Pat Burke and the Lilliputions

Pat Burke is a former NBA player who now runs a basketball camp for kids here in Mount Dora.  When Pulse Magazine decided to do a story on him, I came up with the idea to make him a true "larger than life" character with some of his students.  Realizing that this was far beyond my abilities with Photoshop, I enlisted the help of Ryan Jacobson at www.ryandigital.com who did a great job.  We spent a lot of time talking about how to make this work and I could not have have done it without him.
I first had to draw a sketch of where I wanted to place the "miniature" kids on Pat to make sure it was visually balanced and physically possible.  The other thing is that the kids had to be photographed at the same angle as if they were hanging onto a 14 foot tall man.  This required us to shoot from the same angle as Pat (from the floor) and hang the students up high off of a ladder so that we were looking up at them.

Here's the final shot:

and here are some variations we went through in retouching:
This is what bad retouching looks like--it's the quick test I sent Ryan for placement.
We decided it was better balanced with the boys separated.

This is Ryan's better version on a black background.

We also considered using a basketball court background, but it just got too busy looking.

And these are some of the shots of the kids that went into the final.

Big thanks to my assistant Bill and great help from Kevin too!

Our "rappelling" girl

Knowing that it would be reduced down to basketball size, we had our model hand on to a large ball.

We had to shoot her hanging legs separately

Pat was a great sport, and seemingly up for anything, even though I'm not sure he knew what he was getting into at first!  Thanks Pat.