A year or so ago Alan Friswell, the bloke who made the CFZ Feegee Mermaid and also the guy responsible for some of the most elegantly macabre bloggo postings, wrote me an email. He had an idea for a new series for the bloggo. Quite simply, he has an enormous collection of macabre, fortean, odd and disturbing magazine and newspaper articles, and he proposed to post them up on the bloggo.
Purrlgurrl’s ideas as to how my UFO picture was achieved were pretty accurate; and If only I could really do as Terry the censor suggests -- it would make my special FX work a lot easier! But the UFO was made using materials from Wilkinsons--kitche
n and garden dept--basically some plastic plates and pots stuck together, and was actually a left-over model from an article that I wrote for Fortean Times in 2005, concerning the supposedly ‘fake’ photos taken by alien contactee Billy Meier. Here’s a link to the article for those who might be interested.
The picture was created by taking a picture of the saucer hanging on a line in my garden, then making a cut-out of the image from the processed photo. Then after taking a photo of a suitable background near where I live, I placed the cut-out UFO onto the photo of the background and simply re-photographed the whole thing. If you try to get the lighting right, you can get quite a realistic illusion, and of course, there are no wires to be seen.
This next section should really come under the heading of “Reasons that I’m the sane and balanced individual that you see before you“, but while it’s neither gruesome or warped in any way, it is part of my childhood influences, so here we are.
Being a full-time dino-nut, I’ve built up a fairly gigantic collection of various prehistoric paraphernalia. I always loved to collect picture-cards and post cards of dinosaurs from museums and libraries, and when this offer appeared in several comics in the 1970’s it was one I couldn’t refuse. It was basically a marketing ploy on the part of Walls to induce the children of Britain to consume heroic quantities of skinless sausages, in return for which they would be granted with - attached to the sausage packets - a set of dinosaur cards, heavily ‘inspired’ by the paintings of Charles Knight - in fact, those of a less charitable disposition might go so far as to claim outright plagiarism - but of course I would never do that….
The really cool thing about these particular pictures, was that the backgrounds had been painted in such a way, that however you placed them together, they would match, so you could create several different scenes. I managed to collect them all, due to the selfless efforts of my family, who became sausage enthusiasts for a few weeks - to be honest, they were very nice, and my dad was certainly a fan - and here they are. Does anyone else remember them?
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