This one was fun! Night Terrors was judged at Western Districts and was my only art piece submitted to merit and seal for IPC. This was my one in the bank and my very first MA merit.
Night Terrors is another very personal image as it represents my childhood nightmares that still reside in my head to this day. As a child I watched the Poltergeist movie and the light coming from the closet combined with the joker under the bed morphed into a terrifying entity for me.
I knew what I wanted to create.
My bestie, Melissa, said *SURE! Come on over!* when I laid out the idea to photograph her adorable nine year old twins to play me as the little girl in bed being scared out of her wits. They live in a dome home so the walls are rounded and the porthole windows are unique. I put the strobe in the closet to represent the poltergeist *don’t go into the light* closet monster. It took a while playing with how much to open the closet and the reclining pose for the girls. They took turns hopping in bed and screaming at the closet light wondering what level of crazy I had become.
I knew we had something when Brooke sat up a bit more and really gave a great scream. Between set up, playing with light configurations, and posing…this took maybe all of 45 minutes to capture. The hard part was the Photoshop!
Creating the clown was a blast. Once I added the texture from the side of our Hawaii home onto his face, and started pointing the teeth into fangs, adding speculars, saliva, and blood, it started feeling like ……woah! I’m going to pull this off! He was looking really fierce and scary. I needed to darken the room, added some fog, changed the color oozing from the door, added the face into the door, warped the door and frame. She needed a cute bear in her hands to make her more vulnerable. This was a load of work but I worked fast and furious because I was seriously into this image.
Unfortunately, Brooke won’t get to see this until she gets a little older. Melissa was surprised to see this vision come to fruition. I think she also thought I was just nuts with my strobe in the closet. My night terrors do not need to be anyone else’s…..except maybe PPA judges?
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