I have felt this project has allowed me to connect more with my work as I have thoroughly enjoyed this project because I have been doing things throughout the project that I have never done before and have realised that I have really enjoyed doing it and is something that I would definitely do again and possibly even look into doing in the future as a job. The bigger scale set designing is what I have really enjoyed.
When I first got given the brief I was certain I wanted to focus my project on a cinematic and childhood film theme because I remember that when I was growing up the films were magical but also looking back now they were all weird but wonderful. I suddenly had a thought about an old shoot I did when I was at school. I did a shoot on Alice in Wonderland for an art project and I thought Alice in Wonderland was definitely weird and wonderful. Thinking back to the project I did a few years ago I knew that with my skills now compared to back then I could create a really good project. I started off by researching into the stories and the theories behind the different stories of Alice in Wonderland and I found it really interesting because I would have never thought about the theories like that. Lewis Carroll’s reasoning behind the books was most surprising because I would never have imagined Alice being a representation of maths.
My idea of turning my images into a flick book came about after flicking through some images from a shoot really quickly and seeing that the story really came through because I was struggling with how my images were going to tell a story. I didn’t want to have any writing to my book because I wanted all the pictures to be strong enough on their own to be able to tell the story. I had brainstormed ideas of how I was going to do the project but a flick book wasn’t there I had thought about creating film still type images and then putting them into a book but wasn’t sure whether that could create a flowing story as well so I’m glad I came up with the flick book idea.
I wanted to research as much as I could into the background stories behind Alice in Wonderland so that I could have as much knowledge as possible. I felt I got into the research quite early on into the project which I thought was really good because I can sometimes leave research until further on in the project. I found out a lot of information that I would never had got from the films and stories alone so I wanted to try and make subtle hints to these in my version. To start off with I didn’t research into many photographers that had the same sort of style of photography I was after I researched into that further on into my project but finding out the theories behind was a lot of help. I found a lot of photographers that inspired me and some where only certain elements of their work inspired me but I found them all online and researched them all online so I wish I had used the library to research photographers and artists but it’s something that I will do for future projects to come. I would say I only found about four photographers that I think really inspired me and that I researched into the most because they were the most similar to my work. These were: Carri Angel, Kirsty Mitchell and Tim Walker. The theorists and other artists that inspired me were of course Tim Burton and Lewis Carroll.
With my first shoot I decided to start with what would be on the table of the tea party because as I said earlier I wasn’t too sure of how I was going to present my final work so I wanted to get shooting as quickly as possible. My shoot didn’t go wrong or bad in any way but it just wasn’t in the style of what I wanted so I had eliminated that style of photography from my final images. I then decided to try another shoot with a model which is when I had the idea of the flick book. I learnt a lot from this shoot, I learnt that I wanted to shoot on location, use props and hang them from the air and then use smaller props to show the size difference like in the film. The images were still a way off the final outcome but I was getting closer. I had crit sessions throughout the process and everyone said they liked my ideas but told me to keep trying out new ideas but they could see how my images would come together. I then had an induction in the green screen and this is when I had the idea of using the green screen to create my images so I did a shoot in the green screen with my model where I took all of my props which I had changed to a smaller table and smaller objects on the table. I decided to do it in the green screen because it was getting colder and more wintery outside so the weather was really dependent on the day and by using the green screen I could really see the fantasy element coming through in my head. I then went to a location in a woodland area to shoot a background for my green screen images to go on. When I got to the editing stage of the green screen images the green had bled onto the images more than I had thought so it took me ages to try and get the green off the images. I tried lots of different steps which didn’t end up working so I went to one of my tutors for help and he showed me a YouTube video to watch which did help me but the final outcome didn’t look as I wanted and would have taken me too long to edit all of the images in my series so I decided to take my camera out for a last minute shoot which could have been risky but I managed to get the images I wanted and edited them onto the background that I had from my previous shoot. I used tools from the Photoshop toolbar to cut out the model and place it on the background. I am really happy with the outcome I got with my final images but I was really disappointed that my original idea of using the green screen didn’t work but I couldn’t spend any longer on the editing so I’m happy with the decisions I made.
I decided to get my book made professionally by an online company as I couldn’t think of a way that I could make a flick book myself and make it look nice. I have used a book making website before so I was happy to send my images off knowing they would come back printed nicely and professionally. I was lucky that wit my last minute shoot I had enough time to edit my images and send them off to have the book made. I started my images book off at the back so that people can flick forwards and see the story happening. I originally wanted my book printed from Bob Books because a lady had come in to visit us and had shown us the different types of books they can produce and I found the one I wanted but I had more images that could fit in the book so I had to find an alternative website. In the end I found Blurb who I have used before. The process was really straight forward I had to download the software provided and I just had drop my images into a box and check that I was happy with the design of my book, one good thing I liked about Blurb was that I could put in as many pages as I wanted up to nearly 500 pages with the paper I chose. The only thing I thought that would have been on my book was a title because the software wouldn’t allow me to create the book without a title but it has arrived a title.
All in all I am very happy with how this project has turned out because I feel I have created a book that I’m happy with and a series of images that I have made myself as I have created the sets myself. I have tried new skills some of which really haven’t been successful but others that have. I feel I have got a sense of elements of photography that I prefer. If I was to do this project again I would definitely use the green screen again and refine my skills in the green screen so that I could use it without getting green bleed everywhere. I would maybe work out a way to make my book myself because it would be a lot personal to me but I feel that with a book that I haven’t made it feels more similar to the original stories of Alice in Wonderland. I would do another project along these lines again but it is quite time consuming so it would have to be a personal project over a longer period of time I think.
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