Digital Composite – Week 11

Work

Done and done! Both series have been completed and received back from the printers – even with enough time for me to start picking apart the design. Nevermind.

I think I’ve done enough chatting about where the concept came from in general terms, so I’ll just go through a brief summary of each final piece…

‘National Security Hotline’ Series

The first of these links Alan Jones directly with the Cronulla riots, by juxtaposing his picture above news shots of the violence. The text of the poster discusses ways that tabloid media continues to ‘get away’ with inciting this kind of anger and hatred…

The second of these takes a similar look at Andrew Bolt’s continued attack on race and ethnicity. It includes a broader range of images than the first poster, with everything from the Camden Islamic school protests and Woomera Detention Centre, to general racism in Australia, like the teenagers on a Sydney beach, happily showing their stomachs emblazoned with “Fuck off, we’re full”…

The final in this series looks directly at the comments encouraged by these types of journalists. Every comment used to create the image of Australia comes from members of the public who have commented on Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair’s blogs. Some of it is nothing short of frightening. Spending many hours reading this stuff made my head spin…

‘What Are You Afriad Of’ Series

Unlike the previous series, which were a deliberate reference to an established campaign, these posters were designed from scratch. The first of these points out that Australia actually receives very few asylum seekers, when compared to other countries. Not quite the situation which calls for levels of hysteria going around at the moment…

The second of these ‘red, white and blue’ posters displays the difference in financial cost between processing boat people offshore when compared to taking them somewhere like Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre. Why we feel the need to put them in detention is another point altogether, but comparing cost is something that everyone can respond to…

The final image shows the military might that the Australian government puts into protecting its borders from boat people. When you consider that the vast majority of asylum seekers come by plane, it’s an obscene amount of money…

The printers did a great job (particularly for putting up with hundreds of questions from a clueless uni student). The only trouble we ran into was when printing the blue ship poster. It seems that when I selected the colour in Illustrator, it had a large amount of magenta as part of its makeup. So when the printer wanted to make it slightly darker than I was seeing on my screen, the magenta came through much stronger, making the blue a purple colour.

After some trial and error, the fix came from flattening the PDF file, lightening it and fiddling with the colour balance slightly – all in Photoshop. I’ve decided that it might be time to invest in a monitor calibrator, like the Spyder, or some frighteningly expensive Pantone cards.

I think I’m happier this semester, having taken on projects with a little more concept and social impact. I don’t think my design has been as well developed as it probably could have been, but that aside, I feel like I’m heading in a pretty good direction with my graphic work.

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Digital Composite – Week 10

Work

Work, work, work. I’m inching closer to having these two triptychs finished up now. The direction has changed a little for one of the series, but I think definitely for the better.

The first series, based on the National Security Hotline campaign has taken shape as a questioning look at the Australian media. My first instinct was to point the finger at the politicians that created this policy, but I then realised that this policy is in fact based on a great deal of public opinion. And these opinions are often shaped by ugly, headline hungry, tabloid ‘journalism’.

I’ve had a growing attitude that we should be holding journalists more accountable for the stories they run. Quite often, writers like Andrew Bolt and talkback hosts like Alan Jones (I’ve deliberately avoided the term ‘journalist’ here) seem to really escape any reprimand over what could often be termed sensationalist pieces at best; poorly researched, bigoted and deliberately inciting public outrage at worst.

So, instead of the easy target of the politician, it’s time to go after these guys…

…these are almost finished now, and I’m really looking forward to putting them in some strategic places once they’ve been printed up. I’d love to see a double-take as someone realises that they’re not one of the original campaign.

The second triptych is all but ready for printing too. These are now much more graphic than they were previously, and have given me a chance to spend some quality time in Illustrator…

…I tried to keep these fairly clear and direct. Each poster represents a different point surrounding the ‘boat people’ issue, with a graphic to hit the point home. The title, and barbed wire element was carried through each and the red, white (black) and blue are a final reference to the Australian flag.

I’m going to try and get these to the printers as soon as possible, so I can allow myself enough time to do a test print of each. After the poor printing results of the last project, I’m keen to avoid a repeat of a sub-standard print.

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Digital Composite – Week 09

Work

Following on from my attempt at a subtle political message, I decided to create something a little bit more direct and graphic: activist posters.

