April Phooey

A few weeks ago it became clear to me that my 2015 "April Fools' Day" images were just not working out; my ideas weren't that great to begin with, and then the execution turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated. Rather than present something half-assed (it wouldn't be the first time), I have decided that after almost nine years, maybe I can present a few of my past efforts. It seems that I have managed to misplace (or discard?) the original high-res files for most of these silly images, which is a bummer, considering how much time I spent on some of them. 

ANYWAY, let's start with this one, originally posted in 2007. It's still my favorite! The original slide was vertical, but I wanted more room for the rocket to fly in, so I cropped off some of the bottom and  painted in some additional sky. Then I found a decent photo of the Moonliner (I needed to see pretty much the whole thing), and altered it to look as if it was up above us, with the legs in the "closed" position. Next I found a nice exhaust plume from an Ares rocket launch, and spent quite a bit of time trying to make it look like it was behind some elements, and in front of others, so that it felt like it was inside the park. Then I added a bit of extra glow around the base of the rocket to make the blast feel hot and bright. There are some things I might do differently these days, but I'm leaving it be.

This next one from 2008 is probably my second favorite. I basically tried to cram as much incongruous stuff into one image as I possibly could with the time that I had. I think the final number of items was 31 or 32, ranging from the very large (what's the Matterhorn doing in Frontierland?) to the very small (such as the "dead settler"). Adding the reflections in the water turned out to be surprisingly time-consuming. One cool thing is that I had a chance to speak with Tony Baxter (my one and only time) a day or so later, and he brought up this "crazy picture" that he had seen online (without my prompting at all), and he was clearly describing this image. I think one of his coworkers sent the photo to him, because he did not seem to be aware of my blog. You win some, you lose some!

I can't say that this next one is my third favorite, but it was the only other one that I could find in high-res. It is from 2010; I remember that I was scrambling for an idea - ANY idea - and thought it would be fun (and weird) to put Walt Disney's head or face on every visible person, male, female, or child in the park. There's 1930's Walt, all the way up to the 1960's. The hardest thing (surprisingly) was finding a photo with a decent number of people walking toward us, and close enough so that we could see their faces. It seems that most photos show the backs of a lot of heads. I think the "Walt eating an ice cream bar" might be my favorite, but it depends on when you ask me.

Hopefully I can come up with something new for 2016, if I am still blogging!