25 January 2038, 5:30 a.m.
The navy seals recon team is trying to escape. Preacher is draging his wounded brother in arms, Stump, who is opening fire on the mecha. The M4 bullets are useless against it. Rabbit has already been taken down by the fighting bot.
As the threat is very low, メカ is having fun, which means that it disabled its machine guns and taking its time to erase the threat. Basically it’s doing like a cat with a mouse or a spider with a fly caught in its net.
As unpleasant as it seems it could mean a way to survive for Preacher. Stump’s body has been internally broken by a simple punch from the mecha. He won't live long but Preacher is not letting him behind.
メカ is a fully autonomous 6-legged walker tank, equiped with a huge fully rotating anti heavy armored laser gun, 8 grenade launchers, 2 machine guns on the front legs for close range combat. This is a very agile beast designed to fight on both horizontal and vertical zones. It is moving at an incredible speed, every leg of its body is made to kill, to the point where it is trying to avoid as much as possible to open fire.
This incredible mecha has been built by Cole Blaq, a very talented MOCer. I have contacted him with this project in mind and have sent him some inspirotional pictures to achieve something between Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid bestiary and Masamune Shirow's famous Ghost in the shell mecha.
I invite you to discover the building process detailed in Cole Blaq's last article ->
cole-blaq.com/shobrick-meets-cole-blaq-neo-tokyo
Make sure to watch his fabulous work on Flickr and Instagram :
www.flickr.com/photos/coleblaq
www.instagram.com/cole_blaq
You probably noticed that the soldiers are made with Tiny Tactical's awesome gear. Make sure to have a look at their website :
www.tinytactical.com
Preacher's tattooed arms are from citizen brick :
citizenbrick.com/
Oh my god this picture was an everyday challenge to make it right. It has so many things in the same frame, from background to middle and foreground. The fire shot lighting was the trickiest part. I have taken separately the foreground with the two soldiers of the rest, because you know that kind of depth of field is impossible to achieve in one shot, and the fire effect was tricky enough to make the decision to seperate this two things.
So the idea was to get the lighting from the fire on the mecha. At first I tried with bengal lights but the sparkles keep getting everywhere in front of the mecha, so I simply switch to a small ikea lamp. You can notice the shadow of the mecha hand on its left front leg is pretty neat.
Then came the gun firing effect challenge, I wanted it to get it live as all my effects. I sliced of tiny pieces a bengal lights, put the powder on the top of an iron wire and light it. As you can imagine I had to light it so many times. And then on photoshop I mixed two blows to make the final effect. The bullets impacts are made with projections of bengal lights.
The shooting last at list 3 days, as I was not satisfied with the posing, lighting, effects, I kept getting back to the studio until it came up good.
Please let me know what you think of it in the comments !
