Making Darth Wilson
Lockdown
The great shared experience of 2020. Lockdown. Do you remember the isolation? We'd transformed into Tom Hanks in the film Castaway. Marooned on a desert island. He found a football and painted a face on it... and named it Wilson. Company.
I had my Tom Hanks moment, and my own Wilson was born. He still lives with me. Tom was a little limited in his choice of paint. I could let my imagination run a little more wild... and I had the time. I could only waste so much of it watching Star Wars movies. One Amazon purchase later, a plain black mannequin head arrived and I went to work.
The creative process
I'd been meaning to work with ultra-violet light. Wilson was face painted with UV reactive paint. The hoodie, during the photograph painted with light via a custom made fibre optic brush lit with a Nitecore MT22c torch through a blue gel. The face paint brought to life with a Vansky UV torch. To separate Wilson from the black background, an RGB panel light went behind him which gives a purple rim light on the clothing.
Camera settings for those interested were F6.3, ISO200 and in Bulb Mode. The final shoot was a 60 second exposure. Light to work came from an RGB panel light set at 1%. Otherwise, I tend to light paint in near darkness.
First shoot, the light on the hoodie was a little blurry. I had a couple of commercially available fibre optic brushes, but they're bushy. I needed a brush which was finer... so I made one (sugru to make a torch adapter and the bristles from a fibre optic lamp).
Second shoot, a couple of hours balancing light intensity with the camera's settings so one light source didn't overwhelm the others, I had a result... but Wilson was blind. Lifeless.
How to put life into him? A third shoot where I added a fourth lighting element. Red light shone through a prism to intensify it to make it seem like fiery electricity. Packing in photons to a single point and then using this tool to put life into his eyes.
Darth Wilson lived. In lockdown no chance for us mortals to socialise, but at least the Sith Could Rave. The pictures below show the journey and some of the tools used, and made to create him.
