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Moodboard

Where the shoot gets decided

A job is agreed in pictures long before anybody writes a list of shots. The moodboard is where that happens — the look, the light, the colour, the wardrobe, the locations — settled by pointing at photographs rather than describing them, on a board your client can open on a phone.

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Latentshoot’s moodboard, filtered to sections — Direction, Location refs, Palette, Wardrobe. Sportswear references in saturated yellow, teal and gold sit beside a set line in display type, “One colour a look, and the wall carries the second”; a direction note listing flat light, one colour head to toe and shoes on the floor; an unanswered question about whether the shoes get their own set-up; a link card to a reference collected online; a print shown on a white mount; and swatches named Court teal, Tracksuit and Concrete with their hex values. Every photograph carries its photographer’s name.
A lookbook being worked out: the palette taken off the references, the wardrobe rule written next to the pictures it applies to, and the question nobody has answered yet — whether the shoes get a set-up of their own — still on the board with everything else, where it will be seen rather than remembered.

Collecting

Every reference you have found, in one place and credited

References live in a browser rather than in a folder, so Latentshoot takes an address as readily as a file. Paste one and the page is fetched for you. A page that is one photograph — a Behance project, an Are.na block, a Commons file, an Unsplash photo — arrives as the photograph, labelled with the photographer and the site it came from, and keeps its link. Anything else arrives as a card carrying that page’s own title, description and thumbnail. Text that is not an address at all becomes a note with those words already in it.

The photograph is copied into your own storage rather than pointed at across the web. Left as a link, a reference disappears the day somebody reorganises their site, and it tells that site who is looking at your board. Some publishing sites refuse a server outright: those stay cards, assembled from whatever the page published about itself, and the address you pasted still opens.

A close view of the board: a link card headed ARE.NA reading “Colour blocking, sportswear”, with the page’s own description and a link to open it, sitting beside two photographs captioned “Clément Falize / Unsplash” and “Meg / Unsplash”, and a monospaced note asking whether the shoes get their own set-up.
Two pasted addresses, side by side. The Are.na channel became a card carrying that page’s own title and description; the photographs came in as photographs, each with the name of whoever took it — which is what gets asked for weeks later, usually by a client.

Arranging

Arrange it the way it needs to be read

Size is how you say which frame the whole shoot is being built around, and what sits beside what is how you say a look holds together. Both of those are the work, so the board gives you the tools for it. Drag one reference near another and its edges and its centre snap to the ones already there, and to the centre line of the board. Select several and you can line them up, even out the space between them, resize the lot as one arrangement, or tidy a heap back into rows. The spacing evens out the gaps rather than the centres, because references are different sizes and even centres leave visibly uneven space between a wide frame and a narrow one.

Resizing a photograph holds its proportions unless you ask otherwise, since a reference that has been stretched is no longer the reference. Items tilt up to 24 degrees, and lock once they are where you want them. Positions are kept in board units rather than pixels, so an arrangement built on a large desktop screen still reads on a tablet.

The left of the board: a tall reference of a yellow tracksuit, a set line in large display type reading “One colour a look, and the wall carries the second”, a smaller reference shown as a print on a white mount, and the direction note beside them with one phrase in bold and a closing line in italics.
Nothing here is the same size as anything else, and that is the argument: the tracksuit frame is the one the shoot is being built around. The reference in the middle is shown as a print on a mount, which is a choice about how it should read rather than about what it is.

Direction and palette

The whole brief on one board, not four documents

The references are half of a brief. The rest of it goes on the same board: a note takes weights, italics, headings, lists, quotes, links, alignment and a choice of three typefaces at five sizes, so a set line can be set large in display type and its caveats small underneath. Written next to the picture it applies to, the direction is still legible to whoever is lighting the fourth look at two in the afternoon, which is not true of a paragraph in an email from three weeks ago.

Paste a hex value and it lands as a swatch you can name — Court teal, Concrete — and asking a reference for its palette drops five swatches out of it, ready to be named and arranged with everything else. Give items a section, such as Direction, Location refs or Wardrobe, and the board filters to one at a time: the same board reads as a wardrobe brief for the stylist and a location brief for the producer without either of them wading through the other.

