Marlan Christmas Card '06

If you know me, you should know that I don't care for pictures and even less for pictures-that-pass-for-Christmas-cards; it's my own years-old issue and it's my own thing, nothing against my family, with whom I have been in many Christmas card pictures, and they have often produced some very nice pictures but it's always something I've been uncomfortable with, again, much because I don't care for pictures in the first place. It's rare that I photograph and, unfortunately, it's also often rare that I have contact with all the loved ones in my life. With the holidays coming up, in the fall of '06 I started getting some ideas to do some kind of project that I could send to friends, relatives, contacts, etc. I knew I couldn't just do the standard Christmas card picture, since that's just not my thing in the first place, and why would I want to just send them a picture of myself? Besides, the standard picture would be just like anyone else's and what would be the point of sending a picture of myself in the first place? I wanted to do something but, as is usual with me, I couldn't do just another thing. Then I realized: why not do a picture of myself and send it? Maybe the best way to get away from that is to go right into it. But, again, what's the point of sending a picture of myself? I don't have an immediate family of my own (like a wife and all that) or pets or an interesting house or car or my own visual art so I was a little stumped for what to have in the picture. But then again, why couldn't I make my own family? Having a picture taken of myself in different costumes, as different characters, was in inspiration that came to me in seconds and I could already see the picture itself. It seemed like it could be an interesting project.

Aside: I had done a Christmas picture/card back in '95, my first year in L.A. with Rick, my roommate and frequent collaborating partner. Again, we wanted to do some kind of Christmas picture to send to friends and family and, reveling in how ridiculous it was in the first place, we got one together (for which we had a few accusations of being gay, whether the accusors were making a joke or not):
I had had an idea in the back of my mind for a while that I could take a number of pictures that I could Photoshop together and make it look like I was having my own party of myself. (Nevermind that my idea had all the pictures of me being naked (but specific bits tastefully covered).) Rick also had a picture on his MySpace profile that a friend had done as a Photoshop project, taking various pictures of Rick and putting them into a random family's picture and I thought it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen but I didn't consciously rip that off to do my own project, though, I admit, maybe it was done subconsciously: Another part of that idea from an album cover:
End aside.

However, I didn't know if it could be do-able. I'd need help on it. I could maybe manage to do the cut-n'-pasting and putting the images together in one picture but I know someone that is good with Photoshop could put it together but than I could, as good as it would need to be. If I was going to have more than one character I would need a make-up artist. I would need someone or someplace to print up the cards. But most importantly, the whole thing would hinge on a photographer that could do it, getting good pictures and making it all go together, but most importantly, could "get" the project and have fun with it. My brother Paul went to college with a lady named Amy who I met years ago, had contact with, and knew was a photographer but, most importantly, knew would be on the same wave-length that I was. I sent her an e-mail and suggested that we meet for lunch. At this point I had some ideas and just wanted to talk to her and see if this project could even happen, if she could even do it, if it could even turn out like I wanted, if it would even be affordable (I knew the price for this kind of thing could spin quickly out of control but I wanted to know right-off if it was cost-prohibitive). We went to an Indian place in North Hollywood and talked it over. I spilled my thoughts all at once to Amy and she laughed the whole time so I knew I had a good partner. She thought it would be fun and she said it could totally be done. We went to a coffeeplace down the street and continued talking about it and we worked out a few preliminary things, including the time to do the photo-shoot, which she said would take just a few hours, and the price for the whole thing, which was within my budget (and less than I thought it would be, actually). Amy knew both a make-up person and someone to do Photoshop and said that they could cut me a deal on their rate, just to do the project. Even better, Amy cut her own rate for me to do it and said she would put it all together. So it was on.

