Attack!
Surrealism: a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential ofthe unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.
Oxford American Dictionary
This week’s project has proved to – quite possibly – be the most difficult project to date. Unfortunately, with all of the work, it is still not my strongest work.
I started out my search for inspiration at Worth1000.com, a site that hosts Photoshop competitions which lead to lots of surreal photos. While browsing, I found an image that was utterly stellar, Kitty Attack. This image was so inspiring to me, and being a cat person, I decided to try to replicate the image in my own way.
From Worth1000.com
The first step was for me to find an image of a bridge. For the original image, they chose the Golden Gate Bridge, but as I had no plans to travel to San Francisco any time soon, I felt that was out of the question – and it would really feel too much like copying. Where I’m from, North Idaho, there is a rather large bridge that spans over Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint, ID that is 1.3mi long. This bridge is rather famous among locals here, so I logically chose that bridge for the shot. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a superb image of said bridge, so I tried another bridge adjacent to the original one. Although it was not the well-known one, it is very similar in looks. Below is my shot for the background of the image…
Sandpoint Bridge
The image is actually composed of three individual exposures to get a good look to the image. The sky was totally blown out if the bridge was exposed correctly, while the water was dark. So I took three exposures, each exposed for the three main elements of the photo: the sky, the bridge, and the water. I combined these in Photoshop and this set up the background of the image.
Next, I started adding some destruction to the image: First, I moved some of the pylons down into the water, then warped the elements of the bridge, and finally, I collapsed a main portion of the bridge. I originally looked on the internet for tutorials on how to create ruins from images and came across this tutorial on how to make Modern Ruins, but was unable to do most of the stuff in the image due to lack of destruction in Coeur d’Alene. But I was able to use some of the techniques and inspiration from the tutorial.
Sandpoint Bridge: Destroyed
After I finished totally annihilating the bridge, I went to photograph my cat, so he could be doing the destruction. From my experience, felines really do not make the best of models. They really resist anything to do with sitting when told, and doing the things you ask them (even if you ask nicely). Then when you add in strobes, they just totally go ballistic. This was no exception. I chose my cat, Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov, to do the modeling. At first he totally resisted, but after I introduced a food bowl, a toy, cat treats, a green laser pointer, and another human to restrain him***; he cooperated. Below, you are able to see both cats lazily chilling there.
Setup for Cat Photography
Cats... just being themselves.
After coaxing my cat to be playful with string, laser pointers, and other toys, he cooperated for about 30 seconds. I finally got some good photos. Below is the image I chose for the project.
Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov - My cat
Once I edited the image in Photoshop, I was able to place it into the document. I placed him behind the bridge, and did some really difficult and time consuming masking to get it to look like he was both behind the bridge, and partially submerged in the water. Below is an image of what it looked like after I added the cat.
Micky behind bridge
Now that the main elements were in the image, I was able to make the cat do some very evil things. First, I added some green burning lasers coming from his eyes to give him laser vision. I aimed these at the bridge and then proceeded to modify them to look more like lasers. It was actually quite simple to add them, really. First, I drew two lines using the line tool at about 5px wide on lime green. Then I added a noisy glow in a similar green and turned down the opacity. That was it. Next, I figured it was only logical if the green lasers were doing damage, otherwise Mikhail would never have dreamed of wasting such precious energy on them. So, I downloaded some grinder spark brushes from DeviantArt. I added some nice sparks coming from the bridge and overlaid an orange and red gradient over them. Next, I added some speckling to them to create more tiny sparks. This is where that “Fire” comes from on the bridge. I realized that with fire, there is smoke. So I created a new layer and brushed some white over the layer at 10 percent on a hard edged brush. I made billowing smoke, but then applied a rather harsh gaussian blur to tone them down. Then I turned the opacity down quite a bit to make it clear. Next, I repeated the same thing, but with black smoke for right next to the sparks.
Finally, I realized that where there is destruction in water, there is a splash. So I used the same brush set, but put it in the water and overlaid the water pattern (from the water in the image) over the splash. I applied some speckle to it, gaussian blurred the texture and was done.
At 25 layers, 4 separate images, and many hours of work, I was finally done with the project. I estimate that I spent nearly 16 hours on this project. Although these are just estimates, they are very close to what I spend on the project. I am disappointed that it really didn’t turn out as good as I hoped, but I am still happy with it. In fact, just writing this entry alone, at nearly 1200 words, it is a full-blown essay. From the exporting, color correction, resizing, and writing, I have worked on this for about 4 hours overall.
- Research: 30 min
- Bridge Photography: 2 hrs.
- Editing bridge w/ background: 2 hrs.
- Photographing cat: 2 hrs.
- Photoshopping: 6 hrs.
- Blog entry, including creating web thumbs: 4 hrs.
Below are the contact sheets for the project. You may notice that there are some from the mountain, this is simply because I was originally going to have the cat attacking the lodge at Schweitzer Mountain, but it didn’t work out as planned.
*** No animals were harmed in the production of this image.
