This is what you get when a bunch of high school friends who love musicals, dressing up, acting, acting silly, making movies, Disney, etc… get together with a professional photographer, makeup artists, in a beautiful mansion!  It was a fun day for sure.

Here’s the concept.  What if the Disney characters were real people and wanted to have their portraits taken?  What if their senior portraits were taken?  What would they look like?  This group included high school seniors to middle school and grade school kids.  All of them were either good friends or siblings.  We took them out to the Chateau de Vie in Tempe, Arizona and spent the day making portraits of them in their Disney costumes.  Yes… you read that right, they own the costumes.  It’s a fun group of kids.  Many of these costumes were made by grandma, who is a very skilled seamstress, an artist with clothing really.  Thanks to my crew, and our brilliant hair and makeup artists, we got a lot of images done in one day.  There were not simple available light photographs, so having my assistants there to help move lights around was crucial.

Here are some of my favorite images from the day and of course a little behind the scenes video above.

Special thanks to the Chateau de Vie for providing such a beautiful location (which is available for weddings and events) and to our hair and makeup artists, Rachel Jolley and Kate Sepic, who are fantastic artists.  They did such a beautiful job on everything.  I think this was the first time they had met, but they worked as a team and got a lot accomplished very quickly and did a magnificent job.  Everyone looked perfect.

Some of these kids are my nieces and nephews, and the super skilled seamstress/costume designer is my mother, their grandmother.  A special thanks to all of Mary Platt’s work on most of these outfits.  That Gaston outfit… she made that entire thing!

Enjoy the photos and the video!

I’ll be posting again about the lighting and production on these photos later.