NORTHERN LIGHTS, UKAHALA–After great anticipation, hicom reveals the official portrait of all 10 RFCP officers! Read on for the first look, and to hear how it all came together.
The Recon Federation of Club Penguin (RFCP) is nothing if not formal. While many armies offer pictures of their past leaders, RFCP is the only army to take and display an official portrait of its officers in addition to its past Commanders. Yet another custom to love.
But the officer portrait elicits groans as well. Why?
Just imagine how hard it is to schedule 10 different people (and time zones) to log onto Ukahala at exactly the same time. The difficulty is perhaps one reason why the last officer portrait is from all the way back on June 8, 2020. A lot has changed since then, and the need for a new shot eclipsed the challenges of bringing it all together.
Stepping up to the task of making this photo shoot a reality, Gen. Tumbling arranged an availability survey called “when2meet.” Officers could mark their free hours on a calendar and see a collective graph of when their compatriots were available. It did not take long for those bold, vivid greens (signaling times when 100% of the officers were available) faded into pastels and whites (when few or none were).
Yet four tiny rectangles among the mosaic indicated high officer availability on Saturday, August 6, at 8:00 p.m. EST. With just a little more negotiation, RFCP managed to get all officers online for a window of just 15 minutes.
Work would need to be quick! To minimize delays and confusion, Commander Prior Bumble sent the seating chart ahead of time:
Traditionally, the Commander sits in the center throne, with the Commissar on the left junior throne. This is the first ever officer portrait featuring two Commissars, however, so another junior throne was added to the right. Commissar Coolj as the senior Commissar took the traditional Commissar seat while Commissar HamsterloverL occupied the new one.
Those with higher ranks sit closer to the Commander, and move out as the ranks descend. When an Admiral and a Red Baron are present, they always sit to the immediate left and right of the Commander, regardless of seniority. Unfortunately, this time around no officer held either of those positions. A Vizconde was present, though!
Officers are required to wear the officer uniform, but Prior does occasionally authorize slight variations to accentuate the character of that officer. For example, Gen. Tumbling received permission to wear his trademark fedora, and Col. Voidwalker, our “tech guy,” was allowed to wear his robotic night vision goggles. Commissars are required to wear a different hat item, and Vizconde Don was also obligated to select a hat which represented the Marines division. Col. Randomplayer10, in homage to his rather goofy humor, wore the 3D glasses. Not all requests were authorized, however–some regular attire items needed to remain!
The conference table at which the portrait is taken has always been in Prior’s igloo. On Ukahala, however, the table (called the “covert agent station,” !ai 923) is only obtainable once, which made for a conundrum! No other table in Club Penguin shows enough of the top surface (as opposed to a cross-section) to accommodate the officer portrait. So, Gen. Microham kindly volunteered to photoshop the table, and had the officers escorted to the Plaza after Prior’s igloo to photograph their names for use in the picture editor.
A backup photo was planned to take place in the EPF room as well, just in case photoshop ran into hurdles. This was scrapped, however, as that 15 minute window drained to zero too fast.
The final result (top) is a true masterpiece, for the first time ever presented in a frame. It felt like a miracle that the portrait was pulled off.
After all was said and done, Prior joked:
“Now no one better f–ing retire.”
But for promotions, hey…
We’ll do this again sometime.
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