It's that time of year again. Seems like it always sneaks up on me and suddenly I'm scrambling to figure out something fun or creative to do. This year was no exception but, to be honest, I'm pretty happy with how this one worked out. While my monster cars have previously represented actual monsters of old horror stories, exception to the Ghostbusters Ecto 1 replica I photographed last year, this year was another vehicle that I took creative liberties with. As soon as I ran across a video of this monster truck that a local friend picked up, I knew it'd be a neat fit to do something with.. but I couldn't quite wrap my head around what that was. A generic monster transformation? A real life version of the Monster Truck from the animated movie? An attempt at Bigfoot in the woods? There were several options.. of which I chose none.

After taking a look at the truck in person and realizing we had limitations on where we could take it (it's not street legal and we couldn't get it started that night to actually drive it anywhere) I made a different creative choice. Since the vehicle fits the era of one of my favorite Halloween watches, Stranger Things, and since I'd not jumped on that bandwagon when everyone else was, because I didn't have an era appropriate vehicle or anything tying my subject to the show, this seemed like as good an opportunity as any.

While my previous incarnations have been static photos only, I decided to put a little extra work into this and make it animated to really hammer home the Upside Down effect. A couple of points to mention - I legit love sound design and this was a really great opportunity to play around with some. Also, I cannibalized some stock tornado images to add a little depth/texture to the Mind Flayer. Fingers crossed you noticed and it was worth the effort to more people than just myself.

Happy Halloween, everyone!