COLLAGE CREATION

Continuing on from my 'adjectives inspire photography' blog post. After we were sent from the lecture to take photographs we joined back later that day for our seminar. In this session we were put in groups to create a collage out of the photos we had taken that day. We first came together and chose out favouraite images that we had each taken, we laid these out and looked for a common theme between them, we found that a lot of them involved bright colours and lights so we decided to go with this as our theme and picked out the ones from this collection that fitted the theme.

We laid them all out and tried to find where each one fitted best and decided which should be cut down to fit them together better so that it wasn't a lot of straight edges and block photos. As our photos were all quite bright and fun we wanted to make the collage more fun and if the photos were all lined up perfectly uniformed it would look a lot more formal than what we were aiming for. We cut out the backgrounds of some photos where they weren't needed or didn't fit the theme, for example the one of the lava lamp had a background of a shop when the lamp was the object we were focusing on so we took the plain background out, the same as the orange bench. When planning our inital layout for the collage we found these smaller cut up images were a great way to layer and to hide the solid edges.

We chose to lay it all out on the floor and play around with the positioning to find the best combination, without commiting to sticking them on the wall. After we were happy with the layout we took a photo of the positions and tried to replicate it on the wall. We chose to use a combination of blue tack and masking tape, the blue tack was hidden for the central photos and we used the tape on some the corners of the photos on the outside to again add to how relaxed we wanted the collage to look, without the formal lines and points.

After we had put up the first images we took some close up shots of the collage, doing this gives you a completely different image, you can have just small corners or details of pictures in the collage and they all tell different stories and become their own pieces.

We decided after we created this collage that we wanted to add some more details and variety to the work, we went back through our inital images and chose out some that wern't so directly related to our theme and experimented to see how we could make them work within the piece. We tried cutting them out into smaller images as we didn't have many through the collage and it was also a way of focusing on piece of the image. My favourite thing we did here was cut out the windows on a shop front and place it over the bath bomb photo, the shop was actually one of the photos I had taken and I took it because I thought it was very minimal with the plain white walls, but by adding it on shop of the bath bomb it looked as though there was a lot more excitement within. We also covered the HSBC logo with tape as it didn't fit our theme but it also shows rebellion and destruction which I feel is present throughout our collage. After adding these images I again took some close up photos to try and find all of the variety within the larger piece.

After looking at the over all collage we felt that the biggest thing that stood out to us were the bright lights and that this was a key feature to our collage so we decided to look through all of our original photos to find anything that would work and bring more bright lights into our collage. As one of my words was bright I had a few which I inputted. We added one of a spiral lamp and one from a store display which had light strips, we chose to cut into these images and only leave the bright lights, this way all of the focus was on the lights and it also made them quite abstract and thin strips which we were able to add on top of the collage. We also added a bunch of roses in the blue mans hands which completely changed the story, now it looks like he's carrying them whereas before he looked like he was dancing. After the final pieces were added I took some more close up photos and found where the best pieces connected and told different stories throughout.

After completing the board we were set the task of telling the story in the collage and what store or corporation would use this. We decided that our story would be 'Going to pick up his date to take them to a Christmas disco' and it would be used by Selfridges for a Christmas campaign. We chose this because the blue man holding the flowers looks like he's going to meet a date and give her the flowers, the disco ball, bright lights and variety of colours gives the disco feeling and theres a lot of Christmas decorations throughout so it feels like a Christmas celebration. And we chose Selfridges because they are such a diverse and forward thinking store with to mass variety of ranges they carry, they are also fun which crazy displays within their stores which fits with all of the decorations in this collage.