Magazine Mind Map & Stop Motion Animation

I created another mind map for my 'Altered States' research but this time I decided to use A1 paper. I made it as a collage-style display using different bits from magazines. This work was considerably different to any other work I've produced; as there is a real focus on fashion, appearance and branding. It has rather arbitrary in relation to the idea of 'altered states'; although there is the idea of the altered state of a person or object in photography, which is the main reason for the mood board. The original brief was to create something by pinning pictures on a cork board and linking things together, however I thought it would be more effective visually and practically to stick ideas and pictures down on paper as a collage; and the sources for these images were all older magazines available to us.

I really enjoyed this task, although I stuck down half the pictures without realising I had to take a picture to document each step of the process. This work really showed me the effectiveness of using collage as a way to visually represent things - it was rather new to me as I always illustrated things using pen and paper or created imagery digitally using Adobe Creative Cloud. It allowed me to explore collage and one of my interests in fashion promotion. I am pleased with the way I stuck with the theme of fashion as there is a real sense of commercialism.

In terms of career paths/interests; I am currently building up a portfolio of photos to persue a modelling career - something I've always dreamed of doing since a young age. This is why this fashion and commercial side is relevant to me. The irony however is that I am not actually interested in looking at fashion magazines etc. I just like wearing different outfits, especially smart, sophisticated looking formal wear - so in one sense this body of work opened my mind up to this side of the fashion industry. As a model, I am building up a portfolio of work; therefore this is why I like to help others out with taking pictures and portraits for their own work too; as it sort of offers a kind of experience for me. Normally I am the one being photographed, not the photographer. Examples of this work are on my UCA instagram account (@yadavh.uca) and that is something I quite enjoy, even as just a hobby for now.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/c3a0a6_03b7c3134ba648fba3afffacca22635b/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Above is my animation to document the process of this fashion mood board which I made. It is roughly about 40 steps, not including the first few images being stuck on as I didn't remember to take photos at those stages. I initially tried to create every stage of the animation using the different Patch and Healing tools to cover some of the pictures up, but this turned out to be very very time-consuming. I watched a video to help out with this process; (https://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/remove-anything-from-a-photo/) although it was very helpful and informative; specifically teaching me about how to use the source point tool which I didn't know about; I decided it wasn't as necessary and I may as well animate the rest to look great as a step by step stop frame animation showing the process of making the collage.

I created this stop-frame animation the exact same way I made the blackboard mind map animation - using the timeline and creating frames by making different layers visible, which were imported by loading files into stack. The image below shows the Photoshop process used.

As you can see there was a 0.2 second delay between each frame so that things weren't popping up too fast or too slow. Initally for a lot of the images I needed to use the Perspective Crop tool, as the photos of the page were taken at different angles and in different lighting. The problem with this tool is that it created some areas that were empty (with the white and grey tiles) and the paper didn't cover the whole background and wasn't perfectly rectangle. In order to resolve this I used the Spot Healing Tool with the source point on a blank part of the page and filled in the gaps. Some areas were simple too big or square, in which case I created shapes (hence why with a similar colour to the page to cover the empty areas. It wasn't the neatest way to do it, however the focus was on the images popping up in the animation.

In retrospect I quite liked the rough and messy edges, as it gave the sort of effect that this was a very analogue sort of piece of work and really shows the process of a hand made collage with bits stuck onto the page.