GI Joe Photostory - GI JOE vs. ALIENS

People have asked me how I created the story of GI JOE vs. ALIENS. They wanted details. Well, here goes.

It all began with a story. I sat down with pages of pre-drawn frames and sketched a very rough outline like a quick comic book. When I was satisfied with the way the story was going, and that I had more or less captured the entire story the way I wanted, I drew it up a little nicer. Normally I wouldn't have, because I sketched it in a way I could understand. However, others would have to see it in order to understand the visuals we were trying to achieve, so I put more effort into a refined storyboard that anyone could follow.

Here is the storyboard after the shoot. Before the shoot it devoid of red pen marks and a whole page was added at the last minute. Note that page two here fits after the first frame on page three. Click any image for a larger version.

As each frame was shot, I checked it off, to make sure I hadn't missed any important shots. I also made sure I covered my bases by shooting each frame's shot from several angles with various light conditions.

Early on I knew I needed several corporate walls for Hicks to run past establishing the setting. And I wanted to add a little realism, so I put in a hall light that actually worked.

I bought two pieces of beige (standard corporate office wall color) foam-core poster board, 2' by 3'.


The entire wall.	The wall from behind. That's a tap-light.	The final result. (Click for a larger image)

The light fixture is the bottom half of a plastic easter egg, cut in half with a hack-saw, painted flat black on the inside (to make it more opaque), and green-blue on the outside, to match the decor. Then I put some tin-foil inside to reflect light upward. A small hole in the cup holds the light-bulb from the tap-light. I had some adaptation to do on the tap-light, like move the switch and hot-glue it into position on the frame of the light so I could access it.

The doors were bevel cut from the foam core so I could just glue them back in place from where they came.

Then I painted the exposed foam surfaces black, and used balsa planks to form a door-frame, painting it blue-green as well. For the door handle, I found some game-piece bases (that card-board pieces fit into) and pasted them to the door. The handles are wooden dowels painted silver and hot-glued into place. The kick-panel is silvered cardboard I found on the ground outside my apartment. The signage was simply printed on my color printer.

The GENETRIX Laboratories logo was built around the X, which in this case is a series of molecular dots forming an X chromosome.

The next corporate wall was much simpler. No doors, just two light fixtures. This wall I could use to appear to be longer than it was by putting a printed logo, as well as printed paintings (my favorites, Van Goghs and Monets) and moved them along the wall as Hicks creeps along the hallway to get to the loading dock door. I also printed an emergency fire panel in case I needed it on that wall to further extend the wall by illusion. (I later used that panel on one side of the loading dock door to make it appear different from the other side.


The entire wall.	The wall from behind. That's a small-light I found on a Burger King Frankenstein toy. Masking tape was used to keep the doors in place.

The loading dock wall was to have a functional door in it, unlike the first flat. The door was cut from the original piece, and then another piece was used to form a bevelled door-frame. That door-frame had a square hole cut in it and a Burger King Frankenstein toy cut to remove everything but the light and switch, was hot-glued into the hole after painting.

It was spray-painted with grey primer. I ran out, so the doors were different colored. There is a small panel at the left of the door which used to be part of the same Burger King toy. I did a bit of painting to make it look like it fit, and voila! The door could be taped shut or open depending on what I needed.


Two parallel walls ending in the loading dock door.	You can see they were taped to the other flats.

The corridors of the loading dock are computer packing forms made from the same fiber-board egg cartons are made from. We had just gotten new computers at the office, and I took one look at the forms and knew they were perfect for the job. So luckily the computers kept coming in and I kept getting the forms. I had a stack of them next to my desk nearly four feet tall! They worked to perfection.

One other thing that deserves notice was the ceiling in the above shot. We used a flourescent ceiling light diffuser laid on top of the computer forms, and Sean D. lit it with a red light bulb. In very close.

Lighting on the interiors was actually quite simple. This is not to say easy. But pretty simple. We placed the sets facing a very large window with blinds so we could use the daylight while we had it. We also used a pole-lamp with three regular light-bulb lamps on it. We used red and blue blubs as well as regular lights. The red was particularly striking!

