This time around Tim Presents scenes from Field Marshal Walter Modell’s 9th Army’s continuing advance south on Day 2, aiming to crash through the final and most formidable Red Army defences at Ponyri to rendezvous with the 4th Army’s north-driving pincer

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If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

Looks great! Just one question: Whats Nebelwerferen? Never heard of that. The plural of Nebelwerfer is Nebelwerfer. Grüße aus Deutschland!

Great photographic skills as always. Some of the pics are thoroughly convincing. The last two Hummel pics are kinda wonky though. Is it meant to show a gun that has just exploded or what ?
J

Jerry I believe the last two images show the gun miss fires and the crew member who has gone AWOL.

Excellent pictorial series. Sorry to hear about the Hummel tragedy - it looks like the explosion also blew off the left rear door (as seen in the 3rd photo in your sequence)!

Thanks guys

Max – ooops yo sorry it should have read “NebelwerferenDaHood”, a tribute to that deeply underrated rap track by Smokey Robinson. You know the one, he overdubbed Stevie Wonder’s Superstition with: Maybe supersonic/Gefreiter’s on the ball/Very ‘pocalyptic/Destruction ‘bout to fall etc.

Jerry - see accompanying text in Link to Item for explanation.

Kev - in test-fires 1 and 3 the whole rear wall of the compartment was blown off, not just the doors. In 1 you can just see the end of it at left edge of frame, ahead of the flying crew commander & barrel. In 3 it’s heading the same way having just detached.

The photography and lighting is very effective. Live action pyrotechnics is something never to be taken lightly. Go for the effect, not a complete recreation. What will give the effect of muzzle flash without blowing stuff up?

That and the possibility of damage is what confines all my effects to Photoshop and digital composites. But then I only do webcomics.

Excellent photography ! and love the test fire pics they are very realistic these things did happen and still do.

Hugley effective. Congratultions on a great project.

great pic I thought they were the real thing(or were they ??)

Congratulations with the presentation , top ! It works for me, well done Tim .

wow! fantastic effects! looks very authentic!! great work

Thanks again guys,

Stephen – hmm but I can’t really get the effect without the complete recreation – I tried photoshop et al with dire results - like really awful. Believe it or not I’ve never wrecked i.e. written off any vehicles, mainly because I’m careful to insulate them from the obvious heat-generation & the blasts are so fast anyway there’s little time to melt anything. All the Hummel parts that blew off came away cleanly - I guess because I use a minimum of extra-thin cement when building – so repair/touch-up was relatively easy…unless I couldn’t find them again e.g. the brass barrel.

One exception to the above - blowing off the same T34 turret four times (photos coming soon in Eps 5 & 6) finally rendered it useless, but the hull was still untouched. But with buildings - for reasons I can’t actually put my finger on, they took as much time/effort as several AFVs to complete - they are expendable!

Cheers, Tim

Sorry to hear you can't produce good SFX in Photoshop. It takes a lot of experimenting to find the mix. Some take numerous effects layers and transparencies . Since I also composite most of my images it's simpler to have the pyro be its own layer on top of (or between) everything else. I have found it's a lot less time consuming to shoot each element separately than try to put it all together at once. But then I typically portray more complex action with lot more images to tell longer stories with characters and dialogue.

Intriguing – can you show me/us samples either a link or post some images here?

Cheers, Tim

Hi Tim,

I've got to say, you're certainly pushing the boundaries of what a dio can be! This looks great. Unhappily, I'm fairly low tech when it comes to both photo manipulation and, well, uh, full on special effects! Wow...

I do feel pretty comfortable tackling complex ground planes and surfaces - I think a big element contributing to the believability of this work is your rigor on the ground plane, and your attention to continuity of treatments - you've done a great job - I really like your couple of color pics - as they clearly show the various "layers" you've built into this. I know that's time consuming work - and the results make it worth the effort! The detail on the build matches the detail on the vehicles and figs - nice!

Cheers
Nick

Thanks Nick

to clarify & apologies if I’m mis-reading your post, but the only photo-manipulation I’m capable of (or wish to manipulate) is tweaking the contrast/brightness of the pics, what you see is what I saw through the view-finder(s) using low-end 8-year old stills camera & cam-corder. In other words I’m not doing/using anything special, the pyro’s child’s play & my kit/diorama base/figure-making skills are nothing other than average compared to some others on this site. Meaning not only could anyone do this but doubtless some could do better & that’s not false modesty, it’s fact. As far as I’m concerned all I’ve really done is combine so-so elements to come up with something (relatively) original & I’m quite content with that.

On the other hand your pioneering is way up there with concept, lighting, atmosphere etc. and I can only repeat what I said on your own thread, it’s currently the Best (with Kurt’s Ardennes dio a close second & several others under construction likely joint seconds/thirds).

Cheers, Tim

Hi Tim,

Ha! Sorry if I created any confusion! I think you've got a great project! In reading the various posts above it sounds like many of the folks here have some strong photo and related effects skills (including you!) - I was just noting that I don't (ha!) the black and white, plus firing, smoke etc is pretty cool!

Thanks by the way for your nice words - there are lots of very talented builders on Armorama - I check out lots of the posts in many subject areas, as there are so many neat builds and techniques being used/tested here, really remarkable work - and builders and projects I admire too!

Ok - looking forward to your next project!
Cheers
Nick