Presenting my work last week, it was pointed out that there was nothing in my image that suggested that my subjects were in fact doctors. There was no signifier. This struck me as being a massive downfall in my work, because without it, I’m really just attaching my own story to the work – the audience has no real opportunity to create their own narrative. At least not one that helps me convey what I’m trying to say in the image. So for the final project, I’m going to really hammer it home.

Still drawing a lot from The Design of Dissent, I decided to work on two triptychs. The first, being a subversion of the obscene Australian National Security Hotline campaign. Similarly to my previous project, I would like to turn these posters on themselves, in a John Heartfield kind of way, for this campaign truly is propaganda…

Whilst this will be a fairly straightforward graphic exercise, the trick will be how I make these my own, whilst still retaining the feel that they are referring to these posters. After creating them, I’d really like to do some simple composite work that shows them in situ – maybe on a bus shelter or train station.

For the second triptych, I’m going to take on an issue that I’ve started feeling quite strongly about of late: boat people. Recently I was at my childhood home, watching the news with my father, when it was announced that a boatload of asylum seekers had been found. Something along the lines of “this wouldn’t have happened if Howard was in” was heard to be muttered from across the room. I spat something fairly unconsidered back in response, and that neatly marked the beginning of what I’ve noticed to be a marked increase in talk of the boat people ‘problem’.

There are all kinds of things wrong with our Government’s policy, but what really upsets me is the general feeling from the public that our shores must be protected from these people arriving at all costs. For all the rhetoric, finger pointing and money spent, I can’t think of one person actually asking why are we afraid of these people? And let’s be honest, that’s where this anger grows from: fear.

My first mockup effort was a bit dry. Looking like a UNICEF ad, or something similar, it didn’t really get the instant impact I was going for…

It also included a lot of text, which rambled a few different points about the current situation. I decided that these would be better served as their own individual posters, each making a separate statement, but clearly being from the same series. The second mockup was a little more successful…

Heading over to Illustrator, instead of Photoshop, clean, clear, vector graphics should be more helpful for this project. Whilst the above image has a long way to go, I think it’s heading in a good direction and could easily be expanded into several posters, creating an activist campaign.

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Digital Composite – Week 08

Work

After my disappointment with the outcome of the original shoot, I decided that rather than trying to save the images in post production, I would shoot once again. I’ve found that in the past, attempting to force poor material into something workable is far too time consuming, particularly at the business end of the semester. Although I had in my mind what I wanted from the shots, I was short on time and in retrospect, poorly prepared. Racing down to a location near a local railway yard, I dragged along a couple of mates to try and catch the last rays of the winter sun before they – and my last photo opportunity – disappeared entirely.

Once we arrived at the location, the sun was already disappearing behind the rooftops of the surrounding houses – something I should have taken into consideration in pre production. I only grabbed a couple of mediocre images, before the first location was unusable…

Scrambling around to find any place that still had a bit of light, I was fortunate enough to stumble across a bright orange shipping container. It was a little bit sketchy getting in there, but I think in the end it was a great find. The colours and composition were much stronger than my original ideas of a simple urban landscape…

Finally, I decided that a portrait framing would be more effective for this shot. It gave me an opportunity to shoot from below and give the subjects more of a heroic pose…

There wasn’t one singular shot that I liked entirely, so I decided to composite parts of my favorites. The final image ended up being combined from around six different shots and gave me a chance to spread the action around the frame a little bit more…

The accompanying media release gives more of an explanation for the duo. My goal for this project was to bring people’s attention to the way they judge what they see through their own associations. Many people would see this image and assume they are graffiti artists, vandals, or even terrorists. I wanted to turn that back on itself by explaining that they were actually doctors, fighting a new disease that was afflicting large parts of the population: Consumerism.

The colours and structure of the frame came together quite well for me, and in the end, I was reasonably happy with the result, especially considering the problems I had during the shoot. However, maybe unsurprisingly, I then had printing issues to contend with.

Whether it’s fortunate I work in a shop that has a brand spanking new large format printer is open to interpretation. Whilst it’s a great printer, we have it set up to print on canvas, not any paper-like media. So for me, this was a crash course in how much colour profiles can change the output of a printer. Not only do the colours look different, but the everything down to the amount of ink that the printer puts onto the page changes. This had pretty dire results for my first print. It looked like something that came out of my home printer when the ink has all but completely run out.

