props

For my project I’m collaging with imagery primarily from the early periods of film and the 1950s. I’m fascinated by how staged and flat these photos appear, especially when juxtaposed against the current high definition photos of the 2020’s. The technology of our current age is rapid and incredibly high quality, so why are we still so obsessed with the analog? Digicams, polaroids, film cameras are all still popular and used today. My theory is the quality difference. IPhone cameras are great quality yes, but there’s an overabundance of footage everywhere clearly taken with them. The visual effects of the iphone proliferate everywhere, oversaturating everything. Analog is in a way escapism. What analog, older technology provides is a visual difference, something to differentiate oneself and escape from oversaturation. This is why I’m drawn to these old Hollywood photographs, they are staged to the utmost degree. The lighting and contrast make these figures appear more like still life props than people, the backgrounds are sparse and liminal. I’m interested in exaggerating this prop-ness, in addition to reimagining these figures, bringing them into new spaces and animating them. For this project, I am to make a few videos where I animate the figures using 3D rendering and After Effects. I am toying with the idea of restaging the figures, once I edit them, in similarly liminal backgrounds, yet with the added effect of being in a three-dimensional space.