I’ve been dreading the arrival of this day, but now that I’ve unloaded it all, this huge weight has lifted from my mind. Not that you need to be told, but today is ‘Fess Up Day, the day when we reveal some secret hidden deep within the recesses of our hearts, festering away, and thus unburden ourselves for improved mental health. Or set ourselves up for a week or more of derisive abuse. One or the other.
So among the many heinous and unspeakable things that lurk within, I’ve chosen to address this thing from nearly 13 years ago, when I did a book review of Paranormality by Richard Wiseman. I always tried to do something innovative and appropriate with the book covers in my reviews, though I’d purchased this one as an e-book. Eventually I decided upon a very subtle, but hopefully quite topical, treatment for the cover, which appears here to the right. Don’t see what I’m referring to? Well, keep looking at it for at least eighteen seconds.
Here’s the deal. Wiseman created several illustrative videos that accompanied the book, and part of his signature quirks within was a burst of static as a transition, perhaps reminiscent of the movie Poltergeist. So I figured I’d have to include this with the cover, but with a creepy addition, so briefly that no one could get a really clear view of what was there, but should have been able to get an impression, once they noticed it. And with the text right alongside, they should have at least caught the burst once, peripherally, while reading and hopefully kept watching for it again. The thing was, I popped this on two people that I know, and neither really saw something curious within the static, so I extended the period very slightly – again, I didn’t want more than a fleeting impression. No one has ever commented on the image since its been up, but then again, no one comments anyway. I’d get the impression myself that the readers are just as fleeting, but of course that’s ludicrous – this is undeniably quality content here.
To create this, I needed an appropriate image to start with, to subsume into the static and almost obscure it, and so I needed a model with proper attire. This is what I settled on:
Well, okay, I didn’t have anyone else handy that would fit the bill, nor did I possess a coarse cowled monk’s robe – go figure. And I had to play with the lighting for a bit to get the nice deep shadows – if I remember right, this is taken in the bathroom with a flash unit attached to the curtain rod of the shower. What needed little help was the brow shadow, because a family trait is abnormally deep eye sockets. Then, it was a simply matter to triplicate the frame with different static filters for each, and lay each in for about 40 milliseconds of the animated gif (pronounced, “GNO-cchi.”) The static and the brevity of the appearance would disguise the towelly nature of the wardrobe. It also disguised the potato nose, which the light angle only served to highlight here, but doesn’t everyone notice such things about themselves? I’m sure everyone I know is used to it, and by, ‘used to it,’ I mean, ‘tries to avoid looking at it entirely.’ I do the same, so who am I to judge?
I really liked the effect and considered it perhaps the most appropriate cover that I’d featured, given the subject matter of the book, and it likely took less time to perpetrate than at least one other. But I knew I’d eventually have to cop to the hoax, and the holiday kind of demanded that I do it now.
But while we’re here, I thought I saw something in the original image, and adjusted the light curves to see if I was right:
Boy, that’s a rather dyspeptic expression, isn’t it? I think that’s how fundamentalists imagine atheists always look, and in my case they’re probably not terribly far off, but really, I was just trying to angle my head forward enough to create the correct shadows. Though I now know I could potentially gain some extra income from laxative commercials…