growing up in a picture projection edit

Although the the images Ive taken worked really well on there own i wanted to see what they looked like when i started to place some of them together. 

there really powerful images, i wanted to play on fact that the different ways you place the heads have different meanings, for example  the one with 3 heads to me means the head to the left is looking to the past ,the middles looking at the present and the right is looking to the future,  which i think fits really well with the brief and the lyric "forever I've known nothings forever""the Maccabees". the images look really great they almost have a painterly quality to them, and almost a sculptural element to them. I'm also really pleased with layout and composition of the images and i honestly think these could be great as final pieces, but I'm going to carry on exploring and experimenting with different ideas.

Growing up in a picture projections

After hitting a few problems I finally had a successful shoot with projecting the photographs of my self on to my self, i managed to to get the studio completely dark except for the image itself. And its come out with some amazing results that I'm pleased with.

they come out a lot better than expected, the colours are amazing and the contrast against the black really makes them powerful pictures, and they barley needed any editing just a bit of exposure tweaks.As images alone they work really well, the image were iv manged to line the photographs up exactly on my face looks really surreal, its essentially me but at four different ages in one photograph. It's weird to see what changes and doesn't change in your face as you grow especially the eyes, my eyes don't seem to have really changed that much at all. Also, even though its four images of my self, people have often said that it doesn't resemble me at all which is really strange. I also played around with projecting the image on other sections of my face, which i think are some of the more powerful photographs from the shoot.

growing up in a picture experiments

using the photographs of myself  I  wanted to experiment with a different technique of trying to overlay the photographs that I did in photoshop. I wanted to use a technique Ive used before using the photocopier, so instedad of just scanning them all in and overlaying the photographs in photoshop I wanted to try a more manuel proccess much more like a screen printing process, but instead of using screens and ink I used a photocopier.

they look really good its a completley differnt effect to what I did with the photoshoped images, the fact that there not completley allined gives it a completley different look, it remindes a lot like the screen prints andywarhol did for his self ptraits

i really like the effect hes used here if the prints were all completely lined up it wouldn't look as half as good but i do think it would be interesting if i could line the pictures up exactly.

Growing up in a picture (part 1)

this week iv decided to try and experiment ways in how to project images  onto myself going with the idea of projecting photographs of my self on to myself to show how I've changed through the years growing up, so i thought firstly an easy way to try and line the photograph up exactly of my face is using passport photographs. As in passport photographs you have to look straight at  the camera with no expression on your face, so these would be very similar to each other and in theory be easy to line up so, i scanned in the photographs.

about age 12

about age 14

about age 17
all ready by putting these photographs together just like this in order it was really interesting to see how iv changed throughout the years, and to see what characteristics stay the same and what change. I then had a little play in photoshop to try and overlay the photographs exactly to really give the sense of change and development

It looks really strange to see myself literally growing up in one picture, and this alone as a picture looks great. So the idea is to try and project these photographs on to my current face and see the the full change in one picture. The process I want to use is very similar to the process used by Andy Warhol  when making the video for the velvet underground, were he projects them at one of there previous shows on to them playing at gig.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1vZ-7P0BKw&feature=fvwrel

 but instead of doing a video i want to do photographs but still using a very similar method and concept as Warhol

obviously technology has advanced since Warhol did this and i was able to use a computer and a digital projector making it easier to achieve, i then realised I hit a few problems the first being that I was unable to get rid of all the desktop icons so they have been projected on to me and the wall as well. Another was that there was a lot of unnecessary light being created from the desktop and the photographs and this is not the effect that I wanted, I just wanted the photograph and nothing else projected onto my face.

another problem is that with the passport photographs having a white background it created again a lot of unnecessary light, and even though the photograph looks really interesting its not what I'm looking for.

so I realised I needed to eliminate all the excess light to get a good effect so I made a note of the setup so it would a lot easier and quicker to setup again.

so i needed to eliminate all the white on the passport  photographs so it would just literally show the picture of my face, so I lassoed my face and put the background as black.

 the photographs are now ready for the studio next week so hopefully the studio will be a lot darker, so that I'm able to get the full effect  that I'm looking for.

Final major project (week 1)

So its the big one the final major project and the brief is to write your own brief and I have 12 weeks to research, develop and come up with a final idea, which is a great opportunity to really develop a nice strong final outcome.

week 1
this week is research week i have to come up with two general ideas for the beginnings of a brief i then have to present the ideas to the tutor group which will help me narrow it down to one idea, I then then have to write the proposal for the chosen idea.

