Montage: Changing landscape of children

I decided to create another montage capturing the idea of how Britain is dealing with a new age of larger children and also to do with how companies such as McDonalds market their products towards children using characters such as Ronald McDonald. There is something very sinister about this and so I tried to create an image that would capture this. I have placed an image or Ronald McDonald running down the train track towards a new age of larger children. I have also placed an image of Oliver Twist who is a character in a very British Victorian drama running away from Ronald. The viewer can connote from this that children used to be skinny yet as fast food chains have become apart of Brittish culture, Britain is becoming a nation of larger children.

Stop Motion Video

Storryboard for stop motion film

I was thinking about possible stop motion ideas and decided to create a stop motion featuring myself. I put my friends camera on a tripod and told him to take over 80 photographs of myself based on this storyboard. I then cut out the photos of myself that took about 3 hours. I had recently gone to the cinema to watch a film in 3D and got given a pair of 3D glasses so I came up with an idea featuring the 3D glasses. I also thought about how glasses are an accesory in fashion at the moment even if you have perfect vision. I created a script that can be seen below each image.

After creating the script i recorded myself speaking on a hand held camera and layered it over the top of my stop motion film. This worked quite well and I was happy with the end product however I felt I could have made it better under less time pressure as each photograph of myself wasn't perfectly placed in the position of the previous one. I chose glasses because of their relevennce to a changing landscape of gimmick accessories in fashion thoughtout the years.

I also could have done with taking more photos even though I would have had to of cut out more because it would have been slightly more interesting. I also could have done with having more money; the recoring of myself speaking didn't sound great and would have sounded a lot clearler in a recording studio. However all in all the storyboard was helpful and I was pleased with the stop motion video.

Photomontage

The montage on the left was done by me in the style of David Hockney's montages. I took 15 photos in all from different angles and aspects of the tray and meat products. I opened up a blank file and gradually started adding more and more images into the montage and started overlapping the images.

I thought about the idea of changing food products in a landscape; sausages are fairly new in relitive terms where as porc chops have been around for years, tin foil is fairly new whereas wood top tables have been around for hundreds of years.

My second montage was all about me and my village, I incorperated a landscape photo that I took of Beltring station, 20mins walk from my house, my guitar in the right hand corner, a ceg, an ipod, peanut butter me and my 3D glasses in the top left the local post box in the bottom left and the facebook logo I got off the internet (my village is far away from most of my friends so its a good way to contact people in an isolated area. The lightbulb in the centre is a long lasting lightbulb and so better for the environment than tradition lightbulbs. In this way societies landscape of essential products is changing with social issues such as climate change. I recently discovered a guy in the year above me that lives in my village so the light bulb also symbolises the idea of a light freeing me from boredom. I originally had a background of my friends wall with a bubble pattern and this pattern is merged into all of the photos in the montage most clearly on the top right and ceg. I used a stamp affect on most of the photos to make it more interesting and aesthetically pleasing.

Edited photograph showing a range of skills and photomontage

I took the original photograph in Africa. I turned the photograph into a negative and selected the road. I colourized the road and tree with a red tone. I then selected certain aspects of the image such as the different mountains and changed the darkness of the mountains. I then decided that I would darken the sky and colourize it so it look dull and grey. I then went onto google and thought about the concept of a sun coming up in the background. I expanded this idea and thought about a Japanese type sun because its quite stylized and I think quite interesting. I copyed this in and put it onto a new layer behind the mountains. I then made the rays longer so they reached the edges of the photograph. I thought this was quite an interesting affect because it mixes a more realistic idea with a cartoon like aspect too it.

I researched Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and David Hockney who are three of the most famous photo montage artists. Man Ray one of the most famous photographers of the 1930s and 1940s.

Composite images

I took a tutorial to try and learn some new techniques that I could apply to some of my images. I put the two planes in (on new

layers) and made them look extra realistic b

y using the feathering tool after contracting t

he plane by 0.5 pixels. I blurred the image and

put a motion blur on the planes at the same an

gle as the plane to make it look as if the plane is traveling forward. You can also change the

number of pixels that you blur and so I only dragged the bar across a little because if you blur it by too many pixels you cants see the plane very well (just a blur) and I wanted to make the plane distinguishable in the photo.

The photo on the right is one of mine and I wanted to create an image in the style of David LaChapelle with the same techniques learnt in the tutorial and image I created in the image above. I decided that I would create an Image similar to the style of LaChappelle's by adding colour to this dull image. I also wanted to make a comical image that is rather unrealistic. I first found an image of an ice cream van and customer and copyed it onto a new layer. I placed it to the side of the track and feathered the edge of the van. I then placed a fun fair ride in the background next to the heard of wilderbeast. There was not a break in the heard so I had to clone stamp the grass in front before hand to erase some wilderbeast to make room for the fair ride. I then motion blurred the people on the ride to make it look as if they were going fast. I looked at the sky and noticed there was a big space; big enough to put a plane in. I took a lancaster bomber and placed it on a new layer. I then selected it and resized it by holding shift to keep it to scale. I then used the motion blur on it like I had in the previous image. I originally envisaged changing the hue to make it look almost cartoon like (like LaChapelles) however I didn't want to make too many changes to the image and I was pleased with the image in the end because the idea of a fun fair in the masai mara was rather interesting. Following on from this the lancaster (a second world war bomber) in the masai mara was also rather 'different'.

Filters

I decided that instead of taking one single image and transforming the whole thing by using one filter that I would select certain aspects of a single image and use a range of different textured filters and apply those to the selected areas.

To do this I first unlocked my layer by duplicating it. I then took the magic wand tool to select the sky and went to the filters. I decided to use one of the sketch filters and used the notepaper one. I kept it in black and white because I still wanted a bleak looking photo. I changed the hue slightly to create a light looking sky.


I then used the polygonal lasso tool and cut around the different buildings to create an image with a range of textures. I also added pieces of colour by colourizing certain area by clicking the colourize button.

I had an interesting image in terms of buildings but I thought the Thames needed to look more interesting. I cut around it and used the photocopy filter because I wanted to create a dark dirty looking river to keep in theme with the grey dull sky. I also wanted to create a prevoking image by doing this because it looks like oil that may have spilled from boats.