BTS Toy Photos Shorts: Another for the Mothers

Another for the Mothers, toy photography. Full video here:    • Another for the Mothers - Toy Photography ...  

Hello and welcome back to another Halloween toy photography video!

This week I'm going to show you how to use lighting to give your shot an eerie atmosphere. I call this shot: Another for the Mothers.

The toys I used were Grand Admiral Thrawn, a Sand Trooper, two Night Troopers and Captain Enoch from Hasbro's Star Wars the Black Series.

Every spooky season, I like to let my love of horror bleed through into my work. This year, I thought I'd make a zombie scene with my Night Troopers.

The inclusion of Thrawn working with the Great Mothers to reanimate the corpses of his troops in the Ahsoka series was a nice little injection of horror into a franchise that I think could use more of it.

For this shot, I wanted my main source of light to be underneath my characters, so I built a stage out of cinder blocks and a paving stone, leaving a gap in the middle for a couple small lights.

I put an LED panel light in the front to cast a soft glow on my subjects and a spotlight in the back, to cast harsher shadows through my 3D printed floor grating.

To complete the set, I placed a 3D printed door in the background.

Next, it was time to pose my figures. I placed my Stormtrooper dead centre, and my Night Trooper off to the side with the dead troopers helmet under his arm. With the opening of the helmet facing upwards, I was hoping to suggest that it may not be empty.

With my subjects in position, I fleshed out the background and foreground with a supporting cast.

Lastly, I sprayed some atmosphere under my floor grating to give the lighting more ambience.

Here's my starting image. This was a simple edit, my main concern was lighting and colour grading. I began with a levels adjutsment layer, really cranking the darks and lights, to get a lot of contrast, followed by a colour balance adjustment layer to tone down the greens in the periphery of the shot.

Next I removed the articulation joints on my figures, then used the dodge tool to lighten up some of the features I wanted to highlight on my cast.

Most of these character had glowing eyes, so I used the pen tool and brush tools, along with layer effects to paint those in. I initially painted them from memory, but after adding Thrawn's eyes, I realized I should maybe check a reference image, and ended up redoing the troopers eye's from scratch.

So once again, here's my starting image. And here's where I ended up!

Thank yo so much for watching.

Floor grating:
  / landspeederluke  

Door:https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:582...

Music:
Hour Of The Witch by Scott Buckley |   / scottbuckley  
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...