Behind the scenes: Celebrity portraits at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival

The Abu Dhabi Film Festival was October 14-23. I’ve already posted about live web-casting the festival’s opening and closing ceremonies, but that’s not all we were up to that week! During the days in between, I was able to shadow photographer Fabrice Dall’Anese, the festival’s official portrait photographer, as he and his crew created images of the various international celebrities, regional celebrities and jury members that were attending the festival. The National’s Saturday “M” magazine was planning on running a large spread of Fabrice’s portraits from the festival, and I was asked to do a behind-the-scenes-of-the-photo-shoot video. I was lucky in that most of the celebrities that he was photographing didn’t mind me filming during the shoots. We unfortunately weren’t able to film Uma Thurman, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and many of the other major names in attendance, but most of the film directors and regional stars were all very accommodating. Fabrice and his crew were also wonderful to work with, and it was interesting to watch them make such unique portraits using just two lights and whatever small corner was available at the Emirates Palace. I’m not sure how many different portraits they did in total, but we were able to film 17 photo shoots. I filmed most of them, and my colleagues Deepthi and Razan each filmed one as well. I wanted to keep the final video very tight and fast-moving, so not all of the subjects that we filmed are in the video. My goal in editing the video was to make something as sharp and as stylish as the behind the scenes videos one might see on vanityfair.com, and a video that would hold its own against Fabrice’s photos. I’m not sure if it’s quite to that level, but I’m very happy with how it came out.

Link to the video at thenational.ae.

Link to the video on the Abu Dhabi Film Festival website. The video is also currently posted on their home page.

Here is a gallery of all of Fabrice’s portraits from the festival. And here is a little story in The National’s news section about the photographer that ran on the same day as the magazine.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 30th, 2010 at 8:35 pm and is filed under All Videos, Portfolio, Videos and tagged with Abbas Kiarostami, Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Ali Mostafa, Doug Liman, Fabrice Dall'Anese, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lu Ye, M magazine, Matt Reeves, Mohamed Al-Daradji, Ozwald Boateng, Tamer Hagras, The National, UAE, Xu Cenzi, Yasmine Al Masri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.