Is there anything more nostalgic than cartoons?
The bright colors. The simple drawings. The weird proportions. Everything is exaggerated and graphic and somehow just a little more exciting than real life.
I grew up watching shows like Rugrats, Doug, and Rocket Power, and I always loved the worlds they lived in. Nothing looked quite right. Heads were too big. Arms were too long. Colors were brighter than they had any business being.
Honestly, I think I’ve spent a lot of my adult life trying to figure out how to make the real world look a little more like that.
Which is probably how we ended up building a dress out of plywood.
The Attic Series
At the time, David and I were in the middle of our Attic Series, a slightly insane personal project we had given ourselves: build and photograph 25 completely different sets inside our 400-square-foot attic studio in 100 days.
Twenty-five sets. One attic. One hundred days.
Those constraints were very intentional. We’ve learned that sometimes having endless possibilities is actually terrible for creativity. You can think about an idea forever. Change it. Question it. Decide you need more time. Decide maybe you should make something else entirely.
But when you know another set needs to exist in a few days, you don't have time for all of that. You have to make something.
So David and I would have these creative brain-dump sessions where we'd throw around whatever weird ideas were floating around in our heads. Some were good. Some were probably terrible. But that was kind of the point. We weren't trying to fully work out every idea before deciding whether it was worth making.
One morning, a cartoon dress popped into my head.
I grabbed a piece of paper and sketched this ridiculous oversized dress with big sleeves and a super simple silhouette. Then I showed it to David.
“What if we made this out of plywood?”
This is one of my favorite things about creating together. I can throw out something completely impractical like, “I want to make a giant cartoon dress out of wood that a person can actually wear,” and instead of explaining all the reasons that is a terrible idea, David starts figuring out how we could actually make it happen.
That's how a lot of our work starts. One of us throws something out, the other adds to it, and somewhere in the back-and-forth it starts becoming a real thing.
David was in.
Okay, But How Do You Make a Plywood Dress?
This was where the idea became his problem.
David took my sketch into the computer and started designing the dress so he could cut it using his CNC machine. Almost immediately, there was a problem: our CNC machine wasn't actually large enough to cut the dress in one piece.
So he divided each side into multiple pieces, cut everything separately, and figured out how to piece it all back together.
And then came the sleeves.
The freaking sleeves.
The dress couldn't actually be flat because a human being needed to fit inside of it. David had to build a frame behind the plywood to give the whole thing depth, which created all of these weird compound angles where the oversized sleeves met the body.
There was probably a mathematically correct way to figure those angles out.
We did not find it.
David eventually started cutting different angles, holding pieces up to the dress and basically guessing until something fit. I watched him get increasingly defeated by two plywood sleeves, we talked through what might work, he tried something else, and eventually one of those guesses actually worked.
That's also a pretty accurate representation of how we make things together. We usually know what we want something to feel like long before we know exactly how we're going to get there.
Once David had the first half assembled, he called me outside to try it on.
It looked absolutely ridiculous.
Like someone had taken a piece of clip art, extruded it six inches and stuck a human inside of it.
Which meant we were getting somewhere.
Making a Dress You Could Actually Wear
From the beginning, we didn't want the plywood dress to just be a prop our model stood behind. If we were going to go through the trouble of making a dress out of plywood, someone needed to actually wear the thing.
So we built a front and a back as two separate pieces. Our model, Morgan, could step between them, and then the two halves would close around her and latch together almost like a guitar case.
Was it comfortable? Absolutely not.
But it worked.
We were about 20 minutes away from the shoot when we still hadn't officially attached all of the latches. David and I were getting tense, the dress was still being finished, and then Morgan walked through the door.
We hadn't told her she was going to be wearing a plywood dress.
Surprise!
Thankfully, Morgan is the exact kind of person you want showing up when you've built a giant wooden cartoon dress and aren't entirely sure how this is going to work.
And Then Morgan Became a Cartoon
As soon as we put the dress on her, I started thinking about the Disney movie Life-Size that I watched as a kid, where Tyra Banks plays a doll who comes to life.
Except I wanted to reverse it.
What if Morgan was a real person who had suddenly woken up as a doll?
Maybe she doesn't quite understand her new body yet. She's trying to walk. Her arms feel strange. Her feet don't cooperate. Everything bends in ways it probably shouldn't.
That became the little story running through my head while we photographed.
And Morgan was perfect for it. She's an actress, so she knows how to turn a pose into a character, but she's also double-jointed, which meant she could make her body do things that already looked slightly unreal.
At first, I was directing her pretty specifically. I would ask her to turn a wrist, bend a leg or move her feet a certain way, and then she would take that tiny direction and turn it into something I hadn't thought of.
That would give me another idea. Which would give her another idea.
Meanwhile, David was watching everything we had spent the last few days talking about and building finally come together in front of the camera. He said later that once I pulled the camera off the tripod, everything just kept getting goofier and goofier, and he could see Morgan and me feeding off of each other's ideas.
Pretty quickly, none of us were really following a plan anymore.
This Is Where Everything Got Weird
At some point, I pulled the camera off the tripod and everything opened up.
We were photographing with the Sigma 15mm F1.4 Diagonal Fisheye, which pushed the whole idea even further. The set looked bigger. Morgan's limbs stretched toward the edges of the frame. The already oversized dress became even more absurd. Everything started feeling a little warped and wonky.
The world we had physically built was starting to look even less like reality through the camera.
It felt like a cartoon.
And I was completely in it.
Some of our favorite photographs from the shoot weren't planned at all. At one point we put the dress flat on the ground and Morgan threw her legs over it. She was wearing these colorful Charlotte Stone shoes, and suddenly we were making these bizarre conceptual shoe photographs that hadn't existed anywhere in our plans before that moment.
That's when a shoot is the most fun for me. We can spend days planning and building something, but once we start photographing, I don't want to be so attached to our original idea that we miss something better happening right in front of us.
I remember looking at Morgan at one point and saying, “I could literally photograph you all day.”
And I meant it.
What the Attic Series Was Giving Us
There is this feeling that happens sometimes when I'm photographing where I get so immersed in what we're creating that I stop noticing time. I'm not thinking about whether the photos are good or what we're going to do with them. One idea is just leading to another, and I'm completely inside of making something.
That's what happened during this shoot. And I think it was part of something bigger that was happening to both of us during the Attic Series.
The more we made, the less precious we became about making. We didn't have time to wait around for the perfect idea or figure everything out before we started. We had to trust the idea and trust each other enough to see where it went.
And that's really how our work has always happened. An idea gets passed back and forth between us. I might hand David a weird little sketch, but what he figures out how to build changes the idea. What we build changes what I see through the camera. And somewhere in all of that back-and-forth, it becomes something neither of us would have made on our own.
The plywood dress is one of my favorite examples of that.
Nobody asked us to make it. There was no client waiting for it and definitely no practical reason a giant wearable wooden cartoon dress needed to exist. We just really wanted to see if we could make it real.
And I think that's what I keep coming back to with personal work. Not everything you make has to make sense or lead somewhere. Sometimes being curious enough to wonder what if we actually made this? is reason enough.
Because a few days later, we were standing in our attic watching Morgan wobble around inside this ridiculous thing that had started as a sketch on a piece of paper, making photographs that were weirder and better than we had imagined.
And we were having so much fun doing it.
Model: Morgan Flanagan
Shoes: Charlotte Stone
Purse: Min & Mon
