Soundwave

Soundwave was definitely my favorite Decepticon. As a child, I found his monotone and synthetic voice to be unforgettable. Future iterations of the character have not managed to recapture that magic for me though. Forget the voice of Siri and Alexa, if NASA were to let me anywhere near the voice of their future shuttle AI, this is what I would program it to sound like. This was the Decepticon that instilled fear in me. Cold, unfeeling, calculating, and seemingly dispassionate - he was the one Cybertronian that ticks off that fear of the rise of the machines. His small army of extremely loyal minibots made him a force onto himself. It was fortunate for Megatron that Soundwave was unfailingly loyal.

This is also my favorite of the official Masterpiece Decepticons. The figure captures everything iconic about the character and is better engineered than any of the Seekers. The minions are smaller than I would have liked, but I can understand the need to make them fit into his chest. I can't wait to replace them with the oversized ones from Ocular Max though. Since I have the Hasbro version, I had to replace his yellow eye visor with a third party add-on. I suppose I could have painted it myself, but I didn't have the confidence to paint back then.

I shot Masterpiece Soundwave, Laserbeak and Ocular Max Jaguar in a light tent, propping KFC Mandy on a USB adapter. I used a purple filter on the lamps to impart some magenta highlights. In Photoshop, I added eye glows and cleaned up screw holes, especially on Mandy. I probably should have made Soundwave bigger, but I couldn't have without his legs and Jaguar disappearing off the bottom of the picture. Plus, I didn't want to obscure the background too much.

The reflection in the water is actually their real reflection. When the bottom edge of your subject is uneven, it is not a trivial exercise of copying and flipping the picture. Fortunately, my plexiglass surface is very reflective. I did apply a Gaussian blur to give the reflection a more watery effect. I also added water lines because I've been watching Bob Ross.

The background is of the Washington Monument during a recent trip to Washington DC. I woke up at 2:30 am PST and faced the 40 degree weather (still can't comprehend that number) to take pictures. I wished the sky had been more dramatic with clouds.

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Nothing defeats the Devastator!

One last project with TFC Hercules before I crack open the new sets. I discovered Transformers before Voltron and other Japanese giant robot cartoons, so when 6 robots formed into a giant brute that the Dinobots couldn't initially handle, my mind was blown. My childhood Devastator toy was an orange-colored knockoff my father had found at the local flea market, but I didn't care.

Would Generation Toy Gravity Builder or Toyworld Devastator look better? Probably, but Hercules still looks pretty damn good. Over the year, he's gotten a little wobbly at the hips, but he's able to maintain his stance. I had to do a little surgery to his left knee. The ratchet in Mad Blender's connector joint was really loose. I was able to fix it by opening up the housing and placing 4 pieces of post-it note paper underneath the ratchet plate. If Structor's ratchet loosens, the same fix should work as well.

This is from the episode, "Heavy Metal War." Because of the small size of my light tent, I shot Apollyon, Soundwave, Starscream, and Thundercracker individually. Yes, Thundercracker. I'm anxiously awaiting finally getting my hands on MP11 Skywarp. I used some Hue Saturation layers to recolor Thundercracker. It still doesn't look quite right, but it will do for now. I did the same to the green barrel on Mad Blender. The smoke is drawn with my custom smoke bush. The background is a composite of an evening sky, a large boulder formation at Alum Rock Park, the foothills at the same, and a dried out lake bed at Penitencia Creek Trails.

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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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X Transbots Apollyon and Masterpiece Starscream and Soundwave

I wanted to see what else I could do with the shots I had taken for my collages. Here are the big three. I applied some Color Balance and Hue adjustments to get them to go with the sky.

The sky is from a cloudy summer evening, using a magenta filter on my lens. The ground is a close-up of the rock formation at Natural Bridges Santa Cruz, with the birds removed.

Hi-res image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwxl1QbH6hwVTnRpRlpmY29NdU0/view?usp=sharing

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