Ren Faire Demons - Odru-Shaggorath Demon

I don't often do exterior shoots post Halloween, it just gets too crappy and cold. We had a bit of snow down and it wasn't too cold, so this one ended up actually happening. I had plans to shoot late in the day, into the evening so we could play around with shooting at night - but we lost track of time during the makeup process and had maybe 30 minutes to shoot outside (with a 15 minute drive included in that time).

I had other ideas I wanted to try, but we just lost the daylight so fast - and it was getting way colder as the sun went down, so we packed it in and headed back home to do some exterior lighting stuff.

The blue contact lenses really glowed in these last few shots and the dramatic lighting really looked cool. My only disappointment is in the lack of variety in the poses of the shots, we had to stick to keeping it simple to make sure what we were getting would at least be worth it.

 

Annual Halloween Photoshoot - The Eldritch Flayer

I forgot to upload all these here. This was from my most recent annual Halloween shoot, I just made this piece and it was meant to be first shown off in a D&D shoot in September, but shit weather and bad scheduling kept putting it off until the weather turned too cold, hopefully we'll be revisiting it in May/June of next year.

It was a super simple and quick shoot, I've started using Adobe's Generative Fill to add a little more interest to the background of some images since we really are limited on interesting shooting locations on PEI, especially after 15 years of doing this.

 

Cagaaran Demon - Ren Faire Demon shoot.

I had a couple new pieces I needed a product shot for, so I took the time to throw together a costume for a Ren Faire Demon shoot and did a quick one afterwards. 

And since here on PEI we have no real medieval settings (I know about the Woodleigh castles, but whenever I've reached out I just get ignored, so fuck them), I used Adobe's Generative Fill to make my own.

 

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.