February 2006

Watching me, watching you.

This month we expose the truth. Who are the people behind the photo shoots in the Oz White Dwarf? How do they make the magic happen? Where does it all take place? Will they appreciate my efforts to have fresh, clean hair? For those who are happy living without such earth shattering answers, look away before it’s too late. For the rest of you adventurous souls, read on…

With the release of the new Tau Empires codex, the boys at White Dwarf wanted an Oz Tau army to showcase and so I donated mine for the shoot. Firstly, I had to write some text to go with the pretty pictures, so Bryan posed me some questions and I answered them and e-mailed him the answers. This meant that Bryan could lay out the article and work out how many pages and what photos he needed to take before we got to the photo stage.

[You can see Troy's army in the Issue 316 (April) of White Dwarf - Ed]

Then we teed up a time for me to come in and drop the army off and they could take the picis. This was Tuesday 7th Feb. I handed over the little fellas and watched while Bryan set up the table and the miniatures and took photos.

Photo Shoot	Positioning the miniatures	Layout of the article

Some interesting things that I didn’t realise about the WD shoots are:

• They have the article already done except for the photos, so that once they take a photo they can put it straight into the computer from their digital camera and see if it works. They then print that out and use it as a reference to make changes to the model positioning. You can see that in one of my photos.
• They can magically make things appear and disappear. I only had two sniper drones but a legal unit is three, so Bryan took a photo of the unit with two drones, then he moved one drone around and took another photo. In the computer he laid the two photos on top of each other and basically “cut a hole” in the top photo so you can see the “third” drone! Magic…
• Every miniature that gets photographed that isn’t in a “group” scene, or on scenery, needs to be clipped. This means that Bryan, Lorenzo and sometimes Matt have to get an extreme close up of the miniature on their computer screen and take the cursor and draw around the outline of the miniature. This makes a border around it which then cuts out anything but the miniature and it can go into the magazine with text around it and so on. Also a good technique for getting rid of flying stands.

Two Drones..	become Three	Spot the difference

While they had the army, Lorenzo, who does a lot of the GW flyers, posters and web flash stuff, took some photos of my boss for one of those cool “spin me around” picture things on the web site. I’m not sure when it will go up but it will be cool.

There you go, all the secrets revealed.

By the way, I painted my stealth team and started my second squad of kroot this month as well. I’m only taking 3 stealth suits in my army but I thought I’d paint the whole unit of 6 at the same time. I’m taking the targeting array upgrade so I used the crisis suit target locks and stuck them on. I think when the new stealth suits come out I’ll get them and make them the ones with the upgrades and I’ll rip them off these ones so I have a unit of “clean” XV15s.

Spinning around	Painting Kroot	Stealth Team finished

Only a little bit to go and I’m all ready, it looks like I could have this finished on time?