image. book covers. final crit.

For this project we were to create a set of four books that fit in with out viscom icon set. My icon set is about a swim meet. So, for my four books I picked four biographies on famous swimmers. Those four swimmers are Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe, Mark Spitz, & Dawn Fraiser. All four of them have has outstanding runs within the world-wide swimming community and the out into the olympic community.

When i came to the title of the books I wanted to have some sort of naming system to them so they all ended up being cohesive at least through the title. I ended up creating a three-banner system at the top. The biggest banner for the title of the book, the middle banner for the amount of medals that athlete had won, and the third and smallest banner for the flag of the country. For the back writing I also used a banner to put the about information into.

The images of the people on the front cover aren't supposed to be that specific athlete but are suppose to symbolize them and also show their signature swimming style. The blue objects on top of the background are supposed to symbolize a major or underlying theme to either them as a person or to the biography itself.

Things that I feel could have been dealt with better/differently. The overall colors, all four books are the same color, should I have varied them up? Should I have varied up the placement of the banners on the covers as well? front & back? Could I have picked out better symbolic objects?

image. sds. train of thought. sequence.

This is a train of thought blog. train of thought writing is less structured and a more fluid way of writing. Writing down everything that comes to mind and then going back through it all to sift out the best of what was written.

To make my piece as cohesive and interesting as possible I want to figure out the order of how my seven deadly sins will be placed in the final artifact. From the way i started this project out I studied myself throughout almost a week to figure out what parts of my life best accentuate the seven deadly sins. While taking the first round of photos I tried to figure out a way to make them all cohesive. Through that first set I figured out the best, and easiest ways to make them cohesive as a whole through lighting, outfit, and setting. But figuring out how conceptually I want to show these I want there to be a purposeful order them all. Starting out with sloth would make the most sense. Starting out with sloth and me sleeping in a messy room with clothing everywhere and food strewn throughout. from there I could move into greed and me standing in my closet with all my clothes hanging up showing off my absurd amount of clothing wanting only the best of the best. from there it could go to pride with me standing my clean, pristine room wearing my finest. from there it could move into wrath with me yelling at my friend. then go into gluttony with me sitting at the table with a feast of food but not necessarily the best food in the world. Then from there it would go into envy with my room mate and her boyfriend being all cuddly together while I'm segregated from them. then the last frame will be of lust with me back in my bed. each of these frames will go throughout the day. The first frame will be at noon with light streaming in through my windows in my room. then with each frame the outside light will fade and the inside lights will come on so by the time we get to envy it will be fully dark outside with all the lights on inside. Once we get to lust, the last frame, it'll be night time with just the light by my bed on with my lower half under the covers hand reaching down.

Below I have taken what I wrote above and typed out into a structured, more formal form.

The Order.

1. Sloth. High noon with light streaming in on messy room and me asleep on my bed.
2. Greed. Me standing in my closet with all my clothes hanging up wearing my favorite outfit. Sunlight a little lower in the sky.
3. Pride. Me standing in my clean, pristine room, wearing my finest outfit. Jacket, tie, and all.
4. Wrath. Yelling at my friend in my living room with the door to my bedroom open in the background. By this time the lights inside have come on and the light outside is at twilight.
5. Greed. I will be sitting at the table eating a smörgåsbord. This will be almost fully night time. The window behind me will be open and it will be the very end of twilight.
6. Envy. It will be fully lit from the inside and my room mate and her boyfriend will be sitting on the couch kissing/close and I'll be in the background with my bedroom door open again.
7. Lust. Me back in my room with only my bed light on with me back in bed. Very dark light.

image. seven deadly sins. test shots.

So I have my first round of images. I have selected what I feel to be the most successful of each of the sets. The order of the photos are from top to bottom: sloth, wrath, pride, envy, & lust.

Consistency. Focusing on the different criteria I blogged about in the previous post to achieve consistency I'd say it was achieved rather successfully. Envy was taken more for test shots for composition and how I can most successfully convey envy. The final shot will be taken during the day to get the same amount of lighting and feel to it as the other photos.

Composition. For composition, some photos are vertical and some are horizontal so I'll need to figure out which orientation works better overall. I feel that sloth reads pretty successfully, however I don't want me sleeping to be mistaken for dead, some of my poses of me sleeping looked a little dead body esque. Wrath is getting there, I tried a few different compositions and placements of the camera in relation to the apartment and wanting to get my bedroom in the background. I feel that the action shot of me lunging at him is more successful than the more posed feeling photos. I don't fully know how much pride actually feels like pride, however. I think the concept is getting there but maybe the camera angle should be lower or I should look more arrogant. Envy feels not too bad actually. I like the crossed arms and the sort of closed off feeling I'm trying to convey. The couple I used just happened to be wearing almost the exact same outfits though I want to try a couple shots of where they're also kissing so see if that would help at all or if it would just end up looking to overdone. Ohhh lust. It's getting there I suppose. I tried some shots of me fully nude with nothing actually showing, just alluding the action with hand placement and body gestures but it felt too exposed and no consistent enough with the other four. Even with sloth I'm look naked from the way I was placed but I'm still covered up, so I felt the need to cover myself up.

