Hollow Man

Unbelievably, the inspiration for this came from Australian sculpture artist Ron Mueck who’s giant lifelike sculpted masks seriously blew me away.
Just hope he’s not too disappointed that this inspiration ultimately led me to something as far removed from museum art as my own take on one of my fave films of all time…

The idea of my face being used as a mask intrigued me to the extent that I found myself doing a series of selfies with my head resting on its side on the toilet seat. Not much I do to get an image surprises me anymore.

It was a total nightmare separating my hair spikes from the background, but I got steadfast with the task and the cut-out mask looked good.

But that’s where I got creatively stuck. What next?

Fortunately we had to take our cat to the vet last Saturday and it occurred to me that a shot of his operating table could be even cooler than Mueck’s marble museum pedestal… just the way my brain works… So I brought the camera along and while the cat got his shot, I got mine…

It was while I was checking out the shots from the vet’s practice that the Hollow Man thing came to me… like this invisible man needed a mask, and fortunately I had just the thing!!

So all I needed was a guy in a hooded jacket without a face (back to the bathroom with the self timer ticking down)…

I then started to put everything together in Photoshop.

It was tough because the layout of the vet’s practice totally didn’t fit my idea of the frame layout, so I had to clone out the window and completely change the layout, and even move that cool X-ray thing over to the other side of the room… which was actually at the same side of the room before I swapped the room around… whew!

And even when I’d taken my face out of the hood and it looked like the image was done, I knew it needed something more… so I slept on it…

and came up with the newspaper article, the pieces of ID, and of course the sunglasses…

It took a while to get everything positioned and blended and there was a shitload of image layers and adjustment layers to keep track of…

But it was fun. Like I hadn’t had in yonks.

Sorry this is so long winded, but when the adrenaline kicks in ya just gotta go with it, yeah?

All elements shot with a Canon EOS 5D MkI with EF 16-35L and EF 100 mm fixed focal lenses.