Amanda skates through a layer of water outside the Louvre, around a revolving Waterford crystal pineapple that I bought in the Dublin airport’s duty free shop years ago.

Why? We don’t care because it’s so pretty.

Amanda is carrying a silver briefcase and dressed like Nier Automata. Who’s that, you ask? I have no idea. But her costume is wicked sexy, complete with a mysterious eye patch.

I put her on roller skates to make her easier to balance and animate, plus it’s retro-cool. And yes, those skates have real shoelaces and the wheels roll independently.

I shot this on my MOCO cyclorama, turning at a fixed rate: One degree per frame. The stage is a 24” round mirror, which is not only smooth but it reflects light from the 24” round LED fixture directly above it. That light illuminates the stage’s half cylinder of rigid green board, which gets chroma-keyed out in post.

I did the cool water wake/splash effects with a special liquid resin used to simulate water in model train dioramas. Basically I poured seven elliptical “splashes” on the mirror, let them set overnight and then peeled them up with a razor blade. Then I simply animated them into place by rotating them under Amanda’s skates, storing the other splashes on waxed paper. And boy did that work nicely. The edges of the transparent resin actually reflect a bit of white light to nail the effect.

Amanda skates one orbit around the pineapple while talking to Kim Jong-un in her headset, then she pirouettes around and drops into the Louvre via a totally unexpected double wipe.

This is Vonky’s POV from within her helicopter helmet and night vision goggles. She prepares to throw The Switch on Kim’s order, to start their sinister operation.

This is a good view of the album signed by her father, the cocaine-covered table, and my doomsday USB hub made by ThinkGeek.

My wife and I shot this live on my iPhone 11 Pro. She’s wearing latex gloves for extra creepy POSER effect. Shots like this are an homage to Thunderbirds, the British “Supermarionation” TV show from the 1960s. They always threw in a few live close-up shots whenever a puppet had to do something with human dexterity.

We slowly creep away from a gilded portrait of Kim Jong-il’s charming but sinister puppet character from Team America: World Police.

This is a rather beautiful shot, because I used some pearlescent paint on the bunker walls and bombarded the scene with photons from a 365 nm wavelength black light. I slid that light along a yardstick in order to cast shadows through an as-yet-unseen cage.

And what we really don’t yet grasp is why the portrait is slowly mirroring upon itself to become an oddly symmetrical face. This illusion is revealed in the next shot, but the optical setup here had to be very precise for this to work.

Vonky puts a very special album on her Barbie Princess record player so Kim and Dennis can sing along.

This prop actually turns, blinks and plays a Disney song. I customized it a bit with a photo of Ivanka playing dress-up.

In order to capture the rotation and blinky light, I had to make the song play over and over again while shooting this lengthy scene. Oh boy, did that get annoying.

And quite by accident, I discovered that if I slowed its song way down, it complemented Rocket Man in such a creepy way. So that became part of the score, along with Dennis & Kim’s torturous duet.

This is another one of my super fun Splatter Shots, which made all the menial animation work worth it.

This time, as Kim gives the “BOOM!” signal to Vonky, Dennis takes an axe to Carmen’s brain. And again, I flipped all eight colors of neon paint from the brain and onto Kim with one or two exposures per color.

Shots 411 and 412 get intercut a few times for effect.

While Kim looms over Dennis, Vonky finishes her preparation on the laptop.

By now the battery in that desk lamp was running on fumes. It was also a major pain because with every slightest bump, I had to reset it with an onionskin assist in Dragonframe.

The duet is now in full swing, up to the line “I miss my wife.” So here we introduce the remains of Rodman’s former wife, Carmen Electra.

Yep it’s clear that Dennis loved her, and misses her. But it’s not clear what happened to her. And again, whose bones are littering Dennis’ cage?

So many questions.

That’s a creepy little prop that I painted in neon, in sort of a Mexican sugar skull style. I also set some plastic diamonds in her eye sockets to catch whatever light I could. See if you can spot that during her close-ups, especially in a later Act.

Okay, here’s a shot for you. See that crystal bowl on Kim’s table? It’s full of cocaine. Well not real cocaine — just talcum powder. Kim is so out of control in this scene (think Donald Trump, Jr.) that he exhales into the bowl and shoots cocaine everywhere.

To pull off this practical effect, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the bowl and through the table. Then I ran a 1/32” inside diameter silicone tube through it, connected to a syringe, and secured the bowl to to table with a bit of Fun-Tak putty.

The timing was tricky but I managed to catch a few good puffs of powder jetting up into the air with each plunge of the syringe.

Yes, I could have done this all in post with my ProSmoke plug-in, but where’s the fun in that?

Also note the record album in the table. That’s a 1:6 scale version of Elton John’s Rocket Man, which I printed on photo paper. The album is infamously signed by Donald Trump, as his love letter to Kim Jong-un in real life. Yep, that actually happened in 2018. It was actually a CD, but since POSERS is all about the retro, I had to go with vinyl.

While the two men continue to sing, Vonky assists Kim into some gold chains that hang from the ceiling. The chains lift him up off the floor and catapult him into the cage bars feet first.

I did this by looping the long paperclip chain through the ceiling panel’s open grid, and then sliding the panel back and forth in measured increments along the set’s rails.

Private audiences find this jarring, which makes me smile an evil smile. Kim is, after all, inflicting the worst possible psychological torture on this poor creature. Because he is, after all, a murderous psychopath.