I thought it would be fun to show my setup for shooting the still images for the Yeti Party GIF.

(Please ignore the horrendous mess. It gets a little cramped working and sleeping in the same room…)

I normally do my pattern photography using a little tent and these super bright lights, but because I had to get my hands into the scene and move lots of stuff around, I skipped the tent and pointed all the lights away so there wouldn’t be too many shadows.

I also had to find a way to suspend the little mirror ball without using something overhead that would block the light, so I just pulled out the top drawer of my yarn storage and hung it down from that.

Here’s a look at a still photo before I cloned out the wires in Photoshop.

I wanted some of the yetis to make smooth dancing moves, so I inserted pieces of thin wire through the front yeti’s arms and legs, and one through the arms of the yellow-horned yeti, to make their appendages malleable. (You can see a tiny bit of the wire sticking out from the yellow one’s left hand.) The head-spinning yeti and the two dancing guys are stuck to the styrofoam base using straight pins through their backs where they wouldn’t be visible.

I used Photoshop to make the GIF itself, but there are several free GIF makers out there, which you can find with a web search. But if there are enough people interested in how I made it with Photoshop, I’d be happy to share that sometime!