Isabelle Neo: The Magazine Cover

About sometime in July, I was shot for the cover a free quarterly government magazine. Only later during the shoot did I found out that it was a magazine which encourages young or 'young' Singaporeans to expand their social circle and errmm get married and yada yada yada...

Initially I was told that it was a magazine advertisement shoot for a ball, in which i'd be wearing a cocktail dress sponsored by La Vie Bridal boutique. That wasn't a lie entirely, firstly because my agency really didnt know about it; and secondly, it WAS an advertisement to promote the ball which would be held sometime at the end of this year. But what I didn't know was that it was a magazine for SDU/SDS.

Taken using my hp camera, this was my initial outfit, and I really liked it. But they decided that it wasn't flirty enough, and the male model couldn't carry it off. Sigh the photographer of the bridal studio dunno how to use my hp camera~

This was the part where they had some story, which I cropped away using photoshop because without reading the fine-print, people would mistake it as the story of me and the male model. YUCKZ!!!

Speaking of the male model...he irritates me to the core. I still haven't got over hating him.

i thought I didn't look nice in the magazine and the smile looked forced. A friend, who is a photographer asked me if I was unhappy/uncomfortable with the model/photographer. And he was right. In this case, it was the model. Firstly, he stood the whole team up because he kept insisting his hair was not right. Even I was faster than him la. Then subsequently, he kept insisting during the shoot that we should go witht the concept of a couple in love, and told me to relax in case we would be doing intimate poses, which started to piss me off. Hello~ this is a cover for a government sponsored magazine. Clean image. Not some racy magazines like Maxim/FHM, which I would never be featured on the cover because I would REFUSE; Secondly, despite all the shit he said, he was stiff, expressionless, and refused to cooperate. We did so many NGs because he refused to smile.

"eh..no la I won't look nice when I smile", "my mouth looks big when I smile", "you will see my wrinkles when I smile" blah blah blah.
I wanted to club him there, it was so hot out there, he was complaining and my mood plunged with every stoopid, whine he made. In a nutshell, he's a himbo without much to "bo", and totally unprofessional as a model. I think even Takeshi Kaneshiro would have been more coorperative. I found him immensely repulsive, something like a Steven Lim but maybe not as smelly.

Nacissism aside, I thought that the cover would look so much better if his face was removed from the picture, like that: