This piece began as a vague idea to marry Sister Location and Portal, as I was getting back into the latter at the time. Originally, this was going to me a more traditional painting of Michael standing in the elevator and shining his light towards the audience, but I tried it and was not happy with how it was turning out. Several weeks later, I revisited the idea and approached it from a different angle: photobashing. I had done some photobashing in the past, and I usually had a very good time, so I decided to give it a go.

To begin, I had to create an image of Freddy Carter facing forward. To do this, I took a promotional image of him and edited out his face and neck, pasting it onto a shot of Michael Afton's body from the movie. After a bit of cutting, pasting, and smoothing, I was able to get a very decent forward facing shot of Michael. Next was the background, which was just a stock photo of some wall piping. I played around with some posterize and palletize filters and eventually got to a point where I was happy with how the background and Michael both looked. I thought the piece looked a bit empty, so I decided to see if I couldn't find a way to include Ennard.

I searched a bit until I found the PERFECT stock image of a clown mask to use. It was a near perfect match, all that was missing were the ears, lines (obviously), and the eyebrows, which weren't super important to me. Also, the party hat was missing, but I didn't care about that either. I played around with some colors and filters until I got the mask right, and moved on to the wires. For the wires, I used photos of flexible metal conduit, the things used for shower heads. I have thought that these things would be perfect for a real-life Ennard, and I'm very happy with how they look in this piece. For the eyes, I found an image online of an artifical eye that had some computery bits in the sclera, and thought that was perfect. You can't tell in the final piece, but it makes me happy, so I used it. Finally, I moved on to the text, the main point of the piece. I played around with positioning for a while until I settled on the final design. I really like the pure white, courier text. I think it has a very low-budget, unpolished feel to it which really works for this piece. I was greatly inspired by 2000's video game ads (you know the ones), and I think I captured some of that aesthetic fairly well. In playing around with the text, I moved the word "here" to Michael's forehead, and realized that it actually worked really well there. It symbolizes that both the physical location he's in as well as his own mind are both riddled with ghosts and nightmares. I thought that was really neat.

To end it all off, I played around with some filters and gradients, and with the help of the snipping tool, I exported as a PNG. Overall, I'm very, very pleased with the final result. I think it captures the vibe I was going for perfectly. I really enjoyed the process of this one; I'd like to experiment more with photobashing in the future. This piece took me a few hours, and I had a good time with it.