Fampocalypse

Finally. After 8 months of work, I’m am very happy with the way this turned out, and to be quite honest, very happy to be done with it. I kinda burnt myself out there towards the end and had to drag myself across the finish line, but we got it done.

So a big thanks to Susan Robertson from Forever Keeps by Susan for volunteering to do the photo shoot for us, as she has done for the fourth year running. She is a great photographer and always very easy to work with. Here’s a few raw shots from the shoot.

First up was Ryder, age 7. Since he went first, I think he was a little shy, so he wasn’t quite as expressive as he has been in years past. We eventually went with the picture on the right. While we only see his face in profile, I think it helped the overall composition as it mixed it up a bit. It helped the visual story telling a bit, as we are all on the lookout for the creatures lurking in the shadows, and Ryder sells that most of all.

 

Braxton, 9, was next up to bat….. Bwahahaha, see what I did there? Braxton had “the look” down to a science. He gave us plenty of great shots to choose from, and these were the top 3. Ultimately we didn’t want his mask covering up his head, so we went with the one on the left.

 

Raegan, 5, has always given us great sassy faces, but this year she was having a real hard time not laughing. I almost went with the one on the left where she has the bow, but since we decided on Ryder holding the bow, and because molotovs are indispensable to any group of survivors, we went with the middle one. I didn’t really want her to be in the act of throwing it, since we are just on the lookout, not actually in combat, but since this was the best shot we got, I settled.

 

I was up next. Of course the first shot of myself was the best photo Susan ever had the pleasure of capturing, and every subsequent shot was better than the last, so it was really hard to choose. I liked my facial expression from the shot on the left the best, but I didn’t like how my license plate pauldron (shoulder armor for you rubes out there) was angled away from the camera, I opted for the one on the right.

 

And last but certainly not least was my beautiful wife, Kristen, age Immortal. One could rightly ask, “In the apocalypse, do women have the time, means, and drive to put on makeup and curl their hair?” But the joke would be on you, because that’s how she looks when she rolls out of bed in the morning. I went with the one on the left because she looks the most bad ass, and because her shoulders are square to the camera, and it hides the fact that she does not actually have a fuel tank on her back, just a regular backpack.

Then it was off to Photoshop. First step was to cut us all out. Since most of the background was pure white, it was easy to mask it out. I had to do it by hand down around the legs and feet, but that was easy enough, just takes a little patience. Next step was to do standard touch ups, like brightening the eyes, removing any skin blemishes, dodging and burning to bring out details, etc. After that I had to dirty us up.

Here is a before and after of the work I did on Kristen. Among the changes I made were tearing a hole in her jeans, adding stains to her shirt and skirt, adding scratches to her boots and pants, and adding lipstick, which she forgot to put on… When I said she rolls out of bed looking like that, I mean everything besides lipstick. That’s the one thing.

After that was done, it was time to composite. Step one was to place us in the scene, and then rearrange key objects in the scene that were now covered up by us. For example, the car with the skeleton in the passenger seat needed to be moved a bit, the willow tree with the creepy creeper peaking out was behind my head, so that needed to be moved, etc., and I had to change the position and angle of the camera a bit to match the angle and position of the camera we did the shoot with. I also moved the light source a hair to match that of the shoot.

The next thing I did was add in digital mannequins as stand-ins for us. What’s the point of that, you might ask? Simple: Shadows. When you are compositing one element into another scene, the number one thing that sells it is shadows. I could have tried to had paint the shadows, but I don’t think I could have done a real convincing job, especially onto such a cluttered scene as this.

So I sized them, posed them roughly like us, and mainly made sure the feet lined up, as the light was pretty diffuse, and the shadows get lost pretty quickly. I set it up so that the mannequins themselves are invisible, we only see their shadows, so it looks something like this:

 

Once that was done I could do the final render. Rendering this beast was no easy feet, as the total size came out to a whopping 10,800 x 7200 pixels. The sheer size of it, plus the complexity of the scene made my computer weep and beg for mercy. Every time I tried to render it, or even just a small section of it, my computer would run out of memory and the software would crash. So I ended up sending it to a render farm, Rebus. This was my first time using such a service, and while it was a very easy and smooth process, it was much more expensive than I initially thought. So that sucked. But I got great results.

