people buying the magazine whereas digital can move into the millions of views between social feeds and website stats, which for us makes it a more profitable and farreaching prospect.

At this point we have it broken down to a total of 2 magazines that are being marked as priority for us and will be used to promote the business overall building to what will be a series of shoots with our remote team headed up by creative director JamesC.

Choosing our editorial path is in truth is 1 part art and 2 parts commercial with our team plotting out how we can maximize the potential of the work undertaken.