We Precious Few

"Colonial marines are a lot like falling stars. They blaze brightly and savagely and hold back the curtain of night. They are countless in their numbers. They fill the skies briefly, before they reach the ground, burning all they touch. They are far too numerous to be named or remembered, having but the briefest moments of glory when they burn the brightest. Only their fellow marines seem to even be able to tell them apart sometimes, and among them share the camaraderie of family...the fellowship of brotherhood. Among the Colonial Marines, each squad is a band of brothers.
The dropships fill the skies when the marines come, raining down like snowflakes...like falling stars. High above the gunships circle - providing fire support and artillery bombardment for the dropships and their ground
crews. On the ground, the marines are eager to leap from their flying coffins, sometimes even before touchdown, much preferring to die in battle with a fighting chance, than to perish inside one of those flying coffins from a stray missile or plasma burst. They are eager to get down in the
mud, where the metal meets the meat, all of them. They quickly sweep toward their objectives, over-running opposition, seizing strongpoints - readying the LZ for their brothers and the heavier gears of war they will bring.
Only after securing the mountain beacon do Cassandra and her fellow squad mates dare to take a moment to evaluate the rest of the invasion. Their LT killed in the early fighting, Cassie is now in charge, but she knows she can count on Kevin, Greg, and Rook for support and to back her up. Though losing Jim and the others is a blow to them all, as they have been together for years, Marines don't have time to grieve...and so they brace for the next battle and survey the valley and armies below."

Rendered in numerous layers over several weeks on a Celeron 2.66ghz single core, with 3.5gb of ram, using Poser Pro 7. Layered and composited in Photoshop, with additional post-processing, mixing, and some digital painting here and there. The sky backdrop is a mix of freely available sky backdrops, and public domain images from NASA's JPL with extensive mixing and blending to get the sky that is visible. Though this is not the original idea I had wanted to submit to the war contest (the original was
an Epic space battle with Mecha - but Poser was not co-operating and it kept crashing on render) I am happy with this image overall. I was already working on this sort of group shot/promo poster of the characters for one of my animated projects that is very well into production, so I decided to expand the image concept and scope to be more than just a character group shot (although still very much the core of the image). While it doesn't have any flashy explosions or lasers, I am quite pleased with the over image and blending in it, and hope others will be as well. Though looking back I really wish I had the proper hardware for such work (a tablet, a faster computer with far more memory, etc...).