A Sneak Peek into the Face of The Day

For our documentary project, we decided to feature the Face of The Day (FOTD) campaign which is a visual dialogue where a new face is uploaded each day on social media to highlight different issues, be it social, historical or political.

We started off our documentary project with a meeting with the art director and creator of the FOTD campaign, Mr Yang Derong, at his studio on the 18th of October to discuss about his campaign, and for us to explain to him what our documentary project was about and what we aimed to achieve.

Through this meeting, we managed to clarify our doubts about his campaign and his line of work in order to develop a detailed structure to kick-start our production. Together with Mr Yang, we brainstormed different story angles that we can use for our documentary. We also shared possible social issues that Mr Yang could attempt to address through his campaign such as plastic wastage and dog meat festival. After coming to a consensus on the direction and story angle that we will take for our documentary, we had to work around our different schedules to arrange for 2 different filming sessions.

Armed with equipment such as the Lumix GH4 camera, zoom and lapel mic for filming, we completed our shoot over two days of filming.

Photographer of the FOTD team, Jet Ho (right), helping Mr Yang Derong (left), the creator of the campaign, with the styling.

The first filming session took place on 1st of November, where we headed down to his studio situated at Outram Park. When we first arrived, Mr Yang was in the midst of his photo shoot for FOTD, thus we started off by filming some b-rolls. Afterwards, we conducted 2 interview sessions, one with Mr Yang and another with his photographer, Jet Ho.

One of the FOTD make-up artist, Antonio Cheng (left), working his magic on Mr Yang Derong while a member of our team attempts to film some b-rolls.

The second filming session was conducted on 4th of November where we continued filming more b-rolls as well as interviews with the rest of the FOTD team, Carol Yoong and Antonio Cheng, who are the make-up artists of the campaign.

While all interviews with the FOTD team were completed by the end of the second filming session, we realised that most of our b-rolls were shot in Mr Yang’s studio. As such, in order to vary the variety of b-rolls in our documentary, we decided to film b-rolls outside of his studio to feature the social issues that he mentioned such as tray return and plastic wastage.

Through this experience, we managed to get advices for different film angles from their photographer, Jet Ho, and learnt many historical, social and political facts behind the different faces that Mr Yang created. Cross-generational learning also took place as we shared our experiences and possible ideas that Mr Yang can embark on for his FOTD visual dialogue.

In addition, we also came to appreciate the amount of effort the FOTD team took to create each visual masterpiece. For instance, the make-up for the individual faces could take up to 2 hours or more, and much effort was done to continually touch-up in between the shoots to ensure that the photos produced were satisfactory. Also, each photo had many retakes in order to bring out the best of each face.

Despite the long hours of makeup and coordination amongst the team, they managed to complete many different faces throughout the day without breaks or food. Their level of dedication and professionalism inspired us to give our all for this project so that viewers who watch our documentary can see for themselves the amount of hard work that goes into this FOTD campaign that they work on outside of their jobs.

We are nearing the final lap of our documentary production and we hope that we managed to successfully convey the passion of the FOTD team. Please stay tune for our next blogpost where we will finally showcase our Face of The Day documentary. In the meantime, do head on over to http://faceoftheday.sg/ to learn more about the different FOTDs or follow @faceofthedaysg on Instagram to be updated with new faces daily!