My Stop Motion

This is my original stop motion animation. I made it by using my DSLR to take a series of photos (over 100) of pictures moving across more images. In this instance cutouts of a person in various poses and positions, printed them black and white and cut them out. Then I positioned them on photos I had taken and moved them around while taking pictures forming an animation sequence. To make this into an animation I imported all my photographs into Adobe Premier, placed them in sequence, exported this as a video, imported again and shortened the length to around 20 seconds.

However I think is is not as appropriate as a reflected response to the photographers I have looked at and the theme of my project, and so I decided to redo it, with a different top image that represents a natural landscape which contrasts with the train station, representing an unnatural world. I put this together in windows movie maker instead, which seems to have made the video flicker.

David Hockney Response

Here is my photo montage image in the style of David Hockney. To create this I took a series of photos of one subject (in this case my front door) and combined them all in photo shop to create one larger image. Then I merged all my layers to only one layer and adjusted Levels and Hue and Saturation.

I liked this image however I feel as if there is not an obvious link between all my pieces. I will redo this joiner picture with a full body portrait of a person, each image reflecting again on my idea of the conflict of the natural and unnatural world, and 'changing landscapes'. Then I will compose and edit it in photoshop, trying to reflect the style of Hannah Hoch like in my photo montage.

For this joiner photomontage I did as I said above, and took a series of photos to compose a full body portrait of a person, and another two series for landscapes reflect natural and unnatural world to be the background. Then to reflect the cutout style of Hannah Hoch I printed the composed joiner of a person, cut it out, maintaining the abstract joiner shape, and then I retook a photo of this and put it back on the image in photoshop. This meant that the person looked lower quality, as if from a newspaper photo (reflecting Hannah Hoch) and stood out against the variety of backgrounds. I separated the two sides of the backgrounds so that natural world was on one side, and unnatural on the other. In photoshop I gave the layer with the person a halftone pattern, to reflect newspaper print (like Hoch used) and colored the two sides of the landscapes appropriately. Red for unnatural, green for natural. These colors are also complementary.

Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch was a German artist of the Dada movement, she was one of the pioneers of photo montage. Her work is easily recognised by the sepia tones that reflect the epoch in which she lived, and the cut and paste style of the subjects in her final image.

Personal response to Hannah Höch

The above is my personal response in the style of Dada artist Hannah Höch, the main theme to my image is the conflict between the natural and unnatural world.

I began by finding the objects I would use, most of the photos I took myself however the cranberries and the large machine as stock images off the Internet. Then, to reflect the cut and paste style of Hannah Höch, I printed the images from my computer, cut out the object, and retook a photo of the cut-out. This gave the pictures a grainy effect and made them much easier to separate from the background.

To make my the background for my final image I filled the background layer with two shades of brown, fading from light brown on the left to dark brown on the light. I made a new layer filled with a cracked paint texture and set this to soft light.

Next I imported all the photos of my objects and arranged them accordingly, for the hand holding the translucent clock I made two seperate layers; one with the clock face the other with the hand. I lowered the transparency of the top layer and set it to multiply (top layer being the clock face), then using the magic wand tool I selected the background around the hand and inverted it. I then changed the mode of the lasso tool to 'subtract from selection' and selected so that only thumb is left.

Photomontage

In David Hockney's photomontage pieces he takes a series of different photographs of the same subject and places them together to create a collage. I particularly like how the maintains the rectangular shape of the photos and incorporates into the final piece the different angles and colors of the photos.

Yutaka Inagawa is a japanese artist that does a lot of work in photomontage, he uses very contrasting shapes, colors and lines to achieve abstract looking work. He creates his images from a wide range of contrasting and carefully cut out objects - these include machinery, fish, road signs, furniture - the subjects of the image are often juxtaposed with each other, he will combine the usual with the bizarre for example.

Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion animation is created from a series of photographs taken of an object or setting in which small alterations have been made. when all the photographs are then put in a continuous sequence it create the illusion of movement.

Below is an example of a music video for a korean song that uses stop motion animation. I particularly like this video because it conveys a very cute story whilst also representing the band and their electronic indie music in a very positive way.

Composite Image

I started by using the magic wand tool on the background of the plane, then I inverted the selection so that only the plane would be selected. After I had done this I needed to use the selection brush to made sure the edge of my plane was selected effectively and that there was no excess white, I also contracted the area by one pixel and added a feather. Then I copied my plane onto the new layer on top of my background image and resized and moved the plane around to achieve the positioning I wanted. Next I duplicated the landscape layer and added blur to it using motion blur and the select tools. I did this again but with more blur on the images in the foreground to achieve a realistic effect. The Final image is pictured above. I used a similar technique on the my own images to create the picture below.

Filters

Pinch Filter- Before I used this filter I used the Hue/Saturation palette to increase the saturation of the photo, this meant that it would make the final image look more surreal once I applied the pinch effect. Then using the setting below I made a subtle yet surreal result that was similar to the fisheye effect of lomography cameras.

Different Cloud- I started by duplicating the layer so that the top layer's blending mode could be set to color and this would result in the original colors not being lost whilst the effect of the cloud could still was there. Then on the bottom layer I applied the different cloud effect, there was not setting I could choose for this however.

Ink outlines- For this filter I decided to drastically alter the hue and saturation of the photo to maximize the effect, changed the Hue to -106 and the saturation to 50. Then I directed applied the filter to the same layer, using the setting displayed below.

Photocopy- I duplicated the layer so that I had two to work with, for the top one I set the blend mode to Luminosity, and with the bottom I used the photocopy filter using the setting below. When these were combined it produced a mostly monochrome effect however the darker parts of the photocopy layer become brown on the final image.

Crystallize- I started by altering the levels so that I could produce much more contrast when using this filter. I made the mid-tones much lighter and increased the black tones. Then in the filter options I made the crystal pattern quite large so as to achieve this effect.