Faking a Cathedral

The day after the movie studio photo shoot I realized that I should have shot more photos for an actual story involving the painting of Lawrence's portrait. I had been so focused on trying to create a magnificent portrait of Lawrence and his horse, that extra scenes had not even occurred to me, until the next day, and then it was too late. 

A few days later I came down with Covid, and it took months to start feeling half decent again.  As part of Long Covid, my anxiety levels were through the roof, and I couldn't face the stress of asking for a second photo shoot at the movie studio.  Instead I thought I'd try fake it at home. I knew I could handle the actual set pieces, but wasn't too sure about the background. That Gothic Cathedral set was mighty impressive. But I was determined to try.

The most striking features of the cathedral background, other than the actual architecture, are the blue stained glass windows. 

I considered painting them on foam core, or even making them out of painted paper like a real stained glass window.  But both options sounded like way too much work. So I thought of making blue banners from cloth instead. They'd take less work, and last better than painted paper. So I printed out pictures of the actual stained glass windows, and went through all my blue cotton prints choosing all the ones that were the right colours. I wasn't going to try recreate the actual window designs, but just suggest them with the use of colour and texture.

I decided to make the 'window' banners like all my other pieced banners, using trapezoid shapes, so cut them all out, and started piecing them together. 

I made two narrow banners, and two wider ones that even had the golden brown vertical stripes like the real windows.

Setting the Scene

I thought my dining room china cabinet would be the perfect background for my 'cathedral', with all the vertical moulding suggesting 'pillars'.  But I didn't want the dolls inside to show, so taped black bristol-board inside the cabinet to hide everything inside. Then I taped up the banners.

I laid out the 'cathedral' flooring cloth, and started stacking the bookshelves for the raised throne area, and set up the scene using all the same prop and furniture pieces that I'd used at the movie studio.

I did use my styrofoam pillars and arch for some extra architectural interest, and I had to use the interior 'stone' castle walls to hide everything but the china cabinet. ​Then with everything in place, it was time to pose the dolls and shoot the rest of the story - the parts that led up to and followed the photos shot at the movie studio...

Telling the Story

I thought the new photos taken at home turned out quite well, although it took some effort to process them all so they'd have the same lighting as in the cathedral set. I hoped people would be too engrossed in the story to really notice (or care) that the photos were taken in two totally separate locations.

 My only problem with the story was that Lawrence was in the exact same pose for the entire movie studio photo shoot.  I wanted something different interjected in the movie studio photos with him interacting with his horse, but had never taken any photos like that. So I had to fake one. I went looking through the photos I'd taken last summer before I made the blue banners, and found a nice one of him looking at his horse. It seemed perfect, but it had the wrong background, so I spent some time in Photoshop replacing the background in the photo with the cathedral background by superimposing Lawrence and his horse on a blurred studio photo....

Original photo

Photo used for background

Edited Photo

 I thought I did a half decent job, until I realized Lawrence wasn't holding his sword when he was posing for his portrait in the movie studio photos. He was supposed to be holding the orb. I considered cropping in close so we wouldn't see his sword...

It actually made for a rather nice photo, but then I realized that the fur collar of his robe was supposed to be open like in the movie studio photos. So, I found another old photo of Lawrence looking at his horse - while he was holding the orb this time - and the fur collar was open, so I tried again. I started by using the same cathedral photo I'd used the first time, but the top of a pillar ended up flaring straight out of the top of Lawrence's head, creating a major tension point, so I had to start all over again with another background photo. That one turned out perfect!