We planned to do the photoshoot the day after I got back from my Thanksgiving week in Indiana, which was the only time our schedules could meet up, so I had a few weeks to get things together. My plan was to have four characters in the picture, all me but in different costumes, make-up, etc. The first two characters came to me as soon as I came up with the project: the first was the sports-guy. My brothers got a picture taken years ago when they were all in baseball jerseys and caps. It was a nice-enough picture but I always thought it was kinda ridiculous; I've always thought formal pictures were an occasion to dress nice, put on your best clothes, present yourself in the best possible way. Wearing sports-related-clothes always seemed to me casual-bordering-on-slobbish so it seemed out-of-place in a nice picture but I know that people do it. So that had to go in. The other easy one was me as a woman. In every family there needs to be a woman, or at least a female element, and I knew that would be ridiculous to have me dressed and made up as a woman (though maybe not that ridiculous). A simple idea and probably the easiest to prepare for. The goth-guy character came a few weeks after the initial idea. I knew it would be a great contrast to the rest of the characters, like in many families. I've seen goth-people dressed up in formal pictures and I never thought it was a ridiculous idea since that's their own personal style but it's always a striking visual. The fourth person was a little more difficult. I couldn't come up with another element that really fit, one obvious character from a family that was relatively silly but believable and also one that I could be transformed into. I had dinner with Brian and laid out the idea for him (he was the only other person, beside the ones involved with working on it, that I told. Uncharacteristically, I was keeping my mouth shut about it and wanted to surprise everyone) and we batted around some thoughts for the last character. Brian suggested a nerd-type guy with thick glasses and the pocket-protector and all that and it might have fit but it wasn't dynamic enough for me. I wanted each character to be noticeable on his own and putting them all together to have the biggest impact. I settled into the idea of having a guy in a shirt and tie, which would be easy for me to put together, and might also anchor this made-up family as a paternal figure, but coming up with what to add to that character didn't come until much later when I thought to have someone in that costume but looking like he was savagely beaten; there was something realistic to me about that and the idea was that the family had the sitting for their important family picture scheduled and the day before, that member (whether he was the father or otherwise -- I didn't want to be specific about family roles) had been roughed-up but they couldn't cancel the sitting or they would lose their deposit and had to go ahead with it, even though the guy was clearly injured in the most obvious way. (Only I could work a back-story into a family picture.) The pieces of the family all seemed to fit (especially since, largely, they didn't all fit, just like most any family).

Since I had the ideas for the all the characters, I had to get the props, the costumes and everything else that came with it. I wanted the sports-guy to look like some kind of lug, like the fun uncle that drinks a lot. Obviously all the family members needed to look different and for that guy I wanted a moustache and long hair stuffed under his ball-cap. I went to Cinema Secrets to get the wig for him and, obviously, one for the female character, as well as the facial hair, that looked undeniably fake to me but it was all they had, which was disappointing since that store is supposed to have professional-grade stuff but I didn't have a choice. The rest of the costume was for a sports-team but I didn't know which to make it. I didn't want to take a side to promote my favorite team and I rarely follow sports anyway so I wanted to go with a team that was as universally reviled as possible. I thought a baseball team would be best and, after asking, nearly at random, my buddy Paul, I decided it would be the Yankees, who seem to have more people that hate them than most teams (or so I hear). The sports-guy ended up being the most expensive to outfit, with the wig and the jersey, even more than the lady, who had a wig (both wigs being about $45 each, which I couldn't return so I'll have to come up with some Halloween costumes I can use them in) but other than that was a cheap sweater from Sears and some even cheaper earrings (that I ended up not using because they wouldn't be visible) though I did use the cheapie pearl necklace from the same place (Claire's). I didn't have to get anything to outfit the goth guy since I already had the wig from past costumes (originally to be Robert Smith for Halloween a few years ago: then as the Sandman, Master of Dreams for a comic book costume party a few months later: It was a wig I had bought years before for Halloween and I don't remember what it was for originally but later I used it when I dressed as a mover. It was long, black hair and for the Robert Smith costume I chopped off a lot of it and plastered it with so much hair-spray it's probably a potential fire risk). The shirt, which is black velvet, long-sleeved, I got during my clubbing days and it seemed like a good idea at the time but I very rarely wore it and not at all outside of Halloween. The beat-up guy I also had all the stuff for; the make-up I didn't pay for directly. I bought the clothes and accessories I needed from the Burbank Mall with the intention of returning all of it after I was done, which helped save a lot of money. And every store was great about my returning the things (especially since it was a short time after I'd bought the stuff and I was meticulous about keeping the receipts).

The photoshoot was on a Thursday, November 30, at Amy's house. She said we would start at 2 and it would only be a few hours and we started a little later than that though I don't remember if it was because of her or me. The make-up artist that Amy was originally going to get couldn't do it so she got the original artist's partner, Jonelle. Immediately upon meeting her I could tell we were on the same vibe and that we would get along. (It didn't hurt that she has a great ass.) We quickly got to work, first off doing the sports guy. I would have preferred to do the more difficult ones first to get them out of the way but Amy and Jonelle suggested, rightly, that working up to the more difficult ones would be the way to go.
I had assumed Amy had some kind of set-up at her apartment, maybe a studio with lighting or at least a still-camera on a tripod for this project but she's more of a run-n'-shoot photographer and at this point I was already deep enough in this and we were far enough along that I just had to go with it and trust her, which I had decided to do very early on. Amy had done a lot of work on this thing and I knew that a collaboration could potentially bring the best result; I had a very certain thing in mind, a specific image in my head of how I wanted the end result to be, but I wanted to use that only as a starting point and wanted to stay flexible so I could accept a good idea and I knew that Amy would have something to contribute.

We did the pictures of the sports guy first. The sun was still up so Amy did the shooting outside, against the white wall near the door of her apartment. I wanted to give each character a different physical look, like a different smile or posture or whatever I could do to make each character as different from each other as possible. My best idea was to have all of them looking in a different direction (like those old Civil War photos) but this might have gotten lost along the way; they're all pretty much looking in the same direction in the photos.I tried to make him look slightly dazed, again, to give each character as different an appearance as possible.
Note the slightly outstretched hand. I intended to have this hand be layered over the character in front of this guy in Photoshop, for a hand resting on a shoulder, to give it some depth and make it look more realistic. The next was the woman. Amazingly, there was less make-up for her than there was for the other characters. I didn't want the make-up to make it look like a man in drag but rather just a woman, albeit an unattractive and unavoidably masculine one. Jonelle didn't pluck any of my eyebrows. I had earrings but they were lost under the wig so I ditched them. I had assumed that most of my torso wouldn't appear in the photo but Amy had the idea to give my chest some kind of presence so she gave me one of her bras to put on and we stuffed it with scarves (of which Amy had plenty).
We took those pictures outside, just as we were losing sunlight. I had some concern that there would be an inconsistency of color for the characters as we were shooting them in different lights but Amy said it wouldn't be a problem so I let her take care of it. I knew we could correct it in Photoshop but I thought the less we had to rely on that the better off we would be. I wanted the woman to be smiling and radiant, in contrast to the other characters which I knew would be much more dour, but that took some coaxing on Amy's part. Of course, she was laughing at how ridiculous (and ugly) I looked as a woman so it was contagious. Amy also wanted to take some other pictures for her own amusement.
The goth-guy was next. Goth make-up can be incredibly elaborate and what I had in mind was very vague so I let Jonelle go and she kept it pretty conservative, relatively, as far as these things go.
By then we had gotten more of a flow going to the picture-taking so it went quickly. There was no more daylight so we took the rest of the pictures in Amy's kitchen since there was a large, blank wall to shoot against. I wanted the goth-guy to be smiling, to go against the stereotype that all goths have to be morose and frowning all the time, even if it didn't look right. Somehow that direction got lost along the way (as well as the pictures from that part of the shoot. Amy sent me a disc with all of the pictures she took that day but there were a few that weren’t included, for whatever reason she didn’t put them on there).
The last one, the beat-up guy, was its own challenge. I told Jonelle that I wanted the guy to look like he had been in a fight and he had been badly beaten but that it was the day after he had been attacked; I told her to go crazy, the worse the better. I wanted to have some Band-Aids on him as well, though there was a notable inconsistency since there was also blood on his face, which would have been cleaned up if he had had bandages on him, but the blood looked so real and if you don't think about it when you look at it, it looked really great. I also combed my hair to one side which was, to me, the thing that was the most different than myself. It's also one of my worst ties and I don't remember why or where I bought it.
When we shot it I had one of my eyes closed, to make like it was swollen shut, though that pushed up part of my mouth and face, making it look fairly fake as I was smiling; I should have left it to Photoshop. I also wanted to make the beat-up guy to be smiling so it would be a contrast to how he was seemingly beaten horribly recently. I thought the shirt and tie was also an interesting choice, since it showed that this was probably the most conventionally normal guy out of the whole family (if you don't assume the female character wasn't actually female and if you assumed that the sports-guy didn't wear his sports paraphernalia all the rest of the time).
And after all that, we were done, around 8 o' clock, a few hours later than anyone had planned but it was as long as we needed and it seemed to have worked out well. Now all the pictures would go to the Photoshop guy.

With Amy: With Jonelle and Amy: I left the make-up on after that. I didn’t see much reason to take it off and thought to have some fun with it. I was hanging out with friends that night and thought it would be weird (and just like me) to show up with something like that. The three of us, along with Amy’s boyfriend, went to dinner afterwards and the waitress wouldn’t look directly at me. I was used to having the make-up on so I didn't think much of it but I walked up to the coffeeshop where my friends hang out on Thursday night and a friend's girlfriend was outside and she saw me and her jaw dropped and said "What happened to you?" She totally thought it was totally real. Unfortunately, my smile gave it away. I went inside to hang out with my friends and no one said anything for maybe 10 minutes when one of my friends turned me to and said, "It would have totally fooled me if your eye was swollen shut". I told her I'd thought of that already. And she said that there were people at other tables in the place that were looking at me weird (though I didn't notice them). That night I went home and took a close-up picture and posted it as my main picture on MySpace.

Out of the dozen I took, the one I posted:
The next day, I've never had as many people that have made so many comments on anything I've posted there! Even my sister called me that weekend to ask me if I was all right (though I didn't tell her because I wanted her to be surprised by the picture). Then a week later I went to the same coffeeshop and the guy behind the counter, the one that got my hot chocolate said, "I see you healed pretty well". So he might even have been fooled too. It was some good work!

The rest of the project was largely out of my hands. Amy took the pictures and picked the ones she thought would work best and passed those along to her Photoshop guy, who changed at least once and I think back to the original guy, Greg. I don't remember the exact time-table but once Greg had the pictures, I think he did it within a few days but I don't think it got underway until early December. I wasn't in a huge rush to get the pictures back, as it would probably shock people if they got something from me, you know, like, on time, but of course I wanted the pictures sent before Christmas. I know there are a lot of people that send out their holiday pictures in early December and that's nice, to be able to enjoy the pictures for a period before the holiday, but that was just beyond me at the time. I figured it might not be a picture that anyone would display alongside their other holiday pictures, for me it was just about the quick laugh that anyone would get when they open the envelope and see the picture. I also thought I would have the element of surprise on my side since no one would expect something from me that would be holiday-related.

Maybe a week or two went by and Amy sent me a version of the picture. I was nervous, of course, just because I had how it looked in my head and if it didn't look amazingly close to that I would feel like it didn't go right so there was a lot of room for disappointment. At worst, I would ditch the picture and that would be that money down the drain. This all came from my insecurity and my control-freak nature and giving a lot of the decisions and control to Amy; of course, I would have done the whole thing myself if I could but I knew I'd have to give up some of my ability to Amy just to make it work in the first place and that was a reality I had to get used to. But Amy sent me the picture and it was what it was supposed to be.

I can't say it was exactly what I had in mind since that would be impossible but it was as close as it possibly ever could have been. It probably could have flown how it was but some of it jumped out at me and the characters didn't completely fit. It was my own fear that since all the characters were shot under different lights and so when they were put together they didn't look like they had been shot at the same time in the same place, which was the goal. This was probably something that no one else would notice but as I've done compositing like this for visual effects on television (which is taking footage from one place and putting it over other footage), when one element doesn't fit with another it's very obvious to me and I’ve developed an eye for it after all these years. The darkest parts of one character in the picture didn't match the other characters so I called Amy to ask Greg to adjust it. I never talked to Greg directly, it was all through Amy, which probably made the process take longer (I call Amy, she calls Greg, he does the work or gives his opinion, she calls me back then sends me the new version, repeat) but that was the way he wanted to work and I don't blame him. I do my best work when I don't have someone standing over me and it's how I would have preferred to do it if it was me. Amy got back to me and said that we could make some minor changes but we were already at our limit for the money she paid him and the time he had for the project. The adjustments for the color of the characters were easy enough, as well as making the shadows a little more diffused, but the beat-up guy looked too obviously like he was trying to close his eye to make it look swollen and I wanted a different take on the goth-guy. Amy told me that the take of the goth-guy was the best one we had and that we didn't have any where he was smiling. She said she would ask Greg to see what he could do and Greg, as his last adjustment to the picture, turned the goth's mouth up a bit in a pinched smile but it just didn't look right.
I could have continued to pick the thing apart for more weeks if not months but if I wanted to get this out by Christmas of that year, I had to end it somewhere and it seemed as good as it could be (especially if Greg wasn't going to change it anymore) and I could certainly live with it. Another slight impediment was that I was trying to keep this as much of a secret as possible so I asked only one or two people what they thought about it. I'm used to sending around projects to as many people as will look at them to get feedback and get another opinion about what works but if I wanted to keep this thing under wraps it wouldn't happen this time. Of course Amy's opinion meant the most to me over anyone and I had to trust that when she said it looked great that it really did look great and she wasn't just trying to get the damned thing done.
With the final version ready, Amy took it to get it printed. I really have no idea about that part of the process but she knew a place, Ritzpix in Sherman Oaks/Studio City, where she could get a deal on the volume. Apparently she got her other projects printed there. I got 100 copies printed in the batch. I had a few dozen friends, a few dozen family-members, a dozen work-related friends, a few others, that I planned to send the cards to and I never sat down and compiled a list of people and addresses before I sent them out but I thought 100 would be more than enough. I talked to Amy before the weekend and she said they would be ready on Monday. A movie I had worked on had its cast and crew screening that Monday night and I told Amy I would pick up the pictures after that, which was around 11 at night. She lives in Van Nuys so it wasn't far to travel and I stopped by the Sav-On to get some extra items (notably standard Christmas cards to send pictures to those people that I wasn't sending the picture to) and got home around midnight. I didn't think it would take long, just putting the picture-cards in an envelope, licking the envelope, addressing it, and stamping it, so I started off taking my time but it very quickly became apparent that it was going to take a while. I went through the addresses I had, probably about 80 cards, and that took me until 3 in the morning (and I had to be up at 8 to go to work). I sent out e-mails to the people whose addresses I didn't have (sending yet another one when I didn't get a reply to the first request) and I knew I was going to go way past the 100 cards I had. Already the cards were going to get to people a week before Christmas but there was still a number I wanted to get out. I figured it would still be funny even if the card got there after Christmas so I called Amy and asked her to get another 50. That seemed like probably more than I would need but it would be better to have more than I needed than not enough. Besides, I'd have a few extra to keep for later in the year if I wanted to give them to people (albeit off-season) and a few to keep for myself.

With the cost of printing the cards, along with the costs of the items needed for the shot (notably the non-returnable wigs) and the service (the photographer, make-up artist, Photoshop guy -- all of them giving me cut-rates), it still came out to about a little over $6 a picture. That might not seem a lot if you don't think about how many I got printed. Then it becomes an amount that I can't imagine anyone else would do for such a thing (I doubt the total cost for my family's pictures over the last 20 years came close to that amount) but it was something I wanted to do and it was a gift I wanted to give all the people in my life that mean something to me. It wasn't a traditional gift but I thought a laugh would be something nice to give. I've always been horrible at giving gifts and to a lot of the people in my life, even the important ones, I haven't given gifts in a long time, if ever, and with everything averaged out, it seemed like a fair amount. Nervously I anticipated hearing the inevitable feedback from the ones I sent, thinking that it was entirely possible that everyone would say it was the dumbest thing they'd ever seen and wondered why I bothered (saying these things in the most polite way possible, of course). But I started getting e-mails about it so I know that people got them and, indeed, they seemed to like them and thought they were funny. And even the second batch that went out got there before Christmas (though it was close, if I recall). I was told that my Nana didn't even realize that it was all me in the picture, she apparently thought it was me and some other people. It seems that everyone had a different favorite character, never a more popular one. My mom said I made a very ugly woman. I wouldn't really want to pick a favorite but I'd have to say that the sports-guy, out of all of them, was the most ridiculous so, I thought, was the most effective. I liked how the beat-up guy's make-up turned out. The woman was ridiculous but it's not that much of a stretch to dress in drag and, you know, everyone should do it on occasion (and I hadn't done it in, ahem, quite a while).

All in all, it's a project that turned out well, just like I wanted it to be, and I was satisfied that it turned out at all and even better that it turned out as well as it did. I wouldn't do it again -- not because it was so much work or because it was so expensive or because there was such a huge chance of failure, but because I never want to repeat myself. You won’t expect the next project. And it’s likely there won’t be a Christmas Card 2007 – I’m still recovering from this one.

(Thanks to Kimberly Swan, David Rossi, and my granny for helping me get together some of the old pictures for this.)