D&D 2022

 I've had a version of this shoot in my head for going on 3, maybe 4, years now. I went through a few different models with various ideas until suddenly this version stuck and got fully fleshed out.

Part of the idea was to create a narrative, not just improv a bunch of shots with the model/actors in makeup and costume, but to tell a part of a story - which turned into a very long story, more on that later though.

In this instance we have a Tiefling Rogue who happens upon an Orc and Troll who've just stolen a Talisman and she decides she wants it for herself. I storyboarded it like I was shooting a movie so we wouldn't miss anything and it really made the whole shoot so much more fun, still a little hectic and slightly stressful (in an artistically satisfying way), it turned out great though.

  What follows could almost be a series of still from a movie clip.

Once we got all this we then had a series of other shots laid out, not storyboarded but a list of various setups.

I usually avoid multiple character shoots because it can be a huge hassle with very little reward, but I came up with these style of shots to make sure at least each makeup/character has a good solo shot and not just slightly out of focus or out of frame or whatever. This is the 3rd or 4th time I've done setups like this.

Then we did a series of solo shots for each character, again the idea is to let them shine in a more posed way.

There's a lot of little costume bits you never really get to see unless you focus on just one character for a couple shots. There's a lot of layers to all the costumes and while they're certainly not of Lord of the Rings standard, I think I did a decent job of creating costumes for these two characters.

And if you're wondering why the Orc has what looks to be orange-ish TMNT hands, it was a choice I made to allow the model/actor to not have his hands painted, instead I was able to pull an old mould I already had of these hands and customize them into full gauntlets to make it easier should he need to use his hands. I did the same for everyone. The Troll has full gloves/gauntlets as well and I got some leather gloves for the Tiefling, so no hand painting - it's not something I enjoy and it makes things slightly messy in the end, this was a much more interesting and quicker solution. In the future I intend to start making foam latex glove prosthetics for things like this.

I'm really happy with how simple, yet really nice looking the Tiefling costume turned out. The shoot was always centered around her, I just felt it needed more than a simple posed shoot. She needed something to do to show off more characters, although these solo shots actually do a decent job of that in their own simple way.

I had debated about a full prosthetic tail, but quickly realized that was just going to be a waste of resources since I didn't want to wrestle with a dead looking tail to make it look alive. In the end my dwindling GC skills had to be refreshed just enough to do this - not perfect, but it does the job.

We grabbed a few group shots in the end as we were packing up from what was a pretty long day. Several hours of makeup, I did it all myself, and several more hanging out in the woods. Overall it was a fun shoot.

I realized during the prep for this shoot that this is the kind of thing I should have been doing all along. By that I mean I used to make weird little movies, just for fun in the beginning, however as things went along I found the fun aspect of the process became shorter and shorter. I liked the actual filming with everyone, I liked location scouting and building props and costumes and makeup, but that was it. For the actors, the day of shooting is 90% of the fun experience (memorizing lines and relooping not so much), for me the day of shooting became 10% of the overall experience, meaning only a small portion was fun anymore. Editing, dubbing, post work and all that just sucked everything out of the experience and it dragged on for months, sometimes projects never even got finished after the initial editing phase because of this.

Transposing the more fun aspects of a movie shoot onto a photo shoot was perfect. There is literally no aspect I don't enjoy and it's an almost immediate creative itch that get scratched right away instead of a slow dull prodding over months. I've got three more shoots like this planned, all with unique challenges and aspects I'm looking forward to. I've got some basic leatherworking skills, so I plan on buffing those up a bit to create some simple leather costumes bits for next time. Even learning to use a sewing machine properly to do some minor costumes and whatnot. For my D&D 2025 shoot I'm even planning to learn some basic animatronics.

With this project finally done, I'm already starting work on the D&D 2023 shoot and pulling the trigger in a brand new Mind Flayer design I've been mentally working out for the last year or two.