Corridor Digital
One of my main influences for looking into the idea of stop motion for a 4D journey was Corridor Digital. This is a group of videographers that create short videos and short films with different themes, usually themed around a specific idea and building the plot up around it. On of my favourite examples of this is in a video called Stop-Motion Parkour, which you can see below.
This video utilises stop motion to tell the story of two people, a man thirsty for water and a man who has water. The first man steals the water from the second man and when the second man catches up to him, he pushes him to the ground and says “You better start running!” This is taken literally as the man transitions into running while still laying on the ground, taking the scene into 2D stop motion. The second man then joins this and they fight for a short amount of time, using objects in the environment in the process, until eventually the second man gets back up into the regular world and drops the first man down, as he is still in the 2D stop motion world. This idea interests me because it takes a fairly simple concept and is able to use an ordinary problem, an ordinary environment and seemingly ordinary people to create a very exciting scene. I would like to adapt the idea by creating a short GIF as one of my final outcomes, utilising this method but adapting it to fit the topic. I was considering going along with the theme of games and using the finally part of the first level of the first game I ever played, Super Mario Bros, to signify this journey. This would fit with the theme because it symbolises the completion of the first step, which is often the most important in journeys.
Don McCullin
Another influence of mine for looking into the more fearsome side of adventures is Don McCullin. He was an old war photographer, and used personal journeys as his way to get through his posttraumatic stress. One photograph I like in particular is named “The Steel Town” and is shown below.
Photographed in 1974 in Consett, a town in the County Durham district south-west of Newcastle, this picture shows a woman with a pram walking beside what appears to be an industrial site. This makes the woman look particularly out of place because the pram looks very shiny and new, heavily contrasting the background of the grimy and destroyed site. The photographer himself quoted that this image struck him for its “alien lunar landscape; an environmental disaster which is so uncomfortably at odds with the presentation of this young mother pushing her shiny pram.” Two ideas stand out to me in this image. The first is the journey for the woman and the reason why she has to go through this very dirty area and the second is the journey of the baby in the pram and what could happen to them if they continue to be exposed to this area. This creates an uncertainty and can trigger the fear of the unknown. Having a personal connection the the fear of the unknown, I would like to explore this idea more and how to present it through photography. I am thinking of showing not only a story through the singular pictures that I take, but also having an overarching journey that spans across all of them.