Demon Faerie photo shoot

This was one those photo shoots that just worked and came together with very little effort it seemed. I had just shot the opening sequence to Moonshine of the Damned with Alana and asked if she was up for a photo shoot, reason being - I have this "mental process" we'll call it, that I go through that makes me picture people as a possible demon for a shoot, it's not something I really work at or consciously think about. Just happens with certain people, I just see the shoot when I look at them.

This was definitely one of those shoots. All I could think of was Demon Faerie when I looked at Alana and so that's what we did. I looked around online to get some ideas for a costume, saw this very simple dress that was all done up with carious things and stuff all over it, showed it to Kim Bradford and let her go to work on it and what she came up with was amazing. The dress in the picture was green, what she found was red and I'm so glad that's how it worked. I think green wouldn't have worked quite as well.

So I designed the prosthetic, keeping it simple. And came up with the idea of a gradient of colour from the fingertips up to elbow, same with the feet and that was it really. Alana curled up her hair a bit - I hadn't even thought of that. And we did the shoot and this is what came out.

I had always planned to do the wings in post. I liked the idea of having real wings right there on the shoot, but in the woods it would be so cumbersome, catching on everything. And I don't know if we could've created something with as much of a realistic look and the size I ended up going with. Also, I had originally thought they would be very bizarre and elaborate looking - I tried that, looked like crap. So I found some hi-res images of butterfly wings - I figured grounding it a little more in reality might work better. And it did. I colour corrected the wings and I have to do full sized renders of them for each photo - takes a bit of work.

Overall I'm really happy with how the shoot turned out. I got quite a few reactions to the initial photo posted on Facebook.

This shoot also marks the first of my planned Limited Run prosthetics. The basic idea is to create a constantly revolving stock of new prosthetics that are only available until the moulds can no longer produce pieces. So it's stuff I do photo shoots with, once I'm done I'll make a few more and put them up for sale. I might make 5, maybe 10. Maybe even 20 or so pieces.

The idea here is that the more hardcore enthusiasts might appreciate the exclusivity of theses pieces, knowing there won't be dozen, upon dozen more people out there with the same makeup on. There might only be 5 other people in the entire world ever to wear that particular piece. It keeps the stock in the store a little more interesting and hopefully encourages repeat business too.

This piece, the Kaeliss Demon is available now for $50 plus shipping and ships worldwide. You can email me directly if you're interested at foxhenderson @ themonkeyrodeo.com. At this point it hasn't even gone up for sale on the website yet.