Well, I finally crossed another task off my list. I've always wanted to do a gnome project. You know, the one where you
steal your neighbors gnome, take it on a trip, and then send the owners various pictures of it posed at interesting sites. Unfortunately,
none of my neighbors have gnomes and quite frankly I really didn't want to haul a piece of concrete around with me on vacation. Almost
every year a bunch of us head to Colorado to tear up the slopes. The pictures in this particular feature was from our
April, 2004 vacation. One of our friends that heads out with us is Sung. He happened to purchase
a new doll... sorry, a new ACTION FIGURE on the way over to our house. When I saw it, it immediately occurred to me that I could
substitute the heavy concrete gnome with a smaller and lighter action figure. Just so happened I had a set of predators Sung had
given me sometime back. I decided not to take the Master character with us because the staff on that figure was a little too fragile
for the trip. That left me with the other two figures in the set. Just so happens that they looked alike with the exception
of one having the helmet off and sporting some damage.
The process was fairly straightforward. At the time, I didn't focus much on the storyline. The original intent was to just take
a bunch of pictures and put them on my website. As the pictures started accumulating, it occured to me that a story
line might make it a little more interesting. Course, I had no idea what the story would be, so we just kept shooting pictures
everywhere we could. Needless to say, we probably gave a bunch of people interesting stories to tell their friends - especially a bunch
of old people at a McDonalds in Nebraska who watched me struggle with getting the desired Ronald vs Predator pictures 8^). During the trip,
Sung also bought another doll (darnit, I mean ACTION FIGURE) collection with the Ash character which I utilized for my hitman role. Anyway, we
made it back with a ton of pictures (many I decided not to use based on the quality of the shot or inability to fit it in the story (the
latter being less of a deciding factor since I stretched the story as far as I could). Up until now, I've been trying to find time to
wrap up the project. I got the baseline of the story done with the available pictures, but decided there were missing pictures. To fill in
the gaps (such as Preddie and hitman getting their orders and the final shots) I found a fairly dark room (assuming predators were living
in dark secret locations), borrowed the Ash figure again, and snapped a few stills to tie up the story. I then used the Photo Album generator I wrote for the album section
of this website to crank out all the required HTML pages.
That's about it, hope you enjoy!
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