by Amanda Fried
Puppies! Who doesn’t love them? Cute, cuddly (and cloned) these precious Dalmatian pups brought many a smile to the Wonderful Machine staff. Therefore, we couldn’t resist snatching them up for our October print promo. Printed by Modern Postcard and delivered to 2990 creatives across North America, this dalmatian was captured by our photographer David Clugston and cloned by retoucher Janko Williams. The final product is both paws-itively adorable and informative of the hundreds of locations you can find photographers on Wonderful Machine.
I got in touch with David to find out more about our chosen image. Luckily, he didn’t need a team of scientists to create this particular litter. David explains:
I shot this image for the November 2011 issue of Wired Magazine. The assignment was to create a whimsical environment wherein cloned puppies where the prizes in a carnival claw game. The idea being that in the future, animal cloning is so prevalent that you can win a cloned puppy for 10 dollars at the fair. The clone concept made this shoot at fair bit easier on the pre-production end, but added a lot of hours to post. With the help of retoucher Janko Williams we combined about a dozen captures of puppies, and a claw from a game that I found for cheap on Craigslist. Janko then went in and painstakingly transformed each spot on each pup to be a square. He actually missed just one. Can you find it? If so, I think you deserve a cloned puppy.
Janko shared a few thoughts on the project as well,
One of my favorite things about my job is the spirit of creative collaboration that takes place between me and the photographer. I’ve had the pleasure of working with David for the last few years, and his deep understanding of the entire process of image crafting really creates a great environment to work in.
In this case, David was approached by Wired with this great concept and right off the bat we started throwing ideas out to each other about how to execute it. Pretty soon we were on set with an adorable and energetic puppy that didn’t always pay attention to David’s directions. After the shoot, we had the difficult task of deciding which frames to use and where to put them in the layout. Then, we were faced with how best to create square spots on the little doggies. In the end, we were both satisfied with the result and the good folks at Wired were happy too.
Check out a step-by-step video of Janko’s puppy retouching here:
We’ll leave you with some final puppy cuteness to get you through the day…
If you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level with print or email promos, reach out!