FINISH THE TALE: BIG KYRA ARRIVES

Announcing: the large live-action puppet for Kyra is completely completed. And I love her.

Animator Will Vinton said, "Create a world and then forget what it's made of." This describes my Halfland creation process in several aspects, visually, utterly yes, but also artistically. Putting something in between what I make and their final presentation creates a kind of suggestion of a living fantasy. Its flawed edges become smoothed out, its realism blurred, smeared, different from that expected, all conspire to do that magic trick in fairytales when they become truth. 

I spent the last few months building the enormous Black Mermaid Kyra puppet in a certain amount of realistic detail, only to obliterate nearly all of it in the image capture. And this distortion technique provides precisely the poetic results I'm after.

Let's spend a moment on one of these magic makers, the triumph of the AstrHori 50mm F1.4 L Mount Lens. It's not a pro lens answer for every project, but it could not be a better tool for the specific feel of this one.

It's a plane tilt focus lens for all L Mount cameras but at an egalitarian $250 price. Its low-definition image quality, depending on how it's set, capturing frames without the typically harsh clarity in modern digital lenses, gives an ethereal, otherworldly quality that this little folktale needs in its proper telling.

It loses corners and has a soft close-up, fully smoking out areas with such a shallow depth of field, as if we see everything Halfland through an old ship's spyglass. Painterly, artistic, an ambiguous reality.

When I finished the build, I couldn't invest the time to properly study and learn everything about photography, or my new camera, or this new lens intuitively picked to use as my main shooting camera set-up. I was intimidated and filled with overwhelming dread. So, I snuck up on it. Fiddled around like an animal (no offense to animals), pushing all the buttons on the camera, twisting all the rings, and seeing if I could follow the logic of the interface. I watched one video (linked above) that gave me enough instruction to clunk through.

I was THRILLED and cussing a blue streak when images of random things near me at the time (ONLY JUST YESTERDAY!!) started to appear how I always wanted Halfland to look.

These first exploratory shots are not only the best I've ever taken with any camera/lens, but they also serve me the focal control I was after with the [late] Lytro technology and the ultra-creamy Hasselblad quality of light I've had in mind for Halfland all these years!

Here she's staged as if perhaps underwater, her aqua eye looking beyond those watching into the deep.

A Black Mermaid. Truly, deeply, Black-skinned. Not a compromise of a lighter caramel latte or any other easier-to-light of the beautiful range of mixed tones that make up darker human skin colors. No. I went there.

When I began, I had only heard tales of fairer-skinned mermaids with long Caucasian hair falling past their slender waists. Wanting to be different, could I, as a white woman, dare to attempt to create one of my main characters as actually blue-black Black? Would it be insulting to this group somehow? Racially insensitive? I wasn't sure. Her presence remained with me through the years, so I persisted. And now, having met this Kyra this week, my Black Halfland mermaid, I am proud she exists. A vision finally fully realized. I hope she comes across as who she allegorically is, beauty, youth, sensuality, and loyalty to her friend, Wisdom.

Links for posts about how she was made; her eyes, fingernails, scales, hair, and costume in detail. How will she be used for this film? Watch me recreate exactly what you see here for the articulated stop-motion scale version. See you on the beach!

• Shoutout to my Resupp partner, Kyelynn, because Resupp [Daily Remote Support] makes these completions possible.

• Can we all agree that YouTube is an incredible resource that changes everything? I get so many things done and done well by learning from people with experience, available for free there 24/7! Incredible.