Pasta dancing in the fridge on an underlit checkerboard dance floor. What more can I say?
Post-challenge: Woohoo, an HM in an Expert challenge, so very happy...now the setup. Very little was done in post. I have used that frosted glass chessboard before and it always works best when underlit. Thank gawd for Sally Ann and similar stores, cause I was able to find a small glass-topped coffee table with enough room underneath to put a strobe with a barndoor and blue gel in it underneath. So that was the dance floor setup.
Next came the dancer. Cooked up a bunch of fettucine, drained and shocked it then carefully cut the lengths into halves and twisted them, formed them into crescents and laid them out to dry. As I was still using my cast-iron woodstove at the time it made a perfect drying surface without risk of burning the twists. Once they were dry I tied them together with kitchen twine and suspended the resulting figure above the dance floor and slowly spun it around while the camera was on timer and got the underlighting on the figure right.
Then it was just a matter of cleaning out the bottom shelf and crisper on one side of the fridge, inserting the dance floor, and as the strobehead was too big to fit, subbed in a very strong LED flashlight shining up through the blue gel to replicate the lighting. Again I suspended the figure and spun it around but wasn't happy with the results, so simply extracted and dropped in the figure from one of the previous shoots. As the figure is underlit shadows weren't an issue and the light inside the fridge cast the right amount of light on the food on the left.
Statistics
Place: 4 out of 21 Avg (all users): 6.5231 Avg (commenters): 8.3333 Avg (participants): 6.2727 Avg (non-participants): 6.5741 Views since voting: 1440 Views during voting: 172 Votes: 65 Comments: 15 Favorites: 0
Great job and congratulations on your HM. I just finished reading how you created your masterpiece and I haver to say it was very cleaver. Thank you so much for your tutorial.
What a great idea and well executed, thoroughly deserving of your HM and score, well done Susan. I enjoyed reading your notes, what a lot of effort but well worth it. The pasta figure is so dynamic and the lighting really effective it works beautifully. It is a great idea but what would have made it work even better would have been better use of the space on the left for an admiring vegetable audience looking longingly at the gyrations of this wonderful pasta danca...
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
