I was doing a quick 45 minute exercise from a book, and the goal was "write what you know" – well… this is what I know! Now let ME know if you’re interested in the topic or how you feel about the writing. Thanks for the feedback!
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Pepita Gonzalez constantly lied to 20 million girls and women, but she knew it was okay because she was one of them.
Her work inbox jumped at the bottom of her desktop with a new email.
Three new emails. Four.
Pepita’s mouse cursor soared towards the inbox icon across her huge monitor. This week, her desktop was a photograph taken by someone looking up at a gigantic tornado. Pepita heard that the photographer who took the picture had died and the camera had been recovered nearly a week later. She liked the story, even though she could see that several pieces of the photo were not real.
The picket fence, for example, which snaked like dreamy white train tracks through the debris, was taken from a video game poster of a 747 crashing in a neighborhood. Pepita’s design agency had helped make that game poster. But Pepita still told people the story of the twister’s photographer anyway. Even if the fence wasn’t real, there might have been something real in it, right?
Pepita made her cursor loop around the tornado like a piece of debris before clicking on her inbox.
Waiting for her were six emails with the final shots from the agency’s photo shoot. There was also a friendly "hurry your ass up we’re already behind schedule" reminder from her art director.
Like she had to be reminded why she was at her work computer at 2:30 am. In a few hours the designers would start screaming for the 6 final photographs so that they could begin designs for the magazine and poster promos.
If the designers didn’t know what the models poses were like, they couldn’t put the words in the right place. Pepita didn’t really understand this. Was it that hard to throw a Victoria’s Secret logo and tagline onto a photo?
Logos and taglines wasn’t her job, though. Her job was to study the photos of the starving, almost-naked underwear models, and make them look even more fabulous than the art director or lighting director or makeup artist could.
Pepita forwarded the 6 photos to the designers. She wasn’t supposed to. The models’ agents had it under contract that only Pepita was allowed to see them before they’ve been retouched.
"Who cares?" Pepita thought. "Let them start designing. The poses aren’t going to change… even though everything else is."
The first one was simple. A silhouette shot on a jungle green background. Pepita grabbed the green color from the background and erased the slight muffin-top on the model’s hips. It didn’t matter if a model was 100 pounds and 6 feet tall, elastic is elastic and it causes a bump. But people didn’t like when elastic looked real… they wouldn’t buy the underwear if they saw what it really looked like, so it couldn’t look real.
The second one was a full color body. Pepita groaned. It needed a lot of work.
She started with the usual stuff… she grabbed the "blur" tool and attacked every pore on the model’s body. She isolated the whites of the eyes, made them whiter. She grabbed the "saturate" tool and made the model’s eyes even greener, to match the jungle theme. She added another highlight to the eyes, to make them dreamier. Pepita whitened teeth, erased moles, covered blemishes, and then completely erased the model’s awkward half-outie/half-innie bellybutton and replaced it with a prettier bellybutton from a previous model.
The model was a skinny, and needed the joint-treatment. It was a lot easier than the movie stars or (god forbid) average-Jane contest winners, who needed major reshaping. No, the skinny models were the right size in the flesh, except for their joints. Their knees were so knobby, it looked like the bones were constantly trying to escape the tendons. The elbow joints were square, rather than triangular, as if there were accidentally one too many bones devoted to bending the arm.
Pepita had to make the joints look normal. She copied pieces from a different model, until she relized that the lighting simply wouldn’t allow the two images to merge. The knees and elbows had highlights that didn’t match – it was like merging photos of a house at night, with a different house photographed in the daytime.
Eventually, Pepita had to copy and paste different pieces from the model’s body and construct a new knee and elbow.
The art director asked about her progress. Her eyes itched – it was 3:30 am. 4 more photos to go.
One after another, Pepita turned the models from amazing into fabulous. Fantastical, but fabulous. These models lived in a world where there was no gravity and their underwear stayed on without elastic, in a world where there was never a crease of skin between the bra and the armpit, in a world where there were no pores and where joints and flesh meshed into impossible combinations.
Pepita knew they weren’t real, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to be them. It was like the picture of the twister – if she made herself forget what was fake, she could pretend that the story was true. After all, a picture of a real tornado wouldn’t be nearly as fabulous.
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That’s it! Obviously, not much on character development or story… those weren’t really my goal for this exercise. Just writing what I knew. Thanks for reading!
Technorati Tags: art director, debris, game poster, inbox icon, minute exercise, mouse cursor, new email, photo shoot, photograph, photographer, picket fence, promos, reminder, tagline, tornado, train tracks, twister, video game, white train, work computer
Thanks!
