Hide and Seek: From Storyboard to Final Image

Cassandra Högfeldt is hiding from a T-Rex, less than successfully.

Hide and Seek is a picture in the King Kong series of pictures I am working on. The idea is to show scenes from Skull Island, Kong's home.

There is a bit of a twist: Some scenes are more or less related to the King Kong movies, but not all of them. In the movies, Skull Island is populated by a primitive people that worship Kong. There are also ruins, remnants of a more advanced civilization. There is also the great wall that runs across the island, keeping the humans who live on one side safe from the terrors that roam the island on the other side.

That means the island has been discovered by humans at least twice, and maybe three or more times. According to Wikipedia, people from Southeast Asia reached the island about 3,000 years ago, and it was they who brought Kong's ancestors to the island.

The storyboard I created for the photo shoot. Note that the direction of the light is different from the finished picture.

Skull Island is located west of Sumatra in the movies. Sumatra may have been reached by the ancient Greeks. Thus, it is possible that Greek seafarers also reached Skull Island.

If the Greeks did it, why not others? Romans? Vikings? The crew of the Nisero in 1883? George Edward Challenger? There are plenty of possibilities.

I've got plenty of material to work with, or invent as I go along.

If you want to see the first picture from the shoot with Cassandra Högfeldt, click right here.

Rite of Passage: From Storyboard to Final Image

Rite of Passage: Final Picture vs. Storyboard

I have a set of storyboards that I have been building up for more than a year. Recently, I did a photo session with photo model Cassandra Högfeldt, which gave me the opportunity to create photographic versions of some of those storyboards.

Cassandra did a great job. I do the best I can. Sometimes that means working on the same picture over and over, until I get it just right. Sometimes I have to settle for not completely wrong, but since nobody but me knows what the picture looked like inside my head, I can usually get away with it.

Actually, being insecure about your work, is beneficial, up to a point. It makes you strive to improve, to push yourself to be better, no matter how good you get.

Of course, if the insecurity gets the better of you, you can lose the confidence you need to finish a piece, but when that happens, I discuss the problem picture with a friend or two, and that helps.

Cassandra and I were well prepared for the photo session. I had storyboarded everything, and she had looked through the storyboards and selected the pictures she wanted to do before the shoot.

Before the shoot, I printed all the storyboards and laid them out on a table in the studio. (The "studio" is actually a room meant for parties and meetings that I hire for photo sessions. Works very well, and it is alot cheaper than having a studio of my own, or renting one.)

We went through the storyboards and determined which ones to shoot, and the shooting order. Then we got to work.

The picture you see here, Rite of Passage, is the first of the pictures from the photo session. There will be more. Lots more.

Be seeing you!