Nine months? What took so long?

The story of The Search for the Albino Bigfoot Sasquatch is not short. And I apologize for the length of the tale, but it gives good insight into how this is done, and perhaps even why. It certainly shows the huge amount of work and effort that went into putting something like this story together.

A fellow GI Joe collector had a 1:6 scale polar bear, and I saw some great potential there, and wanted to use it in a photo story. She sent it to me while I was storyboarding a winter shoot, where the bear would be just a background prop.

But doing that story was going to take a while, and winter was waning. So I had the bear, and rather than just ship it back, I thought I should use it, so I started from scratch, and storyboarded this tale instead. I think it was Sean Dickinson who suggested I start it off with a Blair Witch parody, and it worked rather well.

The Storyboard

All good photo stories start with a storyboard. Here is the storyboard I came up with: (Click on any of them for a large version)

So I found a use for the bear, telling what would be an interesting story that had a few laughs, but in its essence, portrayed the very heart of the GI Joe Adventure Team as I saw it, in a funny, friendly way, with a surprise ending, and a good moral.

This one would be more about the real Adventure Team than my previous effort, GI Joe vs. Aliens, which I did for laughs, more of a parody of the Adventure Team, than a real AT storyline.

Preproduction

I saw a chance to use many of the items I've collected over the past couple of years as set decoration. I also saw my first chance to do some exteriors on-location. Sure, my two Arrival stories (1 and 2) were set outdoors, they were shot in my apartment complex's playground. I saw a chance to shoot at Nantasket Beach, a great beach not far from my home.

(Of course the icebergs were composited in afterwards...)

I also wanted to surpass my efforts with set-building too. I took the time to create a GI Joe Boardroom that had a cut-glass table, elegantly styled, with AT logos, and with many AT artifacts strewn about.

I painted a 21st Century military gray Kubelwagen yellow specifically for the Adventure Team, and this story. I had my mother knit a fisher-knit sweater that would look good on the Commander. I made the fedora out of a Michael's Craft Store plastic felt-covered cowboy hat.

There's no way I can explain where I got all the parts needed to put this together, I just have been collecting for two years almost every miniature thing that would scale for a GI Joe.

The First Shoot - May 6, 2001

Storyboard in-hand, Sean Dickinson and I knew we were in for several days of shooting. The Aliens story took one day. A gruelling 14-hour day, but we did it all in a single day. Technically, I went back and reshot the exteriors, so I could say it was two days for me, but one for him.

This one would take several days, and I knew it. So on May 6, 2001, we set up the first day's shoot. We shot outside our office building at Turbine Entertainment, using some vehicles parked at AT Headquarters, a helipad, and a helicopter taking off. Sean used a broom handle and string to suspend the helicopter. I edited the string out with Photoshop.

(Hint, don't shoot helicopter scenes in heavy wind!!! You never get the right angle!)

Then we packed it all up and went to the playground near my apartment, where there is some thick wood. We shot the film student scenes there in the fading sunlight. It was tough on the back, and hard to get 12" figures to stand up on a bed of rough leaves, but we got what we wanted, and wrapped it up for the day.

(Storyboard in the shot! Storyboard in the shot!)

The Second Shoot - May 12, 2001

We're both pretty busy folks, so it's not like we could just go shoot the next day. Six days later we did the second shoot, featuring Taylor and the bear. We did the rough stuff first. We suspended the helicopter from the playground's basketball hoop, and for forced perspective, to get the angle right, we propped Joe up on a shopping cart someone had left lying around.

(To get the right angle, the camera had to be below the Joe)

We also shot the bear scenes that day. We hid the bear in some leaves, and for a while were fairly worried we had thrust it deep into poison ivy. I wouldn't know poison ivy if it bit me. It didn't. Then we shot the closeups of the bear, and the confrontation with the bear. As well as the Quad Bike shots, and the retrieval of the bear by helicopter.

(Hmmm, that's not a polar bear!)

Since I wanted to have the title parody the Blair Witch poster, I took some sticks, broke them into pieces, and fashioned a rough-hewn Adventure Team logo, which I then played with in Photoshop to get the image I used for the poster.

(I shot this on red printer paper outside my apartment)

The Third Shoot - September 11, 2001

Well, summer came and went. I was working heavily doing two jobs. Not only was I working on my regular monthly work for Asheron's Call, but we had an expansion pack in the works, and I was working my butt off helping with and adding to that at the same time. There was just no time to do the third shoot.

