Bounty Hunter 2177
This photo composite is a personal project that has taken me a very long time to finish for multiple reasons. Work being the main one and the second one the fact that this was supposed to be a collaboration project with another artist but ended up being a solo project. The objective was to test myself both technically in my Adobe Photoshop® skills and creatively in relation to art direction and storytelling.
The original idea was very simple:
A) Create a character made as a photo composite on its own.
B) Think of a story for this character that justifies his/her existence.
C) Build the world where this character lives in (also as a photo composite) like a key frame to tell the story.
The character
I wanted a female character with a traditionally masculine job in femme fatale kind of way. So I thought it would be cool to develop a character of a woman who was a bounty hunter from the future. A badass hybrid of human instinct and robot intelligence. A cyborg bounty hunter from New York in the year 2177. Let's call her Emma.
The story
2177's New York is a modern yet grimy and dangerous place. Mafia from all over the world have established in the city and the boroughs belong to different clans. Emma's job as a bounty hunter is clearly not easy or safe. She has had to deal with a lot of criminals who obviously don't want to get caught so they fight back with heavy fire power. As a result she has been injured multiple times, loosing all of her arms and legs due to explosions but replacement parts are fairly available in the city. The problem is that they don't often match because they have been sourced from other damaged cyborgs who's limbs are used as donor parts.
Emma has a case now. She rides a drone bike and has been following a Japanese hitman who is in town to kill the CEO of a big corporation for not paying the mafia in order to operate in Tokyo. There is a juicy bounty for this hitman's head offered by the CEO. Emma just found the assassin and is about to collect.
The photo composite
This is one of the most complex photo composites I have created. Without a doubt. Creating a world from scratch is hard because you have to justify the existence of every element and its appearance so there is consistency in the storytelling.
The image was created with Adobe Photoshop® in its entirety using photographic assets from multiple sources. There are more than 80 images combined in this photo composite. Some assets were free from sites like Pexels and Unsplash. Others I got from my Adobe Stock®, ShutterStock, iStock and POND5 subscriptions. I also bought some image packs from PhotoBash which helped guiding the whole cyberpunk aesthetics with all the neon signs.
In terms of hours I would say there is over 60-70 hours of work if you count the time it takes to find the assets and then working with them. I didn't work all that time in a row. I worked on it a couple of hours at a time over the course of nearly a year.
The final Photoshop .PSB file is 2.65Gb, 234 layers in 17 groups. Just in case you were wondering. Here is a quick layer breakdown of the composite process:
Thank you for checking out this project!
