The Wolf and the Crane: Production Notes
By David Pisani & Tod Pleasant
March 13, 2005
DP: The Wolf and the Crane was our first full-blown photo-story and there was a huge amount of work, as well as trial and error, that went into getting it on the page.
TP: I have have often said we approached each AESOP episode like we are making a film, with distinct steps for concept development, set design and construction, casting and wardrobe, scripting, shooting and countless hours of editing. I like to claim we worked this way because we are both highly methodical and organized people, but the truth is Dave and I live 160 miles apart. For each installment we would get together once, usually for a single day, and everything had to come together just right in order to meet our deadlines.
DP: With only five pages to work with we knew our main objective in the first episode would be to establish who the characters were. We discussed a number of scenarios, most of which included some sort of mission briefing - which we did not want to do. In film school I made a number of short very low budget films and learned that when you are short on running time, or in this case page space, you should jump right it. If you strip away the set-up and get right into the action you will hook your audience and keep them interested. We did just that, even to the extent of killing off the AESOP team leader on page two.
TP: When we were first discussing AESOP the people at Lee's were expecting we would work with 1/6 scale figures and props in the foreground and use photo composites for the majority of backgrounds and settings. From minute one Dave was determined we were going to do this right, building actual sets whenever possible.
DP: I had built a few dioramas before, but certainly nothing to the extent and detail of the warehouse. Ultimately I built what I thought it should look like and incorporated details I had seen in various buildings. The final interior was 8 feet long and 3 feet wide and built out of ¼ inch plywood and corrugated cardboard. I painted the walls a medium gray and spread a thin layer of tile grout over ¾ inch plywood for the "concrete" floor. I then proceeded to trash the place using watered down paint and rusty steel wool to dirty everything up, to make the set as realistic as it had to look very lived-in.
TP: To appeal to all 1/6 scale collectors we tried to incorporate figures from all the various manufacturers in the stories. We saw Shepherd, Lark, Knight and Hawk as the main reoccurring characters and so we cast Hasbro, BBI, 21 Century and Dragon figures in those roles. Ok, so anyone who knows their G.I. Joes knows Knight is not a 21C figure headsculpt. If you look in the gallery section following these notes you can see Knight v.1, who we did not use, largely because, despite repainting his eyes, they still appeared crossed in most pictures. We did, however, go with the 21C body. Mostly because we wanted some height variation between the characters.
DP: While we were using stock figures for our characters, we wanted to modify each to make them more unique. Tod modified a Hasbro recruit head for Knight raising his hair-line, then had Craig Blankenship of Club Hair for G.I. Joe flock him with a little gray on his temples. For Lark I chopped and dyed the hair on a BBI Cy Girl Blaze and toned down her makeup a bit.
TP: We settled on the Hasbro "Kenny" sculpt for Shepherd and had Craig flock him and paint his brown eyes blue. Dave redid Hawk's (winter Hans) hair to complete the team. In the gallery you can see the tragic results of an early attempt at curing the sculpting material used for Hawk's hair.
DP: Lighting was another key element in AESOP. We did not want the over-lit floodlight or flash look of most amateur productions. I had majored in camera and lighting in film school and lit the sets just as I would for a movie, only on a smaller scale.
TP: In addition to using stock photographic lights, Dave also designed and built special purpose lights for use in AESOP. This is one of the areas where the natural division of labor between us just worked out. I would set up the shots, figures props etc. and Dave would set up lighting and take the pics.
DP: Digital photography was a fairly new thing for me at this time. Knowing my 1/3 megapixel Konica wouldn't cut it, I upgraded to a 2 megapixel Kodak which we used the day Tod and I got together to shoot the first AESOP episode. We shot for most of a day and when we reviewed the pictures we realized that none of them would work. Everything was dark and out of focus. The camera just did not have the necessary manual control to shoot something with complex lighting. I looked at all the available options and settled on the Canon G1. The G1 was the first camera that bridged the gap between pro and consumer digital cameras. It has full manual control but is the size of a large point and shoot. Except for the exterior/location shots, every frame of AESOP was shot with the G1. At an average of 300 photos taken per episode, it has had a lot of use, but I can honestly say I have never had a problem with that camera.
