EXPLORING TABLEAUX/STAGED REALITY PART 2

In this part of the project I focused mainly on staged reality, as I was re creating these paintings

These 3 images are the ones we chose as a class to explore as they were some of our favorites. We chose these images due to the different angles of lighting within the images and the angle the photo has been taken from. The meaning behind these images is strong.

Eugene Delacroix ‘Leading the People’

Carravagio ‘Deposition’

David La Chapelle ‘The Last Supper’

MY RESPONSE; 

When taking these photos, we had an allocated director, photographer and lighting person, along with the cast of the image. The director was there to order the photo, in order to get out image as close to the one we were copying. It took many tries to get a good image because there was many people to order and the lighting had to be perfect, along with the photographer getting their settings correct to make sure the photo looked sharp and clean.

This photo is my favorite response from experimenting with Caravaggio’s photo ‘Deposition’. As I feel that the characters are in the right place and the image is sharp. We added our own twist on this image, by dressing the person being held in a gorilla suit, just to make it more creative and give it our own feel. 

When photographing the ‘Leading the People’ by Eugene Delacriox, we struggled getting the lighting in the right places to highlight the right parts of the image. I chose to show these two images from this shoot, because the first one has the lighting in the right place, but the whole frame wasn’t shot. Whereas in the second photo you can see the whole frame with acceptance of the flooring slighting in the photo, but that could easily be edited out. 

The final shoot we did was to reenact the image by David La Chapelle, ‘The Last Supper’. When photographing this image I was in charge of the lighting, I had to have a light in front of the set up and also one from behind to create the type of lighting that was created in the original.

EVALUATION

During this second part of investigating tableaux/staged reality we had to set up the people as they photo had theirs set up, we also had to get the correct lighting to make the photo look something like the original. I found staged reality very difficult because, I like being able to have freedom to change things and set things how I want, whereas in this part we had to follow an image. In staged reality and tableaux there isn’t room for you to do what you like and have the ability to be creative. It was frustrating as it took a while to get characters in the right place and then along with the lighting, it was too boring.

This photo is my recreation of the ‘Lil Boat’ album cover by Lil Yachty. In the original the artist’s clothing, boat, and frame are all very similar shades of red. Whereas in my version all of those elements are yellow, this is because I used a yellow raincoat in the shoot which meant i had to make every previously red element yellow. The original photo was taken in front of a green screen, then edited into the backdrop of the original album cover. I used the content aware brush to remove the artist from the picture and placed a picture of my friend. I used the colour range function to select the boat along with its shadow and change it to yellow. To change the colour of the frame I created a yellow layer the size of the whole cover, then moved it so that it was in front of the original red frame, but behind the image in the centre. I then applied some colour filters to the image of my friend and slightly blurred the edges to make him seem more authentic as part of the photo.

This is my take on the ‘starboy’ album cover. I had to change the colours as the blue colour scheme wouldn’t work as well as in the original because of my friend’s ethnicity. I also had to change the positioning of his hands because he has a different hairstyle and colour to the artist. If his hands were in the same pose they would stand out a lot more against his hair; which wouldn’t have the same effect. Also, due to his hair being longer his fingers would be covered up by his hair if he slid them up his head; which would also be less effective than the original album cover.

The original album cover, it has a much different colour scheme to my version, but these colours work well only in the original because of the artist’s and my model’s ethnicity. The theme of blue-lit black is possible here due to his dark skin tone. There is also a parental advisory tag in the bottom right due to the contents of the album, I didn’t include this in my version because I had already used that tag in previous covers in this project and i didn’t want to repeatedly use them.

This is a work-in-progress edit of the photo which I decided to abandon because it looked too __ and didn’t fit the theme of the cover. My idea behind it was to make everything light colours apart from the eyes and cross (this is the opposite of what they did in the original album cover; everything dark apart from eyes and cross), I edited the eyes first and realised that the idea didn’t really work out so I didn’t bother editing the rest of it.

This is the original album cover for ‘Fallacy’. It has a lot of layers placed on top of each other; which fills in the empty space which the main photo would otherwise have. There are plenty gray/dull coloured layers and red elements to highlight the artist’s head, title of the album, as well as leaves in the bottom left corner.

This is the original photo, it doesn’t have the same effect as the finished product as there is too much empty space in the background, the person is standing in the middle, in addition to there only being one layer present, which is the photo itself.

This is my recreation of the ‘Nice For What’ cover by Drake, I posterized it to create blocks of light/dark. I then applied a pink colour block to all the white areas of the photo to match the original again. However, I applied a much darker shade of pink to make the cover pop more as a whole, it also makes the writing in front of it easier to read.  I then cropped the photo to show a close up of two faces like the original cover. The writing is in two different fonts, with a lot of spacing added between the letters so that they fill out more of the box and appear more bold. The final step was adding the parental advisory stamp in the bottom right corner to match the original.

This is the original ‘Nice For What’ album cover, it’s edited so that you can’t really tell what’s going on but it’s possible to make out the main shapes and the title in the middle.

This is the original photo, I chose to take it in front an urban background in hope to achieve some distortion in the background after I applied the filters.

This is the image after I had edited it, but before cropping and adding and lettering. As you can see there is distortion in the background due to its texture, however its only present around the outer edges, so it wasn’t visible in the final cover after I had cropped it.