Questions. Things to think about going out from here. Do I need to have my bedroom in every shot whether the photo take place in the bedroom or able to see it in the background? If not, should there be some sort of flow to the images that shows spatial relation from one photo to the next? Should the photos be taken during the same part of the day to achieve consistency with lighting or could a wider range of lighting make it more interesting? Do the pictures during the day work better or the photo at night?Oh, and use the same camera for every photo!

image. seven deadly sins. consistency.

This is first and foremost a post for me to figure out the technical aspects of the seven deadly sins project. It may be a little rambly and not the most well put together post of my life.

My direction for this project is personal, I'm studying myself. Yeah I can see how doing this project like I am could be seen as very egotistical but in all honesty it's not. I am putting myself out there and searching deep within my psyche to figure out what I do personally that best exemplifies the seven deadly sins. I really like the idea, it's definitely different from what everyone else is doing, but at the same time it's going to be rather hard conveying some of these. The thing that I have currently run into is how am I going to photograph each of these seven ideas and have them be consistent throughout the entire piece.

To answer this dilemma I think the best way to make them coherent is to shoot all of the photos in my apartment during the brightest part of the day. My apartment is very open, we have a lot of windows to the outside to give me the most light to work with. The walls are all a nice white and it is small enough that if I photograph them just right I will be able to get the same background elements throughout every photograph. Some of the sins involve solely myself, where as some of the sins involve at least one other person, but as long as the background elements and I stay the same, that should be fine, if anything it will just give the piece a wider variety of scenes.

So the elements that I need to focus on to keep consistency:

• Background: keep elements the same and stay within the same area of my apartment
• Lighting: keep, for the most part, the lighting, and from there the color, consistent, or consistently varying
• Wardrobe: keep mine stylistically the same. suspenders & jeans mainly.

Image. Constructed Image.

This was the first round. I ended up laying his outfit on the floor and I quickly realized that taking the photos were going to be really hard. The background was an uneven white so I had to end up blowing out white and black to make the background even and in doing so I lost all detail in the clothing. Also, the shoes were hugely distracting. In retaking these photos I addressed these concerns and created this shot.

I ended up pinning up his outfit on the wall(the hat was interesting to get to stay).

The image is slightly creepy, yes. But in doing this I was trying to haze the line between Charlie Chaplin(The Tramp) and Hitler. All of Charlie Chaplin's movies were first and foremost there to make people laugh in a time of great distress. However, most of his work was also politically driven. An alarming amount of people didn't know that about his work so my project I focused my work on trying to bring across that aspect of his work. One of the most political movies he made was called "The Great Dictator" where he essentially played Hitler. He created his own "swastika" for the movie, which is what exists on his arm. The mustache is supposed to be hazy as to whether it is supposed to symbolize The Tramp or Hitler. However, when you read the quote(made to look like it is coming out of his mouth) it is supposed to contradict what his armband is trying to symbolize.

I went about this radically different from everyone else. When I thought about Charlie Chaplin and what he is most famous for, the first thing that I could ever think about was his outfit when he was The Tramp. So the most successful route for me to go, I felt, was recreating his outfit. I worry this is too literal. I ended up stick his quote where his mouth would be, put his mustache in, and his name where his eyes would be. I made it black and white to emphasize the armband, but i wish I had boosted the red more, it's not overly noticeable on the picture. I also left it grayer than what I was planning to also go with the feel of his movies. They are much much older and the quality of the footage is rather gray so I felt keeping the color muted and gray would actually work better for me.

IMAGE. ReadingOne. Semiotics.

While reading the pdf, I had kind of a break through while reading this quick little article. I understand what icon is, that is a very straight forward idea. An icon is something that looks like what it is trying to represent, but it isn't that object. It is just pencil on paper, or just light on a wall. Index is something correlates directly back to the object. A footprint on the ground correlates to a shoe/foot. Smoke correlates directly back to a fire. A symbol, however, is something that functions through agreed rules(taken directly from the reading). That one little phrase made symbol click in my head. However, now figuring out which ones are through agreed rules is the struggle.