At 8:30am contributors received a theme - in this case "If it's not scary, it's not worth doing." - with the nebulous instructions that we create something in our medium around that theme. After some brainstorming over coffee and waffling back and forth over using our then-uncarved pumpkins somehow, I decided to go with my normal train of thought - take things to their logical conclusions. Death is about as scary as it gets, would suicide be "worth it"? Also, it's near Halloween, make it creepy. Seeing as I'm coming from a retouching background I also wanted it to be more than just a single tweaked shot.
Using at-hand props and an at-hand model (Natasha Colleran), I blocked out the windows and set up the scene. I'm a big fan of the warm-cool contrasts in a scene, and was very pleased with the outcome of this from concept to execution in only a few hours - and the fact that the 'ghost' successfully reminds me of the 80's era Ghostbusters special effects is icing.
I was torn though, the straight shot of just Natasha lying in bed, ostensibly dead, is really beautiful to me. I flipped back and forth between the two over and over again, but decided that the straight shot both didn't show my retouching skills well enough, and at least brought that Halloween-y vibe into the shot instead of heavily bumming everyone at the competition out with just a shot of a suicide, no matter how pretty said shot was. Let me know what you think.
And, for what it's worth, it won the Judges Award and tied for the People's Choice award, so there's that.
Thanks to Adobe (especially the year of cc) and all the other fantastic participants, I sincerely hope I get a chance to have another go next time. See more #CreativeJam competitions and all the work here: Adobe Creative Jams
