Behind the Scene

Now that David's birthday has come to an end, I have a few more 'behind the scene' shots to share.

I had the castle interior set up on my dining room table for over a month as I shot all the different scenes. This is what it looked like from the back, as we walked past in the hall...

The view from the kitchen doorway....

The castle with three separate scenes set up simultaneously....

The girls with some of my stuff in the way; the box of matches to light the candles before shooting each scene, and a bowl to throw the spent matches into; a little container of eye putty to help dolls hold onto things; an extra camera battery, lens cap, and a knife to tighten the screw for the tripod connector on the bottom of the camera each time it got loose; and Ringo's sword....

And one final photo tip from the series, about getting around a doll's permanent facial expression. 
I had shot a close up of Ringo unwrapping his sword, but with his permanent pout, he looked 'distracted' or 'disappointed', so I had to reshoot from a higher angle in order to get across the feeling I was after....hence the sword wrapping is different since I reshot the next day and the sword had already been unwrapped, so I had to put the wrap back on, and of course it's not possible to do that in exactly the same way as before.  Not that anyone would notice.

So now, with the party over, the entire family has moved into my display case....

I had wanted to move them all in there for some time, but there was no space.  So I made the decision to take all my old cloth dolls, which had been on the bottom shelf in the other case for years, and give them away to my daughter-in-law and granddaughters.  So this is how the two cases looked before the shuffle....

Removing all the cloth dolls opened up a whole shelf, but I didn't want to put my FIDs down on the bottom where they'd be hidden by the antique buggy, so I moved my Kaye Wiggs girls down a shelf to the bottom, and moved the entire shelf of dolls from the middle of the left case over to the right case. So then the FIDs would be in the prime spot in the middle of the left display case...

However, the right case is not as wide as the left one, so the Marshmallow Roast with the Gryphon did not fit, and needs to stay on the end of the FID shelf. My son is borrowing my Gryphon piece, as a subject for some special effects promotional videos, so when I get him back, one or two dolls will have to leave. Likely Miho, and Yvette.  Which means she could use a guy to keep her company....?

And of course now that I decided to give away my collection of old cloth dolls, I'm inspired to take lots of photos of them before they leave, since I've never taken photos of them before, and that's all I'll have left of them after they are gone. So stay tuned for lots of cloth doll photos....