How would you like to take a walking tour of the Between-Lives State and never leave the apparent safety of your desktop computer?
Merely send for “Practical Guide to the Labyrinth” and you’ll have an adventure in sight, sound and text, created just for you from my original 35mm color photos, put together with soundbytes and interactive fun, by computer wizard Wayne Hoyle.
You will see an unforgettable array of Afterlife images, in riotous color and reality. The setups for these photos took upwards of 36 hours apiece, and the Bardotown Photo Project was a major effort that began with the HO Scale miniature railway layout that took up a whalloping 35 feet wide and 10 feet deep, with a bank of lights above, and more lights below and at street level.
The models cost a total of $28,000 to build, over a period of almost five years, by more than 50 dedicated painters and weatherers, plus the landscape experts who put in the miniature grasses, flowers, rocks, granite boulders, slate and lots and lots of lighting throughout, for the night scenes.
The photo above was taken with real film in a real camera with a laser-made pinhole lens. There was no way to view directly through the camera with the pinhole in place, so it was a lot of guesswork and bracketing to get the shot I wanted. The fence came in bits and pieces, and was assembled in sections by Uncle Claude.
The university buildings in back were made from rare Pola kits, and embellished with handmade stonemasonry, all of which still exists, ready to go back to work when a shed is made available for the project. The shed would cost around $4,500 to build and finish, and would house the entire Between-Lives layout, including the lighting and fog effects.
The idea is that you see a card that reads “Mountain Road” and press a button, which lights up the scene indicated. There would be several dozen such scenes, each with its own set of buttons connected to the information card next to the “on” button. You’d hold the button down for as long as you want to view the scene.
You can see all the scenes presented in the big layout on the CDR that I mentioned above, which is called, to my best recollection, “Practical Guide to the Labyrinth”, but is best known by its shipping info ticket, “BardoTown CDR”.
I do hope you’ll take a look at these images — they are very evocative, especially when thrown onto a very large video screen, then they immerse 100%.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby