The Tornado

BTS Blog Post
http://iamsray.com/the-tornado-2/

A buddy and I created this tabletop tornado for a photo project of mine.

We spent about a week planning it out and getting all the supplies. We started with a foam board base that was sanded into a rolling landscape and painted black. The sky was made using a white corrugated poster board with a cotton like upholstery filler material glued to it and painted with black spray paint. When we painted the cotton/filler it gave the clouds a very natural look. We then hung the sky above the landscape with wires.

The tornado was constructed of a heavy piece of wire wrapped with cotton and spray painted black. We then bent and twisted the wire and attached it to both the sky and the landscape. We mounted a box on top of the sky with a hole in it to mount the light so the clouds would light up some giving them depth.

Next we created all the telephone poles/wires and trees. The telephone poles were created out of skewers. We broke the skewers and hot glued them and then painted them black and strung tiny wire across them. The trees are made of twigs with moss attached to them.

I went to a hobby/model store in search of a tiny house. I found one with a little light in it. It was perfect. Although the light is not seen in the final image I did wire it up with a 9 volt battery. Once the main set was setup we hung some of the trees from the sky with fishing line. We broke one of the telephone posts and bent the wires up so it looked like it was being sucked up into the tornado.

Once the set was finished and we were ready to shoot I had a person on each side of the set blowing little bits of moss just as I would shoot. During the shoot I switched things up some and swapped out different color gels to get different effects. Once I had the shot I wanted I took it into Photoshop and added some color and depth to the sky as well as the lightning. I also added some swirling debris around the tornado.

The image turned out way better than I envisioned it. It was a lot of fun coming up with the concept and creating it from scratch.