I decided to keep the nightmare section of the project close to home this time instead of big trips across the country so I went for a walk around my local park and looked for things which could look scary or nightmare worthy after dark. I came back with a few different locations and began to plan out each shoot.
I aimed to do three separate shoots and wanted them all to look very different but still to tie into the nightmare theme of being shot after dark and to be in unpleasant locations or to convey something scary / uncomfortable.
Behind the scenes
It was another very cold night and I was in tears with the pain - but it's all for a worthy cause!
For the first shoot I taped fairy lights to a teddy bear to look like red eyes and hid the tape with a surgical mask, hinting at the pandemic. I then positioned the bear in a bush that I had seen earlier in the day and lit the bed and bear with some rechargeable work lamps. The result was this image.
For the second shoot I bought a big bag of creepy crawlies and got my dad to position them all over me while I was lying in the bed, aiming to make the viewer squirm at the thought that I was asleep and unaware of what was all over me. In order to get the angle i wanted for the shot I used a step ladder and bendy tripod to attach the camera above the bed so that I could get an arial shot. Again I lit the scene with work lamps from different angles and a pull lamp looped over a branch of the tree in order to light the top of the bed.
For the last shoot of the night I had seen some wooden carvings of foxes which looked quite cute in daylight but i knew that with some artistic lighting I would be able to make them look quite eery in darkness. I used work lamps again but this time covered them with a red piece of cellophane in order to produce a deep red glow which made the foxes appear more scary. I set the shutter on a long exposure of 15sec in order to allow me to move position and for the camera to record both of my positions - making the image appear as though I've woken up into a nightmare.
