I began with wanting to do some sort of installation where I project video onto objects. I’ve done it before, and I really enjoyed the process because I was able to work physically and digitally with materials. I found this changed after we were shown past student’s examples.

The simple stop animation of an aquatic scene with a boat and oversized fish really appealed to me. I have never done stop animation before and it’s something that is quite playful and naïve, and holds this kind of special childlike magic. So I eventually want to create a stop animation video, but as I’ve never done it before, I decided to slowly working my way towards the process. Therefore, I have begun the first part of the project, “Composition” with still photographs; I figure it seemed a natural place to start.

I want to use the same materials through the whole project, and with stop animation as the end game in mind, I wanted to use materials that were easily manipulated and not fixed. Materials I could easily knock down and rebuild that require no particular technical skill or processes. So I went out and purchased play dough, piping things, glitters, and other bright objects. I gathered up all these materials, along with some of my own and began constructing scenes to photograph.

The link provided to us on the blog to Erik Kim’s Street Photography Blog, (http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2013/10/10/street-photography-composition-lesson-3-diagonals/) has been a huge resource for me. I’ve never been actively in pursuit of a strong composition; I’ve usually just worked by feeling (the feeling that something is missing, or that something doesn’t belong). So this link has basically guided me through my photographs and my process of eliminating/narrowing down images.

The images below are the first shoot I did with my materials. There are three images, one with triangles, the other leading lines and the last without any marks on it. I was doing this basically to see how strong the images were compositionally using triangles and diagonal lines.

One issue that arose when looking back on the photographs was that what looked beautiful in three-dimensional space as a sculptural piece, didn’t exactly translate as interesting or strong in a photograph. Furthermore, I found the more pastel colours used in images 5 – 9, wasn’t as exciting as the neon’s used in images 1 – 4.

Based on this, I did decide to stick with the neon colours for my next set of photographs and therefore decided to no longer use the latex support. I do however believe the latex support did make a good foundation and added interest, so I think at some point I will attempt to make another latex support that chromatically compliments the use of neon’s.