Final Major project.
Our Final Major project, or FMP as I’ll be referring to it, is all about the future. After some brainstorming I want to focus on the future of media, specifically the evolution of movie and television from the days of practical effects and monochrome to the modern day of CGI and technicolour and how that technology could continue to progress.
One specific method I want to use is an unused one from a previous project, that being light painting. I myself own a pair of LED pois, a sort of soft plastic balls with colour changing LEDs inside attached to a string to be spun around. I imagine with the colour changing capabilities of them and the patterns that could be made would result in something at least pretty.
So I need to find photographers that work with black and white to colour as well as light painting.
This is a photoshoot from the saltire trip
Research
One photographer I’ve found is Jan Leonardo who works with light painting, one of the things I’m wanting to use in my project. His use of colour and shape is amazing, with work ranging from abstract to nature, people and even working with brands, but the light painting stays constant and amazing throughout his work.
The second photographer I want to talk about is a man called Eric Staller, another light photographer but different than Jan Leonardo since Eric mostly uses fire instead of using LEDs and also only did light painting in his early work in the 1970s. But I absolutely love the shapes he makes using the fire.
New plan
So I’ve fallen into the same trap I usually do which is getting overambitious with my ideas, having to not only organise the people I’ll need for the shoot but also for making the look of film sets from the different eras it’s too much for me to do especially with the time remaining, so I’m keeping the same theming of past-future but with technology. It’s also more in land with the brand of ACCU with components and electronics. I’m still keeping the light painting component to act as a “time vortex” so it’s like a look through the tech of the past on the left, modern in the centre and what possible future technology over on the right.
In preparation for my new plan I’ve had to research on the style I’m wanting to do and I’ve found the perfect photographer by the name of Jim Gordons. Jim does a lot of different photography but the specific genre I’m looking for is his collection work. Jim gathers mass amounts of item ranging from technology to locks to even food products in some instances, aligning them all to fit together and even though its just items on a background it still has a way to be captivating and interesting.
So above is a very rough concept of what I want it to look like, the blue swirl represents the light paint, the left highlight represents old tech, purple represents modern and green represents future tech, now you can see they overlap and that is on purpose, and that’s because I want to incorporate the Hockney joiners technique from my previous project, but only on the edges of sections. The entire shoot will be studio based.
Above are mockup concepts of what I’ll be using to represent future technology, using broken circuit boards and screen shots of phone and desktop displays and other such applications to use as the screens. I’ll be reducing the opacity of the screenshots to 85% and using a light blue almost teal colour at 50% opacity as when you think hologram you typically think of blue but I dont want it too dark so you can still see and make sense of whats on there.
Above is a contact sheet for some testing photos for some of the tech I’m wanting to use, to try and test the practical applying of the hologram styling on actual photos.
Here I took one of the photos of my ps5 controller that I felt had the best angle for for a “holographic screen” I then layered an image of my PS5 home screen from my monitor over the controller to then begin editing it t0 look like a holographic screen.
I cut out just the screen display to remove the monitor and surroundings.
I then lowered the opacity of the screen layer to resemble the look of the typical sci-fi hologram where it’s slightly transparent.
I finally changed the colour balance to be more blue, as it’s a more cohesive process than completely painting over it in blue and it gives a more clear image final result.
Featured above is the contact sheet for my photoshoot
Evaluation
Now at the end of my project it’s time to reflect on the entire process. To go back to the beginning with the planning and research process, I know that my planning process is a little all over the place. My research informed parts of the project ,that unfortunately never made it to the end, that were more different methods but not the main focus of the photo. Instead I researched the light painting portion of my original plan, seeing the methods of shooting with poi lighting as that was the equipment I had to hand. I ended the research and planning phase with a way to make something interesting with the future concept, the way things were filmed from past, present and what the future could hold, I was wanting to experiment with distortion and uncanny looks to replicate the AI that has become popular in the industry. However I hit a road block that I’ve encountered before that being overambitious with my ideas and not knowing how to properly make those ideas a reality, in this instance I didn’t know how to make locations that would look like film sets. I brainstormed new ideas and remembered one of the core points of the original brief being the company Accu who we were making the pieces for. Accu being a company involved in technology I thought what might I have at my disposal both in and out of college. I came to the conclusion that focusing on tech of the past present and then concepts for the future would result in an interesting end product as well as thematically fitting for our clients. There was then another issue presented in that I didn’t know how to present the items, so I got to researching to formulate more concrete ideas and managed to find Jim Golden who’s collection pieces where exactly what I was looking for. During this project I’ve really improved upon all my skills, I’ve become a lot better with planning but also subsequently with changing original plans to make my projects more realistic to do rather than committing to an impossible idea. I’ve become better with researching, both online and with experimenting with what I want to do practically. My skills with studio work has become a lot better as with previous projects I didn’t really take advantage of the studio and subsequently wasn’t too familiar with it as my peers, however I feel confident with studio work now. If I were to do this project again I’d try and focus on the clients more from the beginning as they are the main focus, ad well as experimenting with editing more than just with for main segments of the piece, for example being more familiar with the tools and what effects they can produce to make my images more visually appealing.