Shooting 'the Soldier & Death'

I've always loved Jim Henson's Storyteller series, so way back in the early nineties I made several sculpted dolls depicting some of my favourite characters; Sapsorrow, the Princess from the Three Ravens, the Storyteller himself, and then my sister and I worked together to recreate the scene from the Soldier and Death where the soldier is playing cards with thirteen little devils.  

This is the entire piece with the original Soldier....

For some time I've been wondering if it would work to replace the Soldier with one of my FIDs. After all they are the same size. So I chose Lawrence to play the role of the Soldier.

​I set up a 'haunted palace interior', but needed a main light source from above, so stuffed a string of Christmas tree lights into a funnel, and suspended it from the chandelier....

There were thirteen devils on the piece and eleven of them were permanently attached so it took some creative camera angles to take the photos...

It was handy that there were two loose devils, since they could be moved around...

Then combined with Lawrence's posability it helped give the impression that the devils were moving as well....even though only two actually were....

Of course then one thing led to another, and I thought I'd tackle more of the story by using my Storyteller. I removed him from his base and posed him in the only fancy chair I had...

In the real Storyteller episodes, parts of the story appear as silhouettes on the scene above the fireplace, so I took a look at the original video and painted two of the backgrounds into one painting on a bristol board surround.  It was challenging to make the scene look dark and dull enough.  

Then after processing the photos, I'd draw in  the little figures in Photoshop...

Then I decided to include the beginning of the story when the Soldier first arrives in the palace. But I couldn't show the whole room since the devils were permanently attached to the table, and I didn't have a bare identical one. So I had to fake it by using a much smaller rectangular table that had the same colour of wood finish....

I took photos of the two loose devils arriving at midnight, and made sure to move the clock hands so they were at the right time.  But I didn't notice that the photo of the Soldier hearing the devils arrive still had the clock hands at the time when he first arrived. So I had to fix it....

With so much going on in the scene it's hard to make sure everything in the background makes sense. There was another scene where the clock was in the background, and I had to fix the hands on the clock again....to help show the passing of time.....

There was another oversight involving the cards, which I didn't catch right away either.  The original cards on the piece were all permanently attached, so I needed to make some new ones.  The original cards were made in the days long before colour printing. My sister scanned in the red cards, and it was only possible to print them in black and white, so she took them to a copy shop where the b&w cards were photocopied in red.  Then we hand coloured the face cards, and I attached peel-back vinyl dollhouse flooring to the backs.

Well, I did have a small deck of cards, but they were too big, so I just took out all the face cards and aces, photographed them, shrank them to the same size as the devil's cards, and I was surprised I still had a sheet of that very same peel-off backing. So the new cards matched!

​But for variety, I gave Lawrence a whole series of different winning hands, and one time it was all queens....

It's the scene where the devils are asking if he's cheating, and it never dawned on me that the accusing devil also had three queens glued permanently on the table in from of him (no wonder he's asking!)  But I couldn't have that, so I had to remove them in Photoshop....

To fill out the story even more I decided to try take some photos of the Soldier opening the sack with the devils inside. Well, I wanted one of my favourite devils to be 'in the sack', so cut the bottom out of the sack so it could fit around him. Then Lawrence, who had already been changed back into his usual outfit, had to sprawl unceremoniously across the table.....

.....in order for his hands to be in position....and I had to place the set on the floor so I could take the photo from above.....

Then for the end of the story, I wanted to do the same thing as in the original video and have a devil come out of the sack that the Storyteller tosses across the room. I'd already resewn the bottom of the sack, so had to cut it again.  Then I used a tiny stand to support the fleeing devil....

...and just cropped in when I took the photo....