This set came out of a hard week.
My grandmother passed away, and everything felt… off.
We had just gotten back from a super fun cruise with our friends. And the day we got back, she passed away. Major highs and lows mixed together. My brain felt super discombobulated.
We had already committed to this project.
25 sets. 100 days.
So there wasn’t really a pause button.
And honestly, I didn’t want one. To finish in time, we had to do a shoot.
I didn’t want to step away from creating. I wanted to use it. To take what I was feeling and put it somewhere.
That’s how this set started.
I couldn’t stop thinking about death.
Not in a dramatic way. Just in a very real, present way. Watching how people respond to it. How everything slows down… but also becomes very focused at the same time.
There’s this strange shift where the person who’s gone becomes the center of everything.
That stayed with me. So the idea of a coffin felt obvious.
We didn’t want to build a realistic one though. We wanted the coffin to feel a little wonky and surreal, so David sketched out some ideas.
There’s something about the idea of a final resting place that connects to sleep.
To comfort. To stillness. And that phrase from a nursery rhyme kept running through my head.
“Life is but a dream.”
So we followed that and chose pajamas as the look for the shoot.
The build did not go the way we imagined.
Because the week was so crazy, we waited until the day of the shoot to start. Which meant we had a few hours to build it.
David wanted to build the coffin from scratch using the CNC machine and make everything super clean and precise.
But there wasn’t time. So he pivoted.
He grabbed the flats from our last set. Six foot pieces we had already built. And just… started cutting into them with a circular saw.
He transformed those old flats into a coffin in a matter of minutes. It definitely was not as perfectly built as David wanted it to be, but in the spirit of the Attic Series, he got creative and used what he had. We didn’t need the set to be perfect. We needed it to be good enough to bring our concept to life, and he totally pulled that off.
The color came together in a way that felt almost too easy.
We had a paint on hand that matched the pajamas almost exactly — Green Bay by Sherwin Williams. After everything else feeling rushed and messy, that felt like a win.
When we started shooting, I knew I wanted to capture a wide range of emotions.
I always like to start super simple and then build towards more complex poses. So, I started with a very simple straight-on-to-the-camera pose.
Centered. Quiet. Almost empty. That classic, at-rest feeling.
And then we pushed it.
What happens when you wake up?
What happens when you realize where you are?
What happens when you can’t get out?
The energy shifted.
Tension. Confusion. Panic.
Moments that felt calm next to moments that felt almost uncomfortable to look at.
I started the shoot on the tripod, and once I had those shots nailed, I went handheld and played with my height to exaggerate perspective. I shot really low and upward, and then really high and straight down. Those extreme angles created my favorite shots of the shoot.
Looking back, this set isn’t perfect.
There are things we would redo. Ways we would build it differently. More time we wish we had.
But that’s not really what this one was about.
This set was about showing up.
In the middle of a hard week.
With limited time.
With a lot on my mind.
And making something anyway.
Because if I had waited to feel ready, this wouldn’t exist.
And I keep thinking about how many things in my life didn’t happen…
just because I thought they needed to be perfect first.
They don’t.
This set proved that again.
