I thought that since yesterday's post was an old photograph of myself, that I can afford to pull out another one from the archives. This one requires a bit of explaination.
I am dressed up as the superhero character "Bottle Dropper". He's one of dozens of such characters that inhabit the "Order Versus Chaos" universe, where there are many, many hyper-abilitied folks who have created polarized alliances with either Order or Chaos. These characters are the work of my friend Earl, so I can't take much credit for them.
Bottle Dropper's talent was that he could make bottles of any kind appear out thin air, and then the bottles are immediately dropped. Bottle Dropper was a not very subtle comment on how I once gave Earl a bottle of Coke which I fumbled and which fizzed up most violently.
Order Versus Chaos dispenses with a lot of plot and character development and cuts right to the point: these super heroes and supervillains are here to fight it out for our entertainment. It's mostly silly. If you are familiar with "The Tick", then you get the idea, although to my knowledge, Order Versus Chaos got its start sometime before Tick. It's that old.
Recently, the topic of the ordinary citizen transforming into a superhero has been very popular on television. Look at "Heroes" on network TV, or the movies "Hitch" and "Unbreakable". The recent "Spiderman", "X-Men", and "Iron Man" movies reinvigorated the superhero genre, featuring Stan Lee's typical protagonists with flawed personailities. This Order Versus Chaos picture predates all of that by around ten years.
Obviously, there is some Photoshop involved with the picture, but maybe not as much as you would think. The bottle and the special effects flash are Photoshopped, as well as part of the door. All of the crazy light and shadow are natural, though. It happened that the sunset was being reflected into the room from outside. The light was very intense, so I decided to get the camera. I threw on as quickly as I could an outfit that I thought Bottle Dropper would wear (as I recall that despite being based on me dropping bottles on Earl, BD's character was African-American, and he wore a typical spandex superhero suit) and I struck the Bottle Dropper pose in front of the camera on a timer. After a minute of this, the sun moved and the dramatic lighting diminished.
I added the special effects flash and the bottle of champagne later. Experts in trivia will want to know that the bottle was a 1992 Dom Perignon, which was a very good year. Also, some sharp-eyed JSVB readers have already spotted Bottle Dropper in a previous post. To see it, please click here. The Superman "S" Logo is the property of DC Comics.
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