Michael the Tree: A Narrative Character Portrait by Brandon Tse (2015)

My character is Michael the Tree. He's a tree who hates children, but he lives in a park that never seems to have a lack of kids. My story documents his multiple attempts to get rid of the kids. Eventually, he manages to scare everyone away. Although, he soon realizes that he misses the company of the younglings that he believed had pestered him. He's saddened by what he's done and he regrets his poor decisions. This is the moment I captured. The moment in my graphic novel when Michael realizes he doesn't actually hate children. I chose this moment because it is the turning point of the story (when Michael has a change in character).

I had my model looking backwards over his shoulder at a teddy bear as a way of portraying him looking back at his mistakes. Like I stated in the first paragraph, he's saddened by his past and the things he has done and he regrets it all. My props were a teddy bear and a bag of leaves. The teddy bear symbolized the kids and the bag of leaves was for a tree-ish effect. I didn't use makeup of any sort because I didn't feel like my model needed any. All of the problems I encountered were during pre-production. First, I had to scrap my original character portrait because it had death in it. So I had to come up with a new idea and through constant brainstorming and multiple scraping of ideas, Michael the Tree was born. The second problem I encountered was trying to turn a tree into a human for the portrait. Thanks to the guidance of Ms Parkinson, I ended up using my grandfather surrounded by leaves (the correlation between my grandfather and Michael is that they're both old). So that is practically all of the problems. Getting my grandfather to do what he was told was a little bit tricky but besides that, the production phase was problem free.