Styx - Master of Shadows and it's sequel are two of my favorite video games ever. For ages I've been thinking about doing a prosthetic based on Styx, I finally got around to it this past summer. I immediately already had ideas for a shoot to accompany it. What should have been a overly elaborate shoot, just became a regularly elaborate shoot since I was able to cobble together a decent costume from stuff I had in storage from years of making movies and other shoots.
Just a shot showing off the contacts lenses as they normally look, I added a lighted effect over them for all the other shots.
A series of headshots, just to get an idea of lighting and how the piece would work, even these turned out great.
This is the first time I've actually storyboarded a photoshoot. Back when I made movies I used to do this all the time and since I knew this wouldn't be a random, improved pose shoot, and I wanted to create a really strong narrative element to it I thought this would cut out a lot of last minute stress and frustration during the shoot, plus the risk of missing a shot idea would be greatly reduced.
This one shot was a massive amount of work to do, but it was something I had in mind right from the beginning. One of my favorite D&D monsters if the Otyugh, so I very early on decided I would have Styx encounter an Otyugh - I just had no idea how I'd do it. In the end I sculpted a little minature Otyugh in Cosclay and just lit it similarly to the original image and comped it in.
I also wanted everything to have an 80s movie feel, so this really helped sell that idea since the Otyugh looks like a little stop-motion monster in the background.
And lastly, since in the 2nd Styx game he had a female Paladin companion throughout the game I thought this would be a good idea to incorporate into this shoot, but I wasn't interested in creating that armor so I again went with what I had on hand and came up with an elf character.