Also, we used that pole to suspend the Alien when he picks up Frosty. We wrapped its tail around the pole, and used masking tape to secure it. You can see the lamp base in the shot above showing the back of the computer form wall.

Special Effects can be seen in around half of the shots in this story. Some of them are simple, and were used as set dressing, while others required a lot of computer work in Photoshop.

In this shot you can see slime dripping from the alien's face. I wish it was clearer, it was great! Also on Frost's boot, the same slime oozes. It's Nickelodeon "Gooze." It's amazing stuff! It's highly cohesive, but very runny. We would just plop a blob of it on the alien, and within seconds the room's heat and the lights, had it running down in long slimy strands. It was fun to play with, and the effect was great!

Come on, it's string. I just pixel-edited it out in Photoshop. For this shot, (since it was a reshoot and I was alone) I had to set the camera's timer, and hold the stick up out of shot with the Turbo-Copter Joe suspended and swinging sometimes quite wildly. I took a bunch of shots until I was sure I got one I could use.

This was shot on the walkway outside my office building. The shrubs were actually perfectly sized for what I wanted. The parking lot lines are simply strips of yellow electrical tape. It was funny because we had meetings with fairly important people the next day and I wasn't fully aware of it. So I know these got funny looks. I didn't peel up the tape. In fact it's still there. I keep telling people it's for roller blade parking.


Regular guys against a building?	No! Forced Perspective!

How do I establish that GENETRIX takes place inside a large office building, but not one that's six times larger than necessary? Forced perspective. I set a table up 30 feet away from the loading door of my own office building, Then a few feet in front of that I set up two bankers' boxes. The vehicle was set on the table closest to the camera, and the Joes on the boxes. Charlotte gets in between the shot here to show how it was done. Some people think that shot was superimposed, but that would be cheating. One of the aims of doing this story is not to cheat in any important way. And because I couldn't build a complete 1:6 building, and I didn't want to super Joes into real scenery, I used this ancient trick to make it look like my Joes are the right size for the building.

Photoshop was used to create most of the Post-Production Special Effects. These are done after the images were taken from the camera and edited in order to fit the story.

Cropping and level-adjustment (too light, too dark) was done first. Then I performed many photoshop effects.

I use blurring in several places. In the above shot I used a shot of the alien against the background to cut the alien out. Then I feathered the edges of the selection, and pasted it into a shot of just the wall (the first shot in the story) and used the Motion Blur filter to show the alien running quickly by. I also dissolved the layer to show that the alien ran by so fast it could barely be seen.

I also use the blur effect to show the rapid growth of the Iron Giant in several shots.

Wow, I used this effect a lot! If you've seen Aliens, you know that the armor worn by the marines had shoulder-mounted search lights. The armor I used had them as well, and I needed them to emit light. So I simply used the Photoshop Lens Flare filter to add them in.


Shot without Lens Flare	Shot with Lens Flare and Light Cone

The shot above shows just one of many lens flares I used. Just about every shot a Marine was in the shot and they were actively searching, the lens flare is there.

Two shots show the Aliens motion sensor. Originally they were just stills, but I decided instead to make them animated GIF files.


No movement, slow.	Movement everywhere - FAST!

I At one point I wanted to show that an alien was watching Vasquez and Frosty, so I used some funky Photoshop filters to get this effect. I just played with the effects until I got something I liked.

While I thought shooting Joes and superimposing them on real backgrounds to be a bit of a cheat, there are some cases where superimposition is essential.

One case was when Hudson is playing the computer game. The original image was printed and placed in the laptop, but the film just wasn't sharp enough, so I supered in a pure image over it. In case you were wondering, the game is "Asheron's Call", which I work on. It's a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, which is a continuing world populated by thousands of players. There is no end-of-game, so I thought this rather funny.

Another case is the Adventure Team Vehicle when Joe meets Hicks. This wasn't absolutely necessary, but in the original (before I reshot it) it was like this, and I thought it lent an air of authenticity, so I decided to pop it in there. This one shows up very realistically, and even the reflections seem right. Which is natural, I guess, since the cab was shot in the same spot the week before.