Many, many tests later (not to mention trialing different printer drivers, colour profiles and paper types), I… gave up actually. There came a point that I had to let it go and just use the best print I had. Obviously, I would have liked to get as high a quality print as I could, but when using a printer that uses ten ink cartridges at around $120 or so each, there’s a limit to how much stuffing around I’m able to do.

For the final project, I plan to steer clear of the shop printer, although I will put in some extra time there at some point, getting to know the printer a little better. I think it’s already shown me that I can learn a lot from a better understanding of how the process works.

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Digital Composite – Week 07

Work

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the most productive week for me. Along with being sick all week, my photo shoot certainly didn’t go to plan. Not that I should be surprised – it’s the lecturer from this very subject that continues to remind us that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And it will happen at the very last minute.

I was helped out by a professional photographer friend of mine for the night shoot I did this week. It was partly because he was only available at night that I chose to go with a night shoot. In retrospect of course, I should have done something with much more light available. After discussing the look I was going for, we did some test shots in Angel Place in the city.

The shot above are done with a separate flash. It was a long exposure image, and several held poses were ‘flashed in’. Whilst I really like this effect, it has its own meaning and isn’t something that really fits with my concept, so we moved on.

Now, dressing your friends up as protesters and having them run through smoke in the middle of the city isn’t the brightest idea, so here is a little ‘thank you’ to my willing volunteers: Jonny and Kate.

To achieve a photojournalistic, in the moment type of shot, we tried following the action with the camera as my models ran past. This gave the effect of blurring the background, whilst the subjects stayed relatively in focus.

And then we tried adding some smoke.

After doing this many times, I decided that we really weren’t getting the effect I was after. Whilst it really did capture some movement and excitement in the shot, it wasn’t really expressing a strong stance from the subjects and therefore not conveying the idea I wanted – that these people are possibly someone that should be feared.

So I returned to the original concept of doing something that sits somewhere between a posed shot and an action shot.

The end result was much closer to what I originally had in mind, but still lacked the power I was looking for. The stances come across as being forced and the smoke has more of a ghostly effect. This is of course because of the night shooting.

So whilst I learnt a lot from doing this shoot, I’m going back to the last-minute drawing board. I’ll be doing a late afternoon shoot this time (I like the long shadows we managed to capture in the above shot), so I can get more of a billowing, flare-like smoke.

Inspiration

Image: Stefano Rellandini

I found this image of an Italian protester that really captures so much energy that I love. Whilst this isn’t as ambiguous as I plan my image to be, the separation between foreground subject and background is fantastic and something I will keep in mind for the re-shoot.

This one I found from an old blog post is possibly closer to what I’m going for…

Image: AP via BBC

In this instance, the break between foreground and background is created with water, but it’s just as effective. The pose of the protester is also a lot more open to interpretation, which could be useful for my concept.

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Digital Composite – Week 06

Work

6am is far too early to be getting out of bed and taking photos. Well, for a lazy student that is. There are a bunch of people out and about at that time of the morning – some are taking their ridiculous looking dogs for a walk, and others are dressed up in a business suit and probably just about to begin their 14hr day. Sounds like a laugh a minute. But I digress…

I was out of my bed at this ungodly hour to snap a few potential locations for my photo shoot. After spotting some excellent Flickr photos from the Greek riots in 2008 (see the ‘Inspiration’ section below), I decided that long shadows + Dutch tilt + black and white = awesome. So that narrowed my times of shooting down to either early morning or late afternoon. Lighting would be great, but is likely to become and issue as power will be difficult to find (something that definitely needs some more thought put into it).

Deciding that morning would be a quieter time to be wandering the streets and taking photos, I did just that: snapping off some of King St and other locations, off the main drag…

The second location, on Knight St looking back at the city was initially the shot I found most interesting, so I attempted a (very) quick composite by layering the same shot over itself, but taken at different shutter speeds. Then using masks in Photoshop, I chose which area of each image to use for the composite…

Even though it’s clearly a rushed mock-up, I do like the surreal look of the image. The unnatural way that light sits together in the image reminds me of Gregory Crewsdon‘s photography (minus the budget).

