How Would You .. The Squadron Leader! 15 Minute Challenge!

15 minutes to make a complete caption? I'll take that challenge!

I wasn't planning on posting tonight, as honestly I hadn't planned on making a caption either. However, when I was floating through the Haven, making sure all the ferrets keeping the server were all fed for the day, I came across this post from Jezebel, entitled, "How Would You" and inside, it said, "I am supplying the photo, you supply the words in cap form of course. Please post it here. What does the photo whisper to you?" and this picture was attached ..

And then she posted what she had created. I love the idea of challenges, as we've been pretty much doing the same thing here for 18 or 19 months now. I was excited, and since it was for the Shop Talk section, which I used to moderate before becoming an admin, I wanted to up the ante for myself and hopefully show people the process, while putting additional pressure on myself to succeed. I posted the following and immediately got to work by firing up Photoshop.

Haven't read yours yet. I am going to take this as a challenge and do everything in 15 minutes with a blank slate, then wrap up whatever I was doing. Hope it comes out well!
Dee

For the process, I'll cut and paste what wrote up for the response, which came 17 minutes later, the time in which I created the caption AND posted it with the write up to the Haven:

Just finished up. Started with just the picture and no idea on what to do, so I figured I'd make something up once I placed it in a caption setting. 

Saw the make up and the gradient I used from the eye shadow and thought of camouflage, so I made the character a military person .. one that had seen too much and him and his squadron had gotten into trouble somehow and were being changed into women. From there, it just let whatever came out end up on the page, then trimmed it down, shrunk the text to fit, spell checked it and saved it so I can post it here now. 

Hope everyone enjoys a truly unfiltered look at how I create, especially under pressure! 

This was great fun!

 That pretty much is how it went down. I honestly have no idea what I would've done if I hadn't used the eye shadow scheme as a background which made me think of army camo. I imagine it would have gone in a totally different direction. It is now about 2 hours after I posted it to the Haven, and I'm going to go back now and detail what I think I would change if I wasn't under such a time constraint and if I liked what I made.

CORRECTIONS: I see that I used the word "overwhelming" twice in the 3rd paragraph, and I usually catch things like that, where I'll change one of the occurrences of it to something close but pulled out of my mental thesaurus. I do NOT like repeating descriptive words in my caption unless it is for a reason, which usually would be part of a hypnotic trance where I'm trying to impart an anchor. Looking again, I also used "in the way" and "all the way" on two consecutive lines in the 2nd paragraph, which I might've picked up if I took my time, but might have slipped through.

Lastly, you can tell that I rushed the last paragraph a bit, because I was coming up against the clock and new I had to shrink the text to fit the space AND spell check and triple stack it as well. In that, I would replace the "out" in "out to the Outlet Mall" with "down to the Outlet Mall" and prohably would've added another line of text to make it more understandable that women are/were the best friends AND worst enemies to each other .. at the same time. Perhaps even just adding "BOTH"  into the final phrase, "they were BOTH hunters and the prey."

DETAILS: I probably would've added some black and possibly a touch of beige to give the gradient background some more "Camouflage" looking effect. What I made is good enough, but I think it would have given it a bit more polish. I honestly don't know where I came up with most of the "storyline" as it were, I just let my fingers type whatever came into my head and went right into the caption setting. I guess my brainstorming really threw out a hurricane of commercial dystopia and disposable culture angst. Perhaps some of my politics came out here, but once I started writing, I let it play itself out to an utter extreme.

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In the end, this little exercise is exactly the reason why I started this blog in the first place, to talk about the behind the scenes writing details and "show the work" when most people only see the final results of a caption. Its a nice little companion piece to my last post celebrating what we've accomplished here. Expect more of the same but hopefully I can keep things fresh for both you and me as we progress onward.

I have responded to everyone that wished me well so head there to see what I've written if you commented. If you haven't, I pledge to answer you if you leave a message there. Also, since this caption wasn't for anyone, I would appreciate feedback on what you see in the caption and what I've written about the process behind it down below. Anytime I get to pull the curtain back and let you see how the sausage is made, is a welcome pleasure for me. Also, feel free to make your own caption with the picture and post it with Jezebel's post in the Shop Talk section of Rachel's Haven!