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After last year’s production, Lisa and I weren’t sure how we were going to top it. We kicked around ideas all the way up until early November. Then, it hit us (Lisa actually): let’s do a Lost-themed card. This would be the only year we could do it. Plus, we had an extra bonus: my sister, Rayna, is currently in Hawaii with her husband. He’s in the Air Force and they just got assigned there. She’s a great photographer, and was excited to have a project to work on.

So, we set out to begin production. We researched some of the actual shooting locations for Lost. My sister captured some great background images. Originally, I began hunting down aircraft boneyards. I couldn’t find anything in Texas that had exactly what I was looking for, so I headed to istockphoto.com and found this plane wreckage. Perfect.

We photographed each family member in the front yard. For the compositing work, it was pretty straight-forward: match the lens, aperture, angle, etc. In fact, I will be teaching all of this at a Master Class at WPPI in February.

Vincent was heroically portrayed by our dog, Queso. Brandon and Trevor stood in as Jacob and the man in black (no, they aren’t missplaced jedis from another card).

Here’s a video with the layer build-up in Photoshop:

Overall, we are really happy with how it came out. I have no idea what we will do next year.

Be sure to check out some of the other holiday card work I’ve been up to here and at AustinChristmasCards.com.