Bokeh Inspires

(image from talkphotography)

Bokeh- "In photography and film, refers to the creative use of lens blur as a composition technique. The aim of bokeh is to deliberately blur the background or foreground (or both) in order to draw the viewer's attention to a particular area of the photo or film"

Throughout my video i intend to manipulate this technique for emphasis on the abstract and surreal nature of the lighting which makes up a key part of my production.

Use of technology, in depth photoshop

Photoshop is a powerful tool and is used prominently within my production, mainly within my ancillary tasks but it is also integrated to my music video. what follows are some making of shots of other work to help display how i create these images, I used a variety of brushes and varying opacity settings, to finalise the image i used the curves tool and adjustment layers.

A light touch.

Much of the imagery within my production is based around lighting effects and what lighting can be used to represent, for example the line "My fingers in creases of distant dark places" is linked with light piercing through multiple small holes and creases with an overall dark screen (the light in this case representing the singer pushing through in to these dark places). Here is some inspiration from other light art.

This light painting entitled "so far away" was partial inspiration for the night time traffic shots.

The unique very bright effect and colour scheme created in the light painting "tunnel" inspired the ending dream scenes of the video."I am on fire" by Benegizer provided inspiration for the album artwork with its smoky ethereal flowing lines (although how i created my imagery and how Benegizer created his is very different)

Finally i decided to create a quick response piece of artwork with some simple photoshop tools.

The face in the video

Part way through the song there is a line that says " Their words mostly noises, ghosts with just voices" at this stage i decided to incorperate some link to people and drew up this rather eerie figure of a boy and then set that layer to hardlight and placed it over the video layer. The boy was a rather simple digital sketch (just block colours on a photoshop canvas smudged together) and then i over emphasised the eyes and made the facial shape far gaunter.

Feed back from rough cut

There was some disagreement over the range of camera skills, the audience regarded them as very good but in terms of technicality there is lack in range however this is a stylistic choice, and I'm not sure if im prepeared to sacrifice the vision I have of the video to introduce extra shots purely to gain marks which would then conflict with the rest of the video. The filming whilst driving recieved good feedback and the intergration of the boys face (which i'd drawn on photoshop) recieved very positive feedback due to its link to the lyrics and the surprise nature of it. Overall the lyrical links recieved positive feedback although more general "journey" shots could be used and the flames could be replaced with a better fire shot. Other improvements include the fact one shot of night traffic went on for to long however feedback said that the in and out of focus on this shot was good.

Full Digipak

For the full digipak i decided to include something for everyone, a 7 inch vinyl for older fans, a free digital download of the track for the digital native generation and for the major fans the inside front cover has the bands signatures (and the lyrics). Obviously this is a special edition Digipak not the standard CD set. All this was created in photoshop below is a print screen of the layers and canvas.

Ancillary feedback

I presented to the class the ancillary work that had been done so far. The first key section of feedback i really wanted was whether to use the abstract lighting piece or typographic one, the class majority voted the abstract light design to be far better for many reasons, they said it's use of black space made it seem "classy" and emphasised the colour. In terms of font on it the size, typeface and use of square brakets was all good also the positioning of the font on top of the smoke lines recieved positive feedback as it drew the eye well. The quotation at the bottom "anchored" the piece and made it more solid. Interestingly it was widely agreed that although it was abstract the lighting and colour fit well with the connotation of what is to be expected from a snow patrol album cover. The overall impact was said to raise questions, it encouraged people to find out more about this and was a striking design, one student said "the colour, layout, style, just perfect". The impovements to be made are relitavly simple, add the band name on the magazine advert to fit with conventions more, and for the Digipak use a similar but slightly altered design so the two aren't identacle.