The board at 200 per cent: three swatches named Court teal, Tracksuit and Concrete, each showing its hex value, taken off the gold-painted photograph above them; the direction note in bullets with “one colour” in bold; and a monospaced note recording that the court is booked 07:00 to 11:00.
The swatches were taken off the photograph above them and then named, so “Court teal” means something to the stylist reading the board and not only to whoever picked it. The hex value is there for whoever has to match it.

From board to shoot day

The shot list is what the board turns into.

Laid out in front of you, a board answers the questions a list of titles cannot: how many set-ups a look actually needs, which two references are the same photograph twice, what the wardrobe change between them is, and what is still an open question. That is the work that produces a shot list worth costing and scheduling.

Then the pictures come with you. Pick a shot’s references off the board and they sit beside it on the list, on the phone in on-set mode when you come to take it, and on the link the crew are holding. The person lighting a look is looking at the photograph you chose rather than at a sentence describing it, which is the whole reason for agreeing the shoot in pictures in the first place.

Signing it off

Send the board on its own, to anyone

A share link can carry the moodboard and nothing else — the direction, before there is a running order worth showing anybody. It opens with no account at the other end, on any phone, and whoever has it can read the board but not change it. That is the version a client approves, and the one a stylist works from.

What they open is grouped under the sections you gave it and set to be read on a phone, rather than a copy of a board built for a large screen. An approval that has to be pinched and dragged is one that comes back slowly, or not at all. Change something after you have sent it and the link is already right the next time it is opened, so there is no second version going round.

The same board as a client opens it on a phone: the project title set large under the studio’s mark and the client’s name, then the photographer’s sections as headings — Direction, Location refs, Wardrobe — with the references in a single readable column, each carrying its photographer’s name, and the link card among them.
The client’s side of the same board. The sections became the headings, the arrangement became one column that fits a phone, and there is nothing on the screen to click that would change anything.
Images on the board count towards your storage: 250 MB on the free plan, 10 GB on Pro. Past the limit new uploads stop, and nothing already on the board is touched.

Questions

About the moodboard

Can a client sign off the board without an account?
Yes. A share link can carry the moodboard and nothing else, it opens with no login at the other end on any phone, and whoever has it can read the board but not change it. What they open is grouped under the sections you gave it and set to be read on a phone rather than reproducing a board built for a large screen, and it always shows the current version, so a change you make afterwards does not leave a second one going round.
Does the moodboard help me work out what the shots are?
That is what it is for. Laid out in front of you, a board answers what a list of titles cannot: how many set-ups a look needs, which two references are the same photograph twice, what changes between them, and what is still an open question. The shot list is what you write once that is settled, and you can pick each shot’s references straight off the board.
Can I paste a reference from anywhere on the web?
You can paste any address, and Latentshoot fetches the page itself rather than pointing at it. A page that is one photograph — a Behance project, an Are.na block, a Wikimedia Commons file, an Unsplash photo — comes in as the photograph, with the photographer’s name and the link kept beside it. Anything else comes in as a link card carrying the page’s own title, description and thumbnail. Some publishing sites refuse a server outright; those stay cards, built from whatever the page published about itself.
What happens to a reference if the page it came from changes?
Nothing. The picture is copied into your own storage when you paste it, so it is still there after somebody reorganises their site or takes the page down. The address is kept next to it, so you can still go back to where it came from, and so can whoever you share the board with.
Is the moodboard a grid of tiles?
No. Items go where you put them, at the size you make them, because size is how you say which frame the shoot is being built around. There are tools to line things up — snapping, align, even gaps, and a tidy that packs everything back into rows — and the tidy keeps each item at its own size rather than flattening them all to one.
Do the references follow the shoot onto the day?
Yes. A picture attached to a shot sits beside it on the shot list, comes up on the phone in on-set mode when you reach that shot, and travels on the share link the crew are holding. The person lighting a look is looking at the photograph rather than at a sentence describing it.

Start with the pictures.

Drag in the references you have already collected, paste the addresses of the ones you have not, and build the board you would put in front of a client.

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