I'll Be Right Here

Another paper cutout project completed! I ordered a moon poster online and then I drew and cut out the bicycle and the trees and taped them to the poster. This one doesn't make use of silhouettes the way I usually do with these, but that wasn't possible with the moon poster. I tried positioning the bicycle and trees out in front of the poster, but lighting the moon to match the movie still and keeping unwanted shadows out proved to be an insane balancing act and in the end this looked better, anyway:

I figured the bicycle/Elliot/E.T. would be the trickiest part, but it actually wasn't too bad and I got it right after two or three attempts:

The trees were really tedious and took quite a while to complete. Originally, I planned to make four or five, but then decided it would look too crowded with that many trees. Plus, they are a pain to cut out:

I used two studio lights; one to the left with a blue filter and a second one to the right with no filter that I set to fire at the lowest power. I taped the poster to a black bedsheet and then taped the bicycle and trees in place:

This blue filter cast a strong blue hue to the shot, which helped match the color seen in the movie. Using two lights – one without a filter – made the lighter areas of the moon appear white, instead of everything looking like shades of blue. I rarely use these things, but this time it came in handy:

Coming up next: Mad Max...

War of the Worlds

My latest card stock project:

I used a small high-intensity LED that I positioned behind the tagboard and directed it through a hole that I cut in the board. The aerosol can of photography mist in the picture below provided some dramatic "smoke" in the shot. Behind the scenes:

This whole thing took longer than intended because I accidentally set the first alien tripod guy on fire!

You can see the flame just starting in that picture. Those studio lights get scorching hot very quickly. Lesson learned. It burned up the tripod and part of the tagboard in just seconds. I guess it was a fortunate accident because the LED light I ended up using provided more of a directional beam and I got the effect I was looking for on the first try... after some serious repairs, ha.

The photographic aerosol mist was cool, but pricey and it produced a faint mist without looking very substantial. I think a fog machine would work better. Maybe I'll try that for my next one.

More Shadows

More Halloween-themed shadows:

Shadows On the Wall

After taking the kids' pictures in front of a wall and capturing their shadows, I started thinking about ways to make shadows that look like something out of a dream, or maybe even something that looks like a still from a movie.

Most of the ideas I came up with would involve making costumes and building props and going to a lot of time and expense to get the right shot. I'm not opposed to going to a lot of work to get the right shot, but I also don't have all the time in the world and I am no expert at trying to photograph shadows. I discovered when I was taking pictures of Rose and Emily that it is tricky to capture the shadows in a way that really makes them stand out. Doing that on a smaller scale might make the learning curve easier.

So with that in mind I decided to create shadows on a smaller scale by cutting out shapes from black card stock. Since Halloween is approaching, it seemed fitting to do something based on a scary movie and since shadows tend to be utilized a lot in horror movies it wasn't hard to find some good examples.

I settled on an iconic scene from "Nosferatu", a silent film from 1922 and the very first vampire movie. It was a super creepy movie surrounded by controversy and at one point a judge ordered all copies of the movie destroyed. And just like the plot to a scary movie, only one copy managed to escape destruction and it has been duplicated and distributed for audiences to watch for many years.

This is the scene from that film that I decided to recreate:

I traced the outline of his shadow and transferred the line drawing onto black card stock. Using an X-acto knife, I carefully cut out the shape of Orlok and the railing to the stairway. Cynthia helped me set them up on an old changing table that we still have in the basement and using a utility light and a piece of foam board for the background, we had a set built!

I couldn't use a professional studio strobe for this because the reflectors inside the light housing create diffused shadows (which is exactly what they are supposed to do), so I had to take an old utility light and modify it to produce a crisp, clear shadow. I'm still going to modify it some more, but for now this will work.

Here's the result:

It looked stark and creepy, but I thought if I added some wallpaper to the background it might add to the realism. I printed off an image of wallpaper that I found online and taped it to the foam board:

Now that's more like it! The wallpaper gave it some more texture and made it look like he is sneaking around in someone's house. The red coloring in this was produced by Cynthia holding up a transparent red storage bin lid in front of the utility light. The wallpaper was actually a weird greenish-gray color, so this was an improvement.

Here's my setup:

A closer look:

Cynthia also came up with the idea of using the clip to hold up the cutout. I used one of her old VHS tapes to make the shadow of the doorway.

It took a lot of tinkering to get the lighting just right and to make the shadow strong enough without placing the cutout so close that it would be in the shot. It was a cool experiment and now I want to try a few more!