My Friday night on an autopsy table

As far as Friday nights go, I just had one that was fairly atypical. After a long day at work and a quick bite for dinner, I lay screaming for the next few hours on a cold autopsy table.

I got a rather strange inquiry a few days before via email. A local photographer asked me if I had any interest in modeling for the poster of a new movie called House of Blood. Normally this sort of inquiry could raise a few red flags, but that’s why God invented Google.

A horror movie written and directed by Jon Rusnak, it will soon be featured at the Sunscreen Film Festival. Apparently, it had been filmed over the last several years and all the principal actors had moved to L.A. (as actors tend to do). So they needed some “fresh blood” for the movie poster.Also via Google, I was quite excited to learn that not only did I already know some of the photographer’s work, I was also a fan (and after a photo of his went viral last year, chances are you are, too)!  The emailer in question, Mark Palmer, recently did an incredible photo for a friend of mine, Ms. Beneva Fruitville of Drag Queen Bingo fame.

What I had loved about Beneva's photo and Mark’s work in general is that it’s incredibly vivid and fantastical; it’s real life times one thousand. As he explained at the shoot, with so many advances in technology anyone can take a good photo. He wants to create art that is new, exciting and cutting-edge.

His methodology involves extreme lighting effects, highly stylized staging and some serious postproduction work.

As explained on Mark’s website:

Classically, photographers were restricted to placing lights outside the camera’s frame. Now, in the digital world, there is a new approach to lighting a photograph. “All the rules are out the door as far as what you can do and create,” said Palmer.  Now, you can light all of the elements in a photograph separately, and digitally combine them into one photograph. So, although the final result of an HDR photo is one picture, that one picture is series of still photographs taken at different exposures.Jon, the director, dictated the premise for my Friday evening horror film photoshoot: I would be on an autopsy table reaching away for my life as one freaky-looking bad guy (and star of the horror film) slowly tried to kill me by cutting me apart.

I was given something of a make-under by make-up artist Naomi Mimms, so that I would look bruised, cut and terrified out of my mind. We then all paused for pizza as a good-natured delivery guy from Papa John's posed for the camera with pizza boxes and a prop knife over the autopsy table.

Then onto the main event …The shoot was not without its challenges for me. I quickly gave up on the idea that I was going to look pretty (doesn’t Tyra Banks call it “ugly pretty?"). Mark and Jon coached me on how to look insanely scared. I had to think about the shape of my mouth as I screamed, the precise tension in my arms and hands, keeping my frizzed hair out of my face, keeping my balance as I leaned off the table, and finally trying to quiver all of my facial features at the same time.

We did a number of sessions of shooting. Thankfully, Mark decided it would be best to photograph me and the freaky-looking bad guy separately and then add us together in postproduction. I hope that by the end of the session, as I felt almost as exhausted as I looked, that they captured one image of me that really works.

I can't wait to share the final photo as soon as it's ready. And thankfully, I’m thinking that my next Friday evening will be of the "less autopsy table, more dinner" variety … but I guess as an actress in this crazy town, you just never know.