Bringing Books to Life

Connor McGlynn, A2 Photography, Unit 3: Personal Investigation, Bringing Books to Life. This blog will contain a collection of ideas, sources, inspiration and images about my photography unit 3 in which I will create images inspired by books I have read.

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Harry Potter Colour Variations

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Harry Potter Shoot

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Harry Potter Shoot Plan

I will undertake a shoot inspired by the book series Harry Potter, by J K Rowling. The images will depict somebody casting spells (beams of light) with a wand. I will do this by setting my camera to a shutter speed of about half a second, and having someone pull an LED across the frame, creating what should be a pretty convincing magic spell.

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Things Not Seen

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Things Not Seen

In Things Not Seen a boy wakes up entirely invisible. To other people he is just a set of floating clothes and a disembodied voice, and nobody knows why. For this shoot, I will photograph people going about their usual lives, and then edit them out of the image, leaving only their clothes and possibly whatever it was they were holding at the time.

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The Red Pyramid

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Roni Kleiner

Roni Kleiner is an advertisement director who’s motifs are Fantasy, magic and beauty. He created an advertisement called “Animal Instinct” from which the above screen shots where taken (the full video can be found on his website at  http://www.ronikleiner.com/148199/2274924/work/animal-instinct). The aim of the advertisement was to show how successful business people can lose their humanity when they get too competitive. I’ve decided to use this as a contextual reference for my “Red Pyramid” shoot, in which I planned to edit the heads of animals onto people similarly to how the Egyptian gods sometimes present themselves to mortals.

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Red Pyramid Shootplan

“The Red Pyramid” features the ancient Egyptian gods in modern day life. They often appear as Humans with the heads of various animals, for example Horus has the head of a Falcon, Anubis the head of a jackal etc. My idea is to take photographs of people against urban backgrounds, probably in streets and/or cities, and edit the heads of animals onto them so they resemble the Egyptian gods.

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Messenger Development

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Ignition Creative

Ignition Creative is a graphic deign company that specializes in designing film posters. A good portion of the posters they design are for horror films, and so they are a very suitable contextual for my messenger shoot. I will develop some of my images into posters, as though the book was being adapted into a film, in a similar style to those above.

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Messenger Shootplan

In "Messenger" there is a forest that is evil. Anybody who goes into it ends up getting strangled by vines, falling on a spike or sinking into a swamp etc. I thought I could create a series of images of someone lost in this forest possibly looking scared and/or panicked, editing the forest to look dark and ominous to really create the atmosphere that such a forest might have.

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1984 Surveillance Development

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1984 Shoot

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1984 Shootplan

In the book "1984", Europe is now under the control of Big Brother who constantly monitors everybody, everywhere. If someone should say something that Big Brother disagreed with in anyway or form, they would be found and arrested immediately by the Thought Police.

My Idea for this shoot plan is to take a series of portraits of people looking paranoid and/or depressed and editing them so that the people have no mouths. This is to express their inability to speak freely, and how that might affect them.

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Inkheart Development

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Inkheart Development Idea

I will print a couple of my Inkheart images onto the page of a book, as that is where the characters came from in the story. I think it may be necessary to lower the opacity of the images and place them over a white background so that some of the words on the book will be visible through the image. I will choose which book to use based on the size, colour and font of the page, not on the books actual contents.

EDIT: Apparently the printers cannot print onto the page of a book so instead I will print onto acetate and glue it onto the page. The outcome should be exactly the same, albeit a little shinier.

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Inkheart Shoot: Black and White