Astrotrain, transform and get us out of here!

Transportation Captain is standing in for Astrotrain. The back of his train mode doesn’t actually open. I did that in Photoshop by cutting out a small section and rotating it. I didn’t use DX9 Chigurh because of convenience. I already had a side shot of Transportation Captain when I had him in train mode recently. I really didn’t want to transform Toyworld Evila Star again because he has a clear plastic hinge in his backpack that I don’t want to stress.

I couldn’t figure out how to get Rumble to hold Apollyon’s fusion cannon, which is quite a bit larger than Rumble himself. I also tried with Toyworld Hegemon’s fusion cannon, but I couldn’t get him to hold that either. In the end, I just took a separate shot and layered it on Rumble using a layer mask. The final shot is with Hegemon’s fusion cannon.

Apollyon was similarly layered on Soundwave with a layer mask because Soundwave’s arms are not long enough nor strong enough to hold Apollyon in that fashion. It was just a matter of trying different camera angles until I found a shot that I was satisfied with. Unfortunately, Apollyon’s head doesn’t have enough upward articulation to match the source material.

Since Generation Toys has yet to release their version of Scavenger, I used Scraper instead. He, Mixer, and Starscream were simply individual shots that were added to the scene.

The immediate foreground elements include a rock from my garden and stairs from my home. Both had a field blur and an orange overlay applied. The stairs had additional Hue/Saturation layers applied to the left edge to simulate the broken edge.

The stray blaster bolt, because the Autobots seem to have worse aim than Stormtroopers, was created from a deformed Marquee fill-in, with Inner and Outer glow layer styles in effect.

The ground is a shot of the desert ground tile from Toy Stages. I applied a Render Cloud layer to simulate mist and dust. It also helps to keep the figures from looking like they are simply floating over the ground.

The background is a shot of the Mechanical Chain Base panels. I used Layer Masks and colored layers to make it look like sections had been blasted away and scorched. The sky is a shot of some random summer day. The smoke plume was created with my custom smoke brush.

Hi-res image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwxl1QbH6hwVeEt3cGMtM1ExVGc/view?usp=sharing

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Booby Trap

Blitzwing is a decent figure, made better by the Dr Wu kit that fixes his faulty shoulders and gives him a larger rifle and a younger face. I didn't get Doubledealer because I vaguely remember him having a missile truck and a bird for alt modes.

Fancy Cell Transportation Captain is a surprisingly good figure. At least his robot mode is. I haven't transformed him yet. He looks good and scales well with Generations Blitzwing. Chigurh and Evil Star are both much larger figures. For having such large feet, he still has a tendency to fall backwards though. I'm interested to see what else this company comes up with.

I don't remember why they have a girl chained to a crate in this episode.

This was composed of three shots - the figures and ground; the doll, chain, and crate; and the sky. The figures were shot together standing on a couple of sand tiles from Toy Stages. The crate is from a Mechanical Chain Base set. I borrowed one of my daughters' smaller dolls to serve as the captive. I'm finding hair to be a pain to create a layer mask from. The chain is one of those rubberband bracelets that kids make, with the colors desaturated. The sky is from a summer evening, shot with my Hoya FLW filter.

Hi-res link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwxl1QbH6hwVOFNSQUNaRWV4Z1E/view?usp=sharing

https://www.facebook.com/lapstransformersphotos/
https://www.instagram.com/laptutran/
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