At last the stars aligned - myself & a friend’s son drove 2 hours to the 3D scanning studio yesterday equipped with rented (dark grey pinstripe) period suit & hat plus various accessories the two SOE agents Gabcik & Kubis would have recognised. Except a Sten & grenades - I didn’t want a police traffic-stop on the way because somehow I don’t think they’d have believed my explanation.
The storyboard calls for 5 Gabcik poses & 6 Kubis poses - each pose required slowly revolving on a 60cm diameter turntable for 3 minutes while the scanner did its work, followed by 8 minutes resting while the data’s processed. Holding a pose for 3 minutes without moving/wavering ain’t easy, but tolerable when you know which part of you is being scanned, you can slightly relax the parts already scanned.
Early tests (of the first poses, parking bikes & crossing the road to take up position) were discouraging (these images photo’d from the processing screen)…
The processing software slowly ground to a standstill or lost tracking on each attempt for unknown reasons (insufficient RAM, a recent software update, the moon in Aquarius, etc.) – one theory being it was set to full-colour scanning, but switching to monochrome scanning didn’t solve the problem either, although some attempts were just passable…
(As for our general appearance, we both wore the same hired suit because I’ll paint one of them a different colour (e.g. brown) at 1:35 figure stage. I’ll also paint my hair dark brown to take some of 40 years off me, & paint the cap a plain grey a la mode – the real guy (Kubis) bleached his dark hair blonde after escaping. As for Gabcik it’s quite likely he did grow a beard for the event in order to shave it off after escaping. But their post-hit disguises counted for nothing, after betrayal they were cornered & dead following a few weeks in hiding)
Anyhow after 4+ hours, overall the shoot was a bust. The scanning guys will work to cure the glitch(es) and mail me their best salvaged 1:35 figure to see what I think. But I still need all 11 figure-poses scanned in one shoot for continuity reasons, so we’ll reschedule a fresh session in a month or two when the stars can re-align. Disappointed? Of course, but I don’t have a viable Plan B and I saw enough to convince me this is the right way to go - we all learned a lot & I get a second chance to refine some of the poses. Good things seldom come easy 