The other thing I wanted to do to really sell the idea that we were really physically present, was to have something covering us up, to give it some depth. I did this with some of the ground cover plants covering out feet. It’s a very simple and subtle thing, but it does wonder to sell the illusion.

To do this I simply just rendered the plants, and placed them on the top layer in Photoshop. Bingo bango.

After that was done, it was simple playing with the color balance, levels, etc, to make sure it all meshed together, and a few little tweaks here and there. Here’s some closeups of some interesting parts of the image:

Here you can see both Braxton’s awesome bat, Lucille 2, and the rusted out/over grown car with this poor soul in it. A bit of visual storytelling.

 

Here’s a closeup of the ground. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I knew the ground and these plans were going to be the closest things to the camera, so I spent a lot of time on them. You can also see the way both the shadows and the leaves covering our shoes really sell the illusion that we are present there.

 

So here is our first creepy creeper. They’re not quite zombies, but some kind of humanoid creature. Mutant? Alien? Science experiment gone wrong? I’ll leave that up to the viewer.

 

Here we have creepy creeper #2, peaking out from behind that tree. Now you know why we are all keeping such vigilant watch. Stay frosty out there.

 

Here’s Raegan with her lit molotov. I added some glow on Kristen’s arm and canteen to help sell it. I thought about adding smoke, but that would have uglied up the image.

 

I like the blue pilot light on Kristen’s flame thrower. And I like Kristen. She’s hot. Can you find creepy creeper #3?

So that just about does it, folks. Thanks to all you guys who followed along. It was quite a bit of work, but I am very happy with the way it turned out. Who knows, I might even do it again next year.

-Brad

Greetings. Today I’ll show you how I made this piece. It’s a harness/pauldron. A pauldron is the technical term for shoulder armor. Let’s dig in.

Let’s start with the center piece. I don’t remember what it’s called, but it’s got threads in the middle to screw in a metal pipe. I picked it up at my local hardware store and rusted it up. You may remember it from my post on how to rust things. Attached to it are some key rings and brass clips that I got on Amazon.

Next step was to attach some straps I had a faux ammo belt that seemed just right for this piece. I scuffed up the belt real good and rubbed some dirt on it. Then I cut off the end of it and attached it to the center piece with a rivet. You hammer them on and they don’t come off.

Here you can see with the buckle attached. This strap will wrap around to my back where I have a large ring that all three straps will clip on to.

Here’s a picture of the back, where you can see the 3 straps coming together.

With the harness done, it’s time to armor up. In the post-apocalypse, easily workable metal is hard to come by. One good source is license plates. I feel like maybe I should blur out the licence plate numbers for some reason but… that sounds like a lot of work. Shout out to my bud Tommy for hooking me up. First step was to cut them in half.

Since licence plates are made of aluminum, they don’t rust. Which will be great for the actual apocalypse, but it doesn’t look as cool for my costume. To make up for this I tried to beat them up real good. I took some sandpaper to them, and both ends of a hammer, I roughed them up and beat them into form. You will notice that one has a big gouge in it. I cut that bit out so that it would be able to bend enough to fit snug around my shoulder.

Then I had to attach them. I attached a piece of belt with a rivet to the harness, and then attached the metal plates to that. That way it still moves freely. The top most plate I attached directly to the harness and you can see here.

 

Now we hit it with some matte clear coat, and sprinkle on some dirt.

To make it more comfortable, warmer, and more awesome, I cut out a piece of rabbit pelt and used rivets to attach it.

And here we are. I will add some more dirt to some of the webbing and straps, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.