Mistress of Evil

Does anyone else walk around with the Maleficent music as the theme song to their life? No? Just me? Ok. Fair enough.

Maleficent was always my favorite villain. When I was little, she kinda reminded me of my mom; she was tall and a beautiful dark creature and otherworldly and completely threatening. She was this fierce feminine power and she could turn into a mutha#^&*ing DRAGON. Hellooooooooo!

And of course, I had to include my new found love for 6-inch heels... maybe 7. Insert wonky face here.

I also have to tell you how this set was almost lost forever. Kind of a funny story under really rough circumstances.

So this set was shot sometime in November (pretty sure we picked the coldest day of the year for me to be out there in wilderness half naked). Ok, so it wasn't the wilderness, it was a state park, but you get the picture. It was a cold for this native Floridian. Anyway, as many of you know, my mom ended up in the hospital in late November (Black Friday to be exact) and since I hadn't gotten around to editing this set yet, I found myself keeping busy many of those long nights by working to keep my mind busy. There was so much going on those nights and the less time I had idle, the better.

I learned the value of saving my work and my new rule is that until it has been fully edited and saved to my hard drive, I no longer delete it off my camera. It's hindering in some ways, but I'm paranoid and I don't have that much work yet so it's ok for now.

So what had happened was... during the editing process, I was also editing another set and I was getting ready to save it to my hard drive and upload it to the client. Well, my mom and I had this cute habit that when I would get ready to do that, I would sit with her and play a slideshow of the entire set so she could give me her opinion. In order to play the slideshow, you have to select all of the photos you want in the slide show, right? So I had selected all of the photos in the clients set, which had taken me a few weeks to edit. Somewhere in there, my mom said oh I don't like that one, you should delete it. My mom always had a good eye for these things, so I did.... unfortunately, all of the photos were still selected. So the client's ENTIRE set was gone. Well, I am not super tech savvy but I believe in the power of google. I immediately got online to look up how I could save my own misdoings. Long story short, I was not able to save it and ended up having to re-edit that other set but I must have tried to reinstate the lost catalogue and ended up losing this set in pretty much it's entirety. I had maybe saved 4 or 5 edits but lost the rest.

Well, last week, the heavens opened up for me. I'm telling ya, my mom has been looking out for me and making shit happen for me this year. I 100% believe that. I was offered a job, and a few days later my computer decided it needed an update, and voila! This set was back! I was able to finish editing, and get them all saved properly. But since it had such a rich history, I thought I'd share it with y'all! And this costume took me like 4 years to finally put together. But it meant a lot to me. Hope you enjoyed it!