The Making of the “10” Photo

 

One of our activities for our club’s tenth year anniversary was the formation of a big number “10” with our cars on a large field or a large parking lot. The idea was conceptualized by our exuberantly active returning member, Ven Rojas. It was his idea that the formation would serve as a commemoration of this historic time, it would serve as a group activity for the members, and the results would also make for nice pictures for a coffee table book that he’s also trying to put together for the club.

After much deliberation as to the time when to undertake the project and where, we gave Ven our full support for his idea and he proceeded to scout for a location. Our first preference was the polo field of the Manila Polo Club which has served as the home of our regular monthly breakfast meetings for the past 7 years. However, we could not find a vantage point high enough to position our cameras for the shoot. Moreover, the timing of this idea happened right in the middle of this yearfs polo season and because of these reasons we had to rule out the polo field as a venue. An alternative location that Ven was able to find was the large rooftop parking lot at the S&R Price Smart shopping center which also had an elevated camera position at the building beside it.

In the meantime, the idea had already been presented to the members over the mailing list and members had started discussing the various configurations on how to form the “10”. A joke went around that we should just wait until next year since “11” would be easier to form. Among the more serious ideas was to have a “digital zero” which wouldn’t present too many problems to form because of its squared off shape. But there were some who were adamant in having a circular “0” for its aesthetic appeal, and according to the proponents of this perspective, “if we’re going to do this, we may as well do it the best way we can. No matter how difficult it may be.”

Sunday, March 4, the core group of organizers and planners, Ven Rojas, Chito Frondoso, Carlo Ablaza and I had a meeting at Pancake House, Rockwell to plan the formation of the cars. Chito asked Carlo, who has a very extensive collection of scale model cars, to bring 30 of his 1:64 scale cars which we could position on a table to represent the project. At that meeting we formed the model cars into various configurations that would represent a “10” just to see how they might appear in real life on the day of the shoot.


 
After that meeting, we proceeded to the S&R rooftop parking lot for an ocular inspection of the proposed venue. There we found a helicopter pad which was outlined with a near perfect circle ? that could very well serve as the pattern for our “0”. There were also linear expansion strips right beside the circle which could also serve as the guiding line for the “1”. We also inspected the vantage point at the restaurant Y Tu Mama Tambien at the adjoining building to see if it could effectively serve as the camera positions for the shoot. Everything pointed out to the fact that the place would serve our needs very well without need of additional equipment like scaffolding or drawing temporary figures on the pavement. Thus, we arrived at the decision that the S&R rooftop parking lot would serve as our venue for the shoot.
 

During the ensuing week, more members were signing up to join the formation. This presented trouble as we had only planned for 32 cars. Carlo had also made a CAD representation of our plans but this only provided for 32 cars. Even worse, the circle in the chopper pad could only accommodate a limited number of cars.

The Saturday afternoon before the shoot, we had another planning session at S&R and at the restaurant Y Tu Mama Tambien. At the rooftop deck we marked off the areas where we would position the cars. It was decided that we would separate the colors of the cars and no cars with similar colors or shades would be together so that the resulting pictures would have an explosion of colors. We also determined that the red cars, which were the most numerous, would be placed in strategic positions first so that they would serve as guideposts for the other cars to follow. While taking measurements of the helipad’s circumference and diameter, and test positioning the cars, we experimented with positioning the cars to the outside of the circle as much as possible, to see how many more cars we could fit. At Y Tu Mama Tambien we positioned the model cars brought by Carlo in a similar fashion. This time we asked him to bring 50 of his little cars.

Based on the sign-up sheet that was fast developing on the club’s mailing list, we were gathering cars hand over fist and by Saturday morning we had 47 cars, and no matter how we configured them they wouldn’t fit into the “1” and the “0”. It was then decided that the “10” would be underscored by a line which would absorb the excess cars. And this is how we envisioned it that night:


Despite the fact that 54 Miatas showed up on the day of the shoot, everything went perfectly. We quickly had breakfast and wrapped up our meeting at Polo and were at the venue by around 8:45am, we had a grand time positioning the cars which went rather quickly, taking pictures of how we were positioning the cars and generally just horsing around, and by 10:30am, the projected time in which we would finish, we were indeed all done. The cars were positioned fairly accurately, the pictures were taken, we all had a great time and it was a complete success! Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in this momentous club event!



Joey Bernardez
March 11, 2007

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