The Bet

A bet is a bet, even inside Psychic World, and Cynthia has lost hers. In this case, the loser has to walk the plank.

"Come on, a joke is a joke," Cynthia pleads.

Well, a joke is a joke, but a bet is a bet. Cynthia has to agree.

Cynthia doesn't like the looks of this. That stuff looks awfully deep.

"You don't really expect me to step off the end of this plank, do you?"

Cynthia reaches the end of the plank. Looks like her delaying tactics have not worked.

"Maybe it isn't really very deep," Cynthia says to herself. "Oh well, how bad can it be?"
 
 

Cynthia takes the plunge.

"Oh gosh, it IS deep."
 

"Help!,... Help me!" Cynthia begins to panic.

Cynthia's panic becomes total.
 

The mud turns out to be quicksand..... Bottomless.

Cynthia's Psychic World adventure ends. She'll probably bet on the Yankees next time."

How "The Bet" was made.

This little story, which is number 50 in the Psychic World series, but the first to take the form of an illustrated story, was made using a combination of real photographs taken specifically with the story in mind, images cut and pasted from an external source, Poser 4.0, and Paint Shop Pro 7.0. Photographs of the deck and plank were taken with a high resolution digital camera, using a deck in my own back yard. The mud came from a photograph taken by Chuck Lang, and was transferred using the cloning tool in Paint Shop. Poser was used to position the character, "Cynthia" in front of a background image. The background image, in most cases, was that of the deck, taken from two different angles. After Poser rendered the image into a JPG files, Paint Shop was used to add the mud. In a few cases, Paint Shop was also used to correct a few problems produced by Poser. [Note, also, that a few such problems have been left uncorrected - its time to move on to another project.]

In addition to the use of both Poser and Paint Shop, a factor that, I think, adds a great deal to this story is the use of three different camera angles, the main camera located to the side of the plank, a second camera located across the mire from the plank, and a close-up camera in the same position as camera two. This is possible because of the use of two different background images of the same deck. I also tried to render both views of certain situations without significantly altering (though with some subtle changes) the position of the character.