Showing posts with label Moodboard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moodboard. Show all posts

Saturday, 7 February 2009

Me, myself and....avatar

This Friday`s Identities seminar was all about moodboards and talking about how they can be used to gather the necessary ideas for creating a representative avatar for ourselves. So, this is what I came up with, at least for now. I keep getting new ideas and I`m not yet sure whether I`m going to drop some of them and just choose a specific path to go along or whether I`m going to try and find a thread that joins up all of these apparently different concepts and make it all up into some sort of story...a coherent whole anyhow.

As I was discussing my moodboard it struck me that using the head in the hand combo might work pretty well for the avatar, as it can be used for some really expressive and theatrical poses and to convey some rather....here come the keywords of the project...ambiguous and ambivalent ideas. In this case I was thinking of control as a keyword. What I mean by that is that when it comes to control, the head (mind) uses the hands (oh, it sounds Metropolis...ish) as a mere tool to execute commands. Yet, here, the roles are inverted, the head being vulnerable in the hands of the....hand. The idea is connected to the picture in the foreground. If you are what you become and what you experience, and if we think of experience as a journey...hence, the path...and still the character is in a sleep-like position...the end result is...you are only partially in charge of your journey (still, it`s worth making the best of it).

What Roma suggested was that it would be a pity to loose the aetheral aspect of the character (I used a lot of clarobscuro-like image manipulation, partly because of the recent exposure to German Expressionist movies, partly because as I`ve mentioned in my earlier posts, the effect that this technique can generate simply intrigue me). So, apparently, a good idea would be to use a sort of projection surface...that is, the face would not be completly modelled in 3D Studio Max; instead, I should create a mask-like object unto which I can project the image of the avatar (or images...hmmmm).

Talk about projection...I remember seeing something similar on Susan Sensemann`s site. She projects different images using her face as a canvas. Now, if I could only remember the name of the other artist Roma has told me to look up,it would be great.

Thursday, 5 February 2009

Lights and shadows

I was playing around in Photoshop for the last 2-3 days and I came up with a set of pictures that have a similar, underlining idea and feel about them: faces coming out of the depths of darkness in a pool of light (or a poddle, if you will). I`m seriously thinking of including these into my moodboard and start constructing the whole look of the Identity package around this interplay of lights and shadow. I`m not only thinking of contrast and of opposites when I say light and shadow...what I observed as I was editing the pictures is how altered the general expression of the character or the whole mood that came across from the initial picture was as I moved through the process. From creating the image of the temptress, to that of the girl next door...they are all a push of a button away (unless you have a tempting girl next door...and then they are not far apart in the first place). So, ambivalence, ambiguity...they were words that I chose during last week`s seminar to define myself...and graphically, this style could serve that purpose.