Behind The Scenes: Adding a picture to the Farang Blog

One of the most common requests we receive here at Farang HQ is to show more pictures on the blog. While we'd love to add more pictures, each picture we post requires an intense effort from a cross-functional, cross-species team. In this post we take you behind the scenes and show you how the magic happens.

Step 1: Our dedicated photographers snap a Polaroid of the subject.

The first step, and also the easiest, is for one of our dedicated teams of research photographers to take a Polaroid picture of the object or scene we'd like to post to our blog.

Step 2: Selection

A design professional reviews each Polaroid and typically selects one to four of the least offensive images for use in each blog post. The hundreds of rejected Polaroids are disposed of in a chemical bonfire, in a manner befitting their status as abominations.

Step 3: Enlargement


The surviving Polaroids are taken to Kinkos, where they are enlarged by a factor of 25 and printed onto high quality glossy photo paper. The resulting 14 1/2' X 10 1/2' image is then cut into six hundred and twenty five 5"X7" rectangles.

Step 4: Training


The stack of enlarged photo-segments are delivered to our elephant workshop, located in Malaysia's Penang free trade zone. Each 5"x7" rectangle is shopped out to an individual elephant sub-contractor, who is then trained to reproduce the image using traditional paints. On average it takes the elephants 15-35 canvases to produce a satisfactory facsimile, though in some cases it can take upwards of 100 attempts.

Step 5: Transferring to the Computer

Once the elephants are sufficiently skilled at reproducing their section of the image, the canvas is replaced with a Wacom Intuos tablet, which translates the elephant's brush strokes into their digital representations.

Step 6: Reassembly

Proprietary software uses edge-matching detection to reassemble the 625 separate images into a cohesive whole. The accuracy of the software is about 95%, meaning some hand-tuning is required before the image is complete.

Step 7: Upload to Blogger and Post


The completed image is uploaded to the server and posted to the blog, for the enjoyment of our viewing public.