Fotografia ala Margo

As some (all) of you know, when Margo reaches teenager-hood she is getting her very own spin-off blog to serve as a journal, as well as a bit of a 'portal' between my game and the interwebs. Call me crazy, but I'm ready to do something a little different, and that involves letting all of you guys interact with Margo in a way that could possibly influence her decisions--an idea that was inspired from something the amazing Kittycattylion was doing with one of her stories.

I've been doing a lot of brainstorming about it recently (even have the blog up and ready to go, as some of you have discovered), and one of the ways I plan on giving it it's own "feel" is editing all the images I use to give them a photographic feel, something that makes a lot of sense given that once she's that age, her friend Veronica is going to be teaching her photography.

I've been playing around with how I'm going to do this, and here's some results:

and a more recent one:

There's a couple of things going on here:

• A few different Photoshop actions to give them a vintage feel, I use this one (THANK YOU Christina, for introducing me to those--you are the bomb)
• Film Grain to slightly emphasize how crappy Margo's camera is
• Lens Blurring (Blurring behind the subjects to account for distance, you can read how to do that here)
• Lens Flare (Which I'll only use on outdoor shots, anyways)

The Lens Blurring takes a bit of work, so as you probably already assumed, Margo's posts are going to be rather short; 5-10 photos max. Though there probably will be some unrealistic scenarios where Margo takes pictures of herself that are physically impossible, there will definitely be occasions where the photos taken will be by Veronica instead, and some from her camera--I haven't decided what "Style" her photos are going to have yet... I'll probably be poking you for ideas on that, PiB.

As of right now, the plan is for this all to go live in about a month; this season is nearly over, and the next one is going to be a shorty. Even so, it may seem a bit early for me to start thinking about this--but there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff I have to do to prepare for this, including building the massive set for the school, deep-cleaning my neighborhood to prepare for new families, writing Season 7... Having everything thought out a ways prior is going to save me a lot of headache.

I'll be mentioning this again in a couple of weeks, but I'm going to be doing a tally soon of how many kids I have in Margo's age group; I'm going to need quite a few, so if people want to make/lend me some families, I'd gladly take them. I'm going to be seperating the teens by social 'class' (jocks, preps, jerks, and nerds), so I need about an equal amount in each. We'll see if I can manage that, I guess. XD

Anyways--too much blah, not enough worky worky... There you have it, a taste of things to come! Smooches!