 Idea 1
my first idea is kind of a continue of my previous project "forever I've known nothings forever" i still think this text has a lot more to offer and as its so open it would be ideal for my fmp, so i started to really think about what the text meant. So I started to think, nothings really forever everything's always changing, so i then started to think about the word change and how that word is so open for ideas and again an excellent starting point for a brief so i started to already think of ideas.

 one being i want to get some old photographs of myself and then project them onto myself to show how I've changed throughout the years.

another being projecting pictures of the human anatomy on to myself or maybe other people and show how the human body is always changing.


another being getting hold of some evolution pictures and show how the human race has changed over hundreds and thousands of years.


I just think this as an idea is really open, and has countless amounts of ideas and outcomes to explore the idea behind the projection ideas was inspired by two artists

Shimon Attie
http://www.shimonattie.net/test/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16 

Shimon Attie used old photographs of old families and old buildings lost in history, and then finds the location of were the photgraphs were taken. He then projects the photographs over there locations were the old photographs were taken and takes these photographs.
 
 
its really interesting to see the contrast between the photograph and the surroundings and how things have change over the years. They look visually stunning the projections are so crisp and clear against these old ruins of buildings.


another artist who uses projections throughout there work is Christian Boltanski 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Boltanski 
Boltanski uses projections similar to Attie but in a very different way Boltanski uses old photographs off Jewish families and Jewish children and overlays, projects and lights up the photograph to forcefully remember those who were killed by the Nazis in the war.


the photographs are very powerful to look at, by using lights and shadows the photograph really stand out and contrasts against there surroundings.
 
 
this one is one of his instillation pieces were hes used little light projection to create these interesting shadows and characters on to the wall. So although he uses a similar technique to Attie he creates  very different outcomes.

Forever I've known nothings forever

For the last 2 weeks we have been asked to chose a peice of text that we found interesting, and to create a peice of imagery to go with the text and I decided to use a Maccabees lyric "forever I've known nothings forever" from the song "forever I've known" which I thought was a nice little play on words. It also was a very open peice of text so I wouldn't really be constricting myself. So the basic idea for the imagery was there was a band of skulls album cover i really liked which was created by their bass player the album was "Baby doll face honey"  its this beautiful paint and ink piece that had been mirrored and when you looked closer you could depict these interesting shapes and imagery much like the Rorschach test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test . I wanted to create somthing on these lines so I started to experiment with paints by creating interesting shapes on a piece of paper and then literally folding the paper in half so that it creates these crazy quite intricate shapes and patterns. very similar to something you would in early primary school when you had to create butterflies, but obviously i wanted it to be a lot more sophisticated than that.

so after scanning them in to the computer I really went to work on them in Photoshop. Firstly I mirrored them and then I started to play around with layering them, and for the type I wanted to keep it really quite basic as the imagery was really quite busy and psychedelic looking so I didn't want to over complicate things. some of the type has been inspired by my previous project for the album covers and here are my results

the results have come out better than expected there are some really intricate and interesting textures that are not apparent at first glance but once you  really look up close you really notice them im really pleased with the results.

Cul-de-sac

This week we have been asked to create a movie poster for the Roman Polanski film Cul-de-sac http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060268/  and no imagery from the film is to be be used on the poster.

Cul-de-sac although a film i wouldn't necessarily pick was an interesting film and although as a story line i dint really like it i could appreciate it for its artistic quality's and certain camera angles were really nice and a thing i really liked was how there was always little subtle hints throughout the film.

In some country's still to this day when a movie is released in the country the movie artwork isn't always necessarily at hand so its up to designers and illustrators to create the artwork so they have to try and get the the general gist of the film in the poster, a good example for doing this is Poland  http://www.polishposter.com/

so we had to basically do the same thing the original poster for Cul-de-sac was created by a very famous designer Jan Lenica who was often the designer commissioned for most of Roman Polanski films

this is the original Cul-de-sac poster that was actually used which has really nice well thought out shapes and really nice painterly quality's and in contrast really crisp, sharp text which was usual for Jan Lenikas work http://www.poster.com.pl/lenica.htm

so for my poster i started to think about the word Cul-de-sac and what it meant i started to think about words like dead end and confined,  i then found this really nice image of two cliffs with the sea in between them which was perfect because not only did it look very similar to the set in the movie. i also had this idea to try and confine the the text in between the two cliffs to to give the feel of  a cul-de-sac. I feel that the sepia effect one is my more stronger poster as it has a better feel of the film as the film was in black and white. if i had used the colour one it wouldn't really give the feel of the movie, im really happy with the layout of the poster for the text i tried to blend the words together to made them appear trapped together which i think has worked really well and i think my poster does give a general feel and atmosphere of the film.