Black & White + One Proposal

1. How can I express the theme Black and White + One through photo-based artwork?

I came up with a few ideas for what the + One could be representative of; my favourites being movement, focus and effect. Movement: capturing a motion of some kind in a still or a series of stills. Focus: having one particularly detailed/focused image/object in the photo. Effect: Isolating one section of the image and applying a mask layer with an effect. I decided to basically merge focus and movement but I decided to exclude the effect idea, I figured it would be odd when paired with a black and white image.

The idea of motion made me think of city streets, trains and generally traffic. So I thought to convey the theme Black and White + One (Movement) I would do a series of images in metropolitan areas showcasing the motions of the space. There is so much meaning in motion as well as in the concept of black and white as being representational of something greater.

2. How can I explore using the medium of photography in a way that stretches my current knowledge and understanding AND suits my interpretation of the theme?

Photography is not really my strong suit and I often have trouble getting my photos to consistently have high detail and so I decided to look for a photography technique that would allow me to use blurs or distortion artfully. My first photo inspiration was a motion-blur image of a pair of dice which led me to a photography technique that seems to most commonly be called Long Exposure Photography.  

The motion blur suits my theme of movement having greater meaning. For example one of the ideas I’m exploring is foreign/out-of-place objects in settings with high movement backgrounds to highlight life moving on around them/without them.

GIF Assignment

For my GIF assignment I had a lot of trouble getting started. Picking a clip was made hard by the multitude of choices and styles. I chose a few clips and upon experimenting with them found that the backgrounds were an issue; either they panned far too much or didn't move enough that isolating movement in the clip would be redundant. 

In the end I chose my clip from the NBC Hannibal television show (original clip can be found in YouTube video titled "Hannibal Sick Realization") because I've found the show is full of subtle actions that convey a lot of meaning.

The scene takes place in the show's FBI morgue/lab while the lab techs examine a serial killer's latest victim and Will Graham (pictured), the FBI profiler after this killer, is in deep thought in an attempt to gain insight into the killer's actions. In the moment I chose Will is realizing the killer's cannibalistic nature right before the techs uncover evidence to back his theory. Without Will the techs may never have made the connection to cannibalism. Will is an empath, and can understand and empathize with just about anyone, he is used by the FBI because he is incredibly talented at riddling out the behaviour of killers. Before this killer emerged Will taught at the FBI academy because he was deemed to emotionally fragile for field work, I think this shot does a good job of emphasizing the mental toll chasing killers has on Will.

To show how Will was lost in thought I isolated his image and masked it so only the blurred people behind him move. I decided to do this because of the expression "frozen in thought". Then I colourized the layers, making Will greyer to make him look a little more ill and making the background bluer to show the depressing undertones of Will's thoughts.

For the quote I chose to go with my GIF is a line from this scene which pretty much sums up the entire episode and nearly the entire first season, "He's eating them." Will is the one who says it and at this point it's the only thing he can really think of to say. It's one of the first season's big reveals as before this cannibalism was heavily implied but not outrightly stated.

In my HTML assignment I made the background a pop-arty image of a stag because Will sees visions of a stag that represents the killer as he slowly loses his mind. I also attached an audio file of an eerie version of the song Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) because I thought the lyrics really fit, especially the line "some of them want to use you" because throughout the show Will is constantly manipulated by Hannibal Lecter and the FBI.