Callidus

Well, I’m back. Actually I’ve been back, I just haven’t had time to write about it. Its weird.

Last week, I had this sudden burst of inspiration. For some time, I’ve been toying with the concept of doing a manip series that would utilize stock photography. The sorts of photos that business-types throw into power point presentations alongside a graph labelled with words like “Projections” and “Fiscal Year.” Over the years I’ve come across a few dozen stock pics that I thought could work well in a mind control story. I was just waiting for the inspiration to bite.

Which brings us back to last week. I was hunting for something on Google Image Search and one rabbit hole led to another and I stumbled onto three or four images that I really liked. A story began to materialize in my mind. A corporate takeover. Aided by nefarious mind control. I went to my raw material folder and began collecting photos and seeing what worked well together. I grabbed a few naughty images that I’ve had saved but probably wouldn’t find a use for on their own.

I got the Photoshop work underway and immediately moved on to animation. In a couple nights, I had my images finished. From there, I went on to do the writing which naturally lent itself to a vignette-style story. As I wrote on it more, a broader, yet vague, narrative came together that helped to glue everything together. I polished a bit and worked on the pacing, trying to make it feel like its naturally building towards something. And, hopefully, the ‘something’ its building towards feels satisfying once you get there.

And that’s it. A fun little project that was a nice change of pace: just sitting down and doing something rather than spending a lot of time planning and over-thinking it.

The manip itself has been in the gallery for several days. But, literally, as I began to type up this blog post, my email pinged with some fresh work from a freelance client and so I dashed off to handle that. I just grabbed a few spare moments this evening to jot down my thoughts.

Whether you’ve already had a chance to check it out or this is your first peek, I do hope you enjoy!

See you next time.