25 Nov 09: Group Task - From capture to print

(Graphics by Helen)

Our group task was to use the skills we have learnt in lectures and workshops to produce a photograph influenced by one film from a selection of 11 titles. We started by looking up some of the films on the website IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/). Initially we looked at “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” but felt that in the time available we would not be able to recreate the glamour of the movie. Then we looked at “Dead Man’s Shoes” and “Into the Wild” before deciding upon “Rear Window”, in which a wheelchair bound photographer spies on his neighbours from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.

We selected this because we liked the idea of taking an image of the photographer observing his neighbours. In her book “On Photography” Susan Sontag discusses the idea of the photographer as voyeur and Geoff Dyer, in “The Ongoing Moment”, discusses the idea of the photographer as observer represented by a figure in his/her photographs. I find both of these ideas really interesting and they seemed to tie in with theme of the movie.
We decided to recreate a still image from the movie trailer which was also used on one of the posters for the film:

We also planned to add some ‘bloody footprints’ to the image to pick up on the line from the film “what do you need, bloody footsteps leading up to the door?”
We went outside to find a suitable location. We wanted a location where the light would be coming only from a door behind our character, played by Mark. Initially we went to St Joseph’s club, but despite being given permission to go in and take some shots we left empty handed as the staff wanted to lock up and leave before we had even had time to set up properly. We then headed for the Victoria Centre. On the way we stopped to make some wet footprints on the paving flags and photographed them so that we could use layers in Photoshop to merge the two images together.

In the Victoria Centre we found the perfect location, a locker room where we could turn the lights off, Mark could sit with his back to the door and the scene could be lit by light from the corridor behind.

Having obtained the shots we wanted we headed back to the computer room to manipulate the images in Lightroom and Photoshop. However, having overlaid the footprints onto the main image we decided to leave them out as it made the cropped image too busy. We tried several different crops before choosing a final version which mirrored the poster image reasonably well and gave the effect we wanted. Having cropped the image down it became apparent that the image was not as sharply focussed as we would have liked. This was due to a small amount of camera shake as we did not use a remote shutter release. After trying several adjustments to make the image darker and moodier, we settled on adding a red graduated filter to the top left corner. The overall effect is to draw focus to mark’s eyes whilst the background colour provides a sinister atmosphere of paranoia and fear.  Despite the image not being as sharp as it could have been, when we saw the final printed version we were pleased with the final result which did capture the suspense of the movie: