Last week, we discussed some of the process behind creating a client image inspired by the anime My Hero Academia. This week, we’re looking at the other subject in the session, who portrayed one of her favorite characters from anime, Homura Akemi.
From what I understood at the time of our session, Homura Akemi from the Madoka Magica anime is a time traveler caught in a time loop, forced to witness the death of her friend many hundreds of times. The girls’ mother provided a reference image of Homura time traveling, in which the character faces forward, with a shattered design behind her, as in the images to the right. This inspired some conceptual thoughts about time as a broken mirror (something like the introduction to Marvel’s What If…?), and I wondered whether the composition might show several versions of Homura at various moments in time. So we shot Homura in different poses, as broken reflections of herself. I knew this would take some additional compositing work beyond basic retouching but was up for the challenge.
These anime characters were a lot of fun to do, and the girls brought their own playlists for the session, so we listened to music while we captured the images. Since there were so many different possible looks for these versions of Homura, we have a variety of images jumping, fighting, thinking, kicking, and so on. This was a high energy part of our session where we captured so much great material.
For the “shattered time” image, I used a cracked glass texture that nicely distorted the pieces of the composition behind it. This whole composition took a good amount of time to cut every Homura out and size and place and edit them. There were aspects that didn’t work at all for a time, and then I slightly blurred the Homuras behind the main Homura so that they weren’t as sharp.
I had photographed my pocket watch not long before, and I used one of the watch mages as a backdrop so that it looked like the face of a giant clock. Then I concentrated on the foreground image of Homura to make it more distinct. Erin Gallagher, who did the hair and makeup, had created a gem piece for Homura’s hand, which I retouched in Photoshop to make a gem that would reflect the light according to the light direction, and I placed this over top of the costume gem’s setting. Then I added some background textures. All of this took some time.
When the girls returned from their cross-country trip and selected their images, Homura had another idea for her second image. She wondered if she might have a scene where she is fighting a powerful reality-bending witch called Walpurgisnacht, who appears to fly upside down and has a gear, or a piece of clockwork, for a body. Though their mother insisted that I didn’t need to do that if it was too difficult, I wanted to give it a shot.
I had to get creative. Since this was an idea that came about after the session, we had not shot a Walpurgisnacht, and I didn’t have a cityscape to bend. So I went through my own stock and found an image of London I had taken in 2015 from the London Eye. I liked the element of time that tied this image to the previous one. I chose to crop the image in portrait orientation so that Homura occupied most of the frame—this was her portrait, after all—rather than do a landscape or panorama in which she would have been only a minor part of the image. I traced an outline of the villain Walpurgisnacht that I found and hid her among the clouds to suggest her malevolent presence. I warped Big Ben, added lighting, some rain, added more hair to Homura, added a shine to her gem, added flying rocks and spatter, added a different sky… An anime reality isn’t necessarily a photorealistic one, so these many weird elements seemed to have their rightful place in the composite. This one took a long time to do.
I turned over the matted and printed images to the girls at the end of summer. I was thrilled to hear that they enjoyed them and had had such a good time throughout the process, getting regular updates on the work as it proceeded. The whole experience was so exciting and fun for all of us who worked on it, and I hope the girls treasure these superheroic souvenirs from their cross-country trip for all time to come.
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