On reflection however, I think the King St images were more successful. There is more movement, and excitement in the framing. And being closer to my house, there’s potential for getting power on the shoot (still a somewhat difficult prospect though)…

Inspiration

Teacher Dude’s BBQ has some really great stuff posted up on Flickr. Not just photos, but some excellent activist posters as well. Definitely worth a look. The following pictures all come from Teacher Dude’s photostream and were the style inspiration I mentioned earlier in this post (all photos are credited through their link)…

The staging of photos is a strange concept of its own. Gregory Crewdson, whom I mentioned earlier, is one of the best known photographers for doing just this. I’m in two minds about his images. On the one hand they are starkly beautiful and surreal, with clear inspiration borrowed from David Lynch, which can never be a bad thing. But on the other hand, they are so overly manufactured, that it’s difficult to feel much for them, other than be stunned by the budget behind the shot…

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 2001.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (North by Northwest), 2004.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses, 2005.

There are definitely elements of these photos that I really do love: the lighting and the smoke are used to wonderful effect. I think my goal here is to combine the precision of Crewdson’s work with the immediacy of a moment snapped in the middle of a riot.

Hmm, maybe I’m setting my standards a little bit high?

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Digital Composite – Week 05

Thoughts

The first coneptual project we have faced in Digital Composite this year has been creatively titled, the Molzianiă Aardvark Project. It is one of the most open briefs I have come across and essentially allows each student to respond to the title of the brief in any way they see fit. Molzianiă Aardvark is of course an entirely made-up term and the only restrictions upon us are technical output: a final high quality, colour correct image at 300dpi A4.

We have however had a quite subtle hint with what direction we could choose to take this project: we are also required to hand in one A4 Media Release. This suggests to me that what we are really doing with this project is, like the title, creating an entity or occurance. Between the image and the Release, we need to take something imaginary and make it appear a reality.

After our lecture on John Heartfield, I have really started to think more carefully about where I’m taking my work. Like my concept for Multimedia Authoring, my initial response to this brief is to make a political statement, no matter how subtle. I’m starting to feel more and more that university should be an environment that I take full advantage of, particularly with the opportunity of making work with meaning behind it. This is not always going to be the case once I begin doing paid work: there aren’t many corporate companies that would appreciate their latest design pointing out the dark side of Capitalism, for instance.

So now that my inner Angry Leftie is making its way out of the shadows, I picked up the latest copy of Adbusters. I used to read this magazine quite a bit when I was younger, but lost interest at some point. Whilst many of the articles are great, I do get the feeling that they are expressed from something of an elitist point of view. Like student protesters yelling about the latest political indignation: they’re making a lot of noise, but when it comes down to it, would they actually change their lifestyle for their cause? Probably not. But in the end, we’re all quite similar in that sense, we’re protective of our status quo.

Where am I heading with this? The front cover of the March/April Adbusters shows a lone figure in mid stride, running from what you assume to be some kind of protest, because of their clothing. They are wearing an almost paramilitary outfit, with smoke billowing around behind them.

This struck me as not only a powerful image, but one that is entirely open to interpretation. Who’s side is this person on? Are they fighting with us or against us? Most Australians would assume this person is something akin to a terrorist. We have very little understanding of violent struggles in our country and therefore cannot understand this kind of fighting. But what if this person was in fact in the midst of a battle for us? What if, unlike the angry students, they were putting everything they had on the line for a cause they saw as much greater than themselves and that we would all benefit from their struggle? This is the direction I plan to take the Molzianiă Aardvark Project.

Work

The first two projects for Digital Composite, completed in class, were focused on giving us marketable, ‘real world’ skills. Repairing an old photograph and cleaning up a beauty shot of Pamela Anderson were both good exercises for getting stronger Photoshop skills. However, they were both solely training exercises and there was no real concept involved. It will be interesting to try and put these skills to use for the Molzianiă Aardvark Project.

At this stage though, i’m still unsure about how I will use digital editing for this project. I think it will be far easier to create an image similar to the Adbusters cover ‘in camera’. Perhaps compositing additional images into the photograph could be used. My instinct is to add some kind of logo, or banner for the group and insert that in post, perhaps along the lines of the 12 Monkeys logo. This idea could be carried across to the final portfolio project for the semester, where I need to put together a group of work. This may be logos, or posters that build upon the imaginary group.

Inspiration

A book that I auspiciously purchased in 2007, The Design of Dissent is a pretty powerful collection of activist design. There’s a lot of ‘anti’ in there: anti-war; anti-government; anti-Capitalism… but I think some of the imagery is still quite positive. And much of it flips the propaganda style on it’s head really effectively.

I’m unsure if this will be of any use for the activist photo, but if I do decide to use graphics in the image or the final project, this will be an incredibly rich resource.

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