I needed to create a few laser blasts. Several during the Marine/Alien battle, and one for the seeking eye of the Borg later on. The above shot shows a Photoshop-created laser. I created the angled laser as a solid shape in red. Then I selected it, feathered and inverted the selection and hit DELETE a few times. This gives a faded edge to a shape. I copied it to another layer and colorized it white to make a hot core to the laser beam.

I used a similar effect to make the lightsabers. But for the intense lightsaber battle, I overlaid a shot of a couple of my co-workers fighing with real toy lightsabers. Someone had a camera and left the shutter open to record the battle. Here's the original pic.

For each shot involving the Iron Giant, I wanted his eyes to glow. Green during his normal mode, and red during his battle scenes. Kind of like in the movie.

So I painted soft-edged circles with a Photoshop brush, and colored them green. I superimposed them on the Giant with some dissolve, so the actual eyes behind showed up somewhat, adding detail.

The cast included mostly GI Joes from Hasbro. Two of them seen in the Adventure Team shot are vintage from the 1970s.

The blonde at the top of the picture is a 1977 Action Man with eagle eyes. The blue-suited figure at the extreme left is a vintage Adventure Team Joe from the early 1970s. The head of the red-suited Joe next to him is vintage Action Man eagle-eye on an ERTL Top Jake body. A few others are Timeless Classic GI Joes - reproductions of the original 60s Joes, and the Commander is General Robert E. Lee, which is a Timeless Classic figure as well, featuring the classic hard hands that make for a great "this close" gag. The rest are Classic Collection Joes produced within the past few years.

I also used a few extra hands. I swapped standard CC hands for the football hand, a grenade thrower's hand, a 21st Century pointing hand.

Chip Hazard was made in the mid nineties when "Small Soldiers" weakly crawled across theatre screens. Not a great movie, but the figure was cool. It was my first 1:6 figure in some time!

The Jedi were recent figures made in conjunction with the Star Wars: Episode I movie last year.

The toys that made up the series of "Plans" are all from my collection. I just picked out some of the more interesting and threatening ones.

The TARDIS is home-made. Of all the things I own, this one is the one most people have expressed that they would like to own. Here's a pic of it with the "lid" off to show how it was made. All balsa wood construction.

The various other marines are other Joes, Adventures Of, Navajo Code Talker (providing one gag only GI Joe fans will appreciate) and Silent Strike with the head of Mitchell Paige. I only owned one Aliens Marine breastplate and outfit, so Jaime Wilson loaned me another for the shoot. I bought Silent Strike Joe because it has the same breastplate painted differently, so I would have three. Then Jeff Griffin offered to loan me two more full outfits and gave! me a breastplate. Wow. So I had a full complement of Marines I could call on.

The storyboard didn't originally have a battle planned, mainly because I just didn't have enough Marines to make it feasible. That changed, so I stuck in a battle scene in at the last minute.

Vasquez' heavy laser weapon is a Star Wars: Episode I laser cannon meant to scale with the 3.5" figures. But I don't recall it being in the movie. But that never did stop toy manufacturers. I bought one, took it off its base and turned it over, and it just fit perfectly in GI Jane's hands. This one actually lit up, too!

There were two face-huggers we used, which come out of the walls in a couple of shots. Sadly, the image quality doesn't show them well. But they're there. They came with Analee Call figures from the Aliens: Resurrection toy line.

Also, I even had shot-gun shells on the ground during the battle because one of the Marines prefers a stand-up shot-gun fight to lasers and pulse rifles.

And there were plans to do a prologue, including the drop-ship sequence and APC scene. Here were the toys I was going to use:

But I probably won't do that for some time. My next project will be based on the TV show "The Prisoner."

Thanks for reading. Here's a treat for those of you who can do cross-eyed 3D viewing. (Cross your eyes until the two images merge in the middle, and let your eyes focus. It's pretty cool! I'm providing a little black space so your eyes won't be distracted by this text: