Watching the pros at work!

Our call time for shooting the gingerbread build was 8 am at Westside Studio.
We're shooting the Fedex job through famed photographer George Simhoni. George is great guy to work with, in fact everyone at Westside is great to work with! George is one cool cucumber, with such a dry sense of humor, sometimes I don't know if I should laugh at what he says. The answer is always yes, but sometimes my brain can't tell right away!

We also showed up with enough candy assets to intimidate the Easter Bunny. We laid out all our candy so the clients, and art director, could choose if they wanted to add anything to the build once they could see it through the camera lens.

I spent quite a lot of time in front of the camera as well! Not as an amazing man-model, but more of a candy truck wrangler. Jody was also on set for this this, and was the royal icing queen, when it was needed.

The great thing about shooting stills, is the camera doesn't move very much from the original layout.
A bit higher, abit lower, a little left or right, but usually always within 12 inches of the concept artwork. This allows us to know exactly how much of something we need to build. Like the roof on the house. we only built what you can see in these 2 pictures. The back side of the truck has no icing, or logo even. And it's gonna be a cold gingerbread winter, with no back walls on the house either!

This job was awesome! A lot of fun to build at the shop, and even more fun to shoot on the day. Plus the deadline was really 3 days, so we didn't even have time to hate it because it dragged on!!!

At the end of the shoot, George and I decided to whip out a stop motion feature film with the assets available to us.

Please sit back, and enjoy the film below, the world will never witness another cinematic masterpiece like this again:

This is why I love my job! Everyday is different, and we get to work with the most amazing people all the time!
8)
JWO

Gingerbread all the way!

Work on the gingerbread build continued to chug along, with all of our attention focused on the house portion.

We ended up testing out several roof styles, until everyone at the agency was happy!

In the end, green overlapped smarties became the winning roof style. You won't be eating this house! Resin gingerbread, with crazy-glued smarties.............toxic tastiness! I will however flip anyone a 20 dollar bill if they can choke this baby down when were done. Don't worry, it'll be a brand new $20 bill, if that sweetens the deal for you!

We also decided on going with plastic display trees, mixed with our "gingerbread bushes" to decorate the yard out front of the house. I sprayed up the trees green, while our awesome student helper, Sydney, got awarded the task of decorating them all with icing.

We also went with a yellow pvc for the window inserts. The word 'fondant' was used, but I prefer routing pvc! The final snow dress will be done on set, and we'll use fine sugar. Fine sugar will sparkle, and won't become a sticky dust like icing sugar would. Not too shabby for s day eating working with nothing but candy!
8)
JWO

Fedex starts to look tasty!

Once the cast sheets were ready, they got taped down to our little Techno, and the parts started coming! I cut all of them with our little 1/16" endmill. The sheets were only about 1/4" thick.

It looks a bit like a burned out scary house at the moment. Because the cut edges were so perfect, in relation to the texture of the sheet surface, I used a small torch to burn the edges. This rounded and textured them enough to look like they were baked in the oven that way!

 With the house, and truck assembled, and the edges burned, I sprayed them up a nice healthy gingerbread color, and we let them dry a few hours before moving on to the decorating.

This was the icing style the art director wanted to see the truck done like. Frosted almost all the way to the edge, with a bit of cookie showing around the edge.

We mixed up the first of an endless batch of royal icing, and I started to ice it. Not an easy thing to do, as the icing tends to set up pretty fast! I have decided that I no longer want to be the Cake Boss. This was a mentally tough job for me, I want everything as perfect as can be, but the truck MUST look like a cookie, so I wrestled quite a bit with perfection vs. cookie. No perfectly straight edges, everything hand done.

The final steps before the logo, was the little headlights and marker lights. All of the candy on this build will be real, to add the "food product" look to these miniatures. Can I tell you how hard it is to find two, somewhat identical, yellow jube jube headlights? They're all bent out of shape, half squished, missing half the sugar coating, stuck together. Oh, it's not all fun and games in our line of work, there are some tough challenges involved. Plus, I had to look very carefully to make sure there was no M&M logo's showing on the marker lights. These are mini M&M's by the way, and the logo is white. I need a nap...........

Once I was happy with the truck, I set it aside for the rest of the day to harden up.
8)
JWO

Fed Ex gets a new truck, just in time for the Holidays!

Another Holiday season, and more gingerbread!
We had done the gingerbread men being tortured last year, or the year before, I can't remember fully!
This year we had to break out the gingerbread one more time.

Jody cooked up a fine specimen of gingerbread, I have no plans on using real gingerbread for this shoot. Plastic all the way for me! Plus, I'm not sure how well it would machine on our Techno!
Once we had our baked sheet of real gingerbread, Jody made a quick and dirty mold box for it.

She filled the bottom of the gingerbread sheet with clay, down to the bottom of the mold box, so we wouldn't have silicone creeping under the sheet. The silicone may be super thick, but it wicks in everywhere, including the smallest of holes!

And through the power of time-lapse, TAA-DAA! One fully cured, gingerbread rubber mold!
We made the sheet as big as we could, because we also have a house to build, as well as the truck.

 Once the table surface was re-levelled, Jody moved onto casting the sheets in resin.

At about 10 minutes per sheet curing, She had a pile ready for the Techno before my second coffee break. I drink a lot of coffee, so that would be around 9:30!
8)
JWO