PEOPLE MAGAZINE COVER X PORSHA WILLIAMS
A few weeks ago, a producer from People Magazine reached out to me and said she wanted to recreate scenes from Waiting To Exhale with Porsha Williams and asked if I was interested. Being an ’80s baby, I started watching R-rated movies around 1995. Although I may have been too young, I watched Waiting to Exhale several times. And if you have ever seen the movie, there is no forgetting the classic scene of Angela Bassett setting the BMW on fire. Fast forward 20 years, and I had the opportunity to put my own spin on that moment.
Creating these moments was not an easy lift, and it took the work of an incredibly talented team. We took a house that was almost completely black (every interior wall was black, and most of the floors were black) and designed/created these moments. The set designer had to go wallpaper crazy, and the lighting team had to dig deep into their bag of tricks. The glam team was tasked with bringing Porsha’s, aka Bernadine, to life, and they murdered it. And my job was to pull all the pieces together and direct + capture Porsha channeling her Exhale moment.
I don't shoot a lot of editorial work, not because I don't want to, but because the opportunities don't come my way as often as commercial/advertising work do. I told myself late last year that this was an area of the business where I wanted to pursue more opportunities, given the creative freedom and space allowed in the editorial world. The overall risk and experimentation you can do editorially do not always translate in the advertising space. And even bigger is the time you have with talent, with the priority being the photoshoot, give more space to play and create something special.
We're going to let this cook for a bit, but I’m looking forward to more editorial projects in my future.