Work on the expansion pack slowed down when we reached RTM (Release To Manufacturer) so I dusted off the storyboard and started working again.

I had a set to build. The next shoot would be the interiors. I needed to create a GI Joe Adventure Team Boardroom. I ordered a piece of smooth-edged glass cut at a local glass shop. I cut a cardboard tube into two short segments for the table legs. I printed AT logos to fit atop the tubes, and under the glass. I bought a Barbie Computer Room set so I could have enough chairs. (These are the small white ones around the boardroom table.)

(Sometimes Barbie stuff comes in handy.)

Props ready, I got some foam-core board in beige and put together a boardroom wall. I used printer paper and cardboard to fashion a door, but I didn't like the look.

We planned our shoot for the evening of Tuesday, September 11, and I had all the stuff ready to go. Coming in to work that day, as I'm sure you all are aware, I was greeted with quite a shock. I had stopped for coffee on my way in to the office, and I heard someone say a plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I didn't believe it at first, of course. Idle gossip. Then I thought, Gee, I guess it's possible. It's a fairly major air lane.

Then on my way in I heard the radio reports, and well, let's say to put it mildly, that took the wind right out of my sails. I was in no longer in any mood to do something as friviolous and as pointless as this silly little thing.

The Third Shoot - January 9, 2002

Months passed, and work got busy again. I still can't believe what happened, though I accept it, and as life slowly returned to normal, I dusted off the storyboard yet again, and had a good look at what I had already achieved, and what needed to be done.

I hated the look of my set, so I rebuilt it from scratch. I canibalized the Aliens set for its lights, making new sconces for my AT boardroom. I used a toilet paper roll, cut in half, and shortened, painted black, with tin foil glued in behind. I hot-glued them to the wall where the lights from a tap-light protruded, and the effect worked very well.

(The effect of the light behind the sconce by the door was soft, and lovely.)

So I asked Sean if he was up to shooting, and he said yes. We arranged to shoot on January 9 in Turbine's main boardroom, because I liked the table top as a floor. I had bought a red sheet of foam-core as well, in case the red accent wall wouldn't look stupid on camera, and clearly, it looks very good, so we went with that. I had shot a test shot earlier at home, and found that the room was easily cluttered.

(Note the cluttered look. Also note the ugly door.)

So I built the room on the table larger than I had first planned, but it worked so much better. There was no crowding, and things just looked gorgeous sitting there on the table. Several of my co-workers filed through as we were shooting, and most marvelled at how much "stuff" I had. Mostly, they thought it was highly geeky, but hey, we work at a computer game company, so to me, that's high praise indeed.

Just to go over a few things featured in the room:

(Click for larger image, like most on this page)

- Red metal filing cabinet is a business-card holder or some such
- Sarcophagi from the new "Secret of the Mummy's Tomb" GI Joe set
- Gramaphone is an old Christmas tree ornament I've had for decades
- Gibson guitar is a 1:6 scale. I forget who made it.
- Sugar container painted black is the statue base
- Red base was bought at a hobby store and painted red
- The bust is a real bronze statuette I got at TJ-Max for $4.00
- The chess table is GI Joe George Washington's map table
- I printed out the chess board, pasted on foam-core
- The chess pieces come from the Basic Fun Chess keychain
- The chess match is set up from a Fischer/Spassky game
- Barbie computer chairs
- GI Joe MSV chairs with custom bases
- Fridge magnet laptop
- Barbie tea set and pastries
- Picture Frame acts as my video display monitor on the wall
- The Commander's brief case is a business card holder. Even has working metal clasps.
- Pith helmet on the floor near the filing cabinet is a vintage GI Joe Mummy's Tomb helmet
- So is the pick-axe
- The silver brief-case against the wall is from a cheap Assassin figure I found at Toys R Us
- In other shots, you can see some of my Mummy's Tomb artifacts I've collected over the years

The video monitor is just a photo frame stuck to the wall with poster gum. I composited the images in later.

(To make the composites more real, I used the natural shadow of the frame.
The image is placed into the frame, then blended into the background by 25%)

So you can see, I have collected a large number of random items that can be used as set decoration for things like this.

So we shot the third shoot, and it all went beautifully. Normally under harsh, flourescent lights, cameras capture a green hue, which has to be corrected for. And I don't own any expensive studio lights. I feared the worst. But after taking a few test shots with Pete MacDonald's digital camera, I saw the results were warm, slightly golden, and just plain beautiful.

Wow. So it was now January, and I had storyboarded the show in March or April of 2001. I was nearly finished!

Except...

The Fourth Shoot - January 12, 2002

Note from this storyboard page that I didn't have a shot of the Commander at the beach, with icebergs in the background. Without that shot (which would turn into several) suddenly having the mystery solved by conveniently having icebergs float down to New England would have seemed forced. This establishing shot was needed to make the iceberg story seem real. And yes, polar bears have come to shore in Newfoundland after having travelled far south on icebergs, so the story is completely plausible. But I had to show the icebergs right from the start to make it believable.

So on January 12, my family and I took a trip to Nantasket Beach. It was cold, but gorgeous. We had a window of a couple of hours of sunlight forecast, and we used it. We made a nice trip out of it. My wife and daughter walked leisurely down the beach collecting shells while I shot the beach scenes. Then we capped the day off with dinner of seafood at a nearby restaurant. Thus ended the fourth shoot.

(My family, walking leisurely up the lovely Nantasket beach)

The Fifth Shoot - January 13, 2002

And for the final shot, I needed to show the bear back at home in the arctic. That would be the last shot that would leave the viewer satisfied with the story ending. Talking about it was not good enough. I had to shoot the bear on the ice.

In anticipation of this, thinking the whole thing would be done by September, I shot the bear on playground sand, hoping it would serve as arctic snow. You be the judge:

(Desaturated, it could pass, but only in desperate times.)

But Sunday morning, after the fourth shoot, the beach shoot, I woke up, and it was snowing. Great billowy flakes of it were coming down, coating the grounds around my apartment! A miracle!

So the fifth shoot saw me standing in two inches of sloppy wet snow, with snow coming down, trying not to get footprints around a plastic polar bear on the lawn near my apartment. But the result was exactly the shot I needed. It was as if it were meant to be. You be the judge:

(There was even some mottling of plant stalks poking up through the snow. Perfect!)

Post Production

Once I had all the shots in my computer, I selected from the plethora of angles and re-takes, and selected what I considered to be the ideal version that fit each storyboard frame. During shooting, I expanded some storyboard frames into two, three, and even four. I selected all the shots, then planned out where the text would go on each frame, and what would be said.

Storyboard text is meant as a guide, and is not written in stone. Rather, my storyboards are always done in pencil, because when you're on set, things change. You may see something that works better, or heaven forbid, you may find that what you had in mind just isn't working at all. During the Aliens shoot, we realized we had no combat scene. All these marines fighthing aliens, and no battle? So we quickly whipped up a storyboard segment depicting a battle, and shot it.

So I added the text and word bubbles to each frame as needed, hoping the composition wasn't ruined by bad placement.

Whenever I do a GI Joe photo shoot, I want it all to be real. Or as much as possible. Putting images into the video monitor couldn't easily be done on the set, so I chose to use compositing to put pre-designed images into the monitors. I don't consider it a cheat really.

To do this compositing, I used the Transform tool in Photoshop, and fitted my images into the video monitor frame, and then cut around hands and heads to complete the effect. Then wherever possible, I added some shadow from the monitor top frame to add depth and realism.

The icebergs came from photos of icebergs, cut up and stuck into the beach shots. I was going to do more touch-up on those, but when I had finished, they actually looked good enough to fool me, so I called that finished.

I then blurred the helicopter blades a bit, removed the string, and added a puff of smoke around the tranquilzer gun. And besides the REC button on the video images in the first segment, and adding in cross-hairs in one shot, there is very little other post production work done. The images are for the most part exactly as they were shot.

In God's Name, WHY?

This is a hard question to answer. Why not? Why did Gerry Anderson create Thunderbirds, or Captain Scarlet? Talking marionettes used in stories set in a science fiction world. Why? I don't care. He did it, and I'm eternally grateful.

Why did Tim Burton do Nightmare Before Christmas?

I did it because it was fun, it was a creative thing to do, it gives me a sense of accomplishment when I finish something of this magnitude and it turns out even better than I had hoped.

It's fun, that's why.

I bet if you had the chance you'd do it too.

Shut Up, Why Don't You???

I think I've just about covered what went on behind the "magic" of this story. Now proceed to the next page for some out-takes and shenanagans.

Thanks for reading! Your comments are most welcome.