10/21/2026
Each year I try to create a Halloween portrait of Coco; she dresses up and takes on an alternate purrrsona almost every year.
This year was AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE and she launched her own Project alongside the Hail Mary:
PRRROJECT HAIL MEOWY
We aren’t certain Ryland Grace or Rocky visited the planet Coco did, but it appears to be somewhere in the Tau Ceti or Alpha Centauri systems.
Coco’s Planet (AKA: “Churu”) has vibrant dense oceans of liquid; it’s hypothesized that the dense atmosphere, visible from space, and overall mass, has compressed the planet’s surface gasses into liquid form. The planet’s gravity indicates there are other substances it is comprised of, so it is not a gas giant. The presence of Astrophage was detected in the system, with a significant trail leading to / from Coco’s Planet; experimental results testing for a biological presence and possible Astrophage-destroying predator are pending.
Coco is famously food motivated, and though she probably wouldn’t turn down Skittles, she craves Temptations, Churu, seafood, chicken, and just about anything edible. Prrroject Hail Meowy was filmed for TREATS.
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This year’s Halloween portraits of Coco began as a concept several months ago; Project Hail Mary has really been the theme purrrmeating my entire year — I read the book several years ago, just before film plans were announced, so it’s a movie I’d looked forward to for literal years, until it finally came out this Spring, and I went to see it in IMAX *multiple* times — so the theme was obvious, however the exact ex*****on was not. Much of what I could do would depend on what Coco would allow me to photograph in costume; I did manage to capture all of the angles I wanted, so at that point, this became more of a graphic design project than simple photography like previous years.
I knew I wanted to recreate one of the PHM movie posters, but it took me several weeks to figure out which one or quite how - the “Time Go Fishing - 70mm” poster that I wanted to mimic wasn’t pawsible since Coco’s astronaut costume is front-facing only, so no back angles. After several weeks of stewing on the direction to take, I landed on combining the leading composition of the “Time Go Fishing - 70mm” poster with the lead-focus of the “Believe in the Hail Mary” poster, and once I found a few graphic assets to get the composition I had in mind, the creative juices started flowing again and I simply had to start being artistic with design elements and polish the details.
I’m actually quite impressed with how well it turned out, and I have to wonder what I could have come up with had I been working with a human model in more intricate costume. I don’t think I’ll be able to top this Halloween portrait of Coco next year, but who knows.
While I captured a selection of angles / poses of Coco with the Prrroject Hail Meowy cosplay / parody in mind, a few also lent themselves to another idea I wanted to play with: “bad / awkward school / family portraits,” specifically with a starry backdrop. Cheesy is the point; these inadvertently look like a greeting card design to me, and unironically they really do capture Coco’s purrrsonality: cuddly, playful, and *constantly* thinking about food. I’m actually really happy with them; they’re maybe a bit less “three wolf moon” and more “two cat stars.”
Includes design elements from:
alonesbe, mypics, goinyk, foodphotoalex, alfotomp, LightFieldStudios, AveCalvar, rwittich, guyswhoshoot, YouraPechkin
These images was entirely photographed, edited, and designed manually; they are *not* generative AI.
