BSA 131 (Digital Filmmaking I) Week 3 : Production Design

This week we looked at Production Design and did an exercise in which we take photographs of ourselves in colourful clothes, with colourful props against colourful backgrounds. All of which have to compliment each other.

We did two photoshoots for this practice, after the first one we analysed each groups attempts. We focused on what worked well and what didn't, at the end of this session we went out again and took some more photos with the clothes and backgrounds that fit. 

1st Shoot

This is an example from the first shoot, in this one the background didn't really work that well with the clothes. There are two reasons for this:

1) The brick red background isn't bright enough for the blue shirt, while the talent (me) stands out, there isn't really a sense of harmony. The background feel bland and faded in comparison. Some other students found better backgrounds within the building, which we used in the second shoot.

2) The bottle and the background are both red which means that the bottle doesn't stand out as much as it needs to. Some of the other students had all three primary colours in their photos and it looked really good, if the bottle was yellow it would have already been an improvement. 

Something else we noticed with this picture is that it's hard to look at the blue shirt I'm in, the reason being the stripes which makes it hard for the eye to focus. Lesson: don't get a striped shirt for the music video.

After class I looked up some music videos and I noticed that some do have striped shirts in them:

This music video (L D R U - Next To You (feat. Savoi) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYDilLUDna0) is a good example of lines being used without hurting the viewer's eyes. I think the reason for this is because of the colours, while there are white lines they don't stand out because the rest of the shirt is also coloured lines. The white pants also helps to negate the effect of white lines. As you can see in the next example I think white lines work better with yellow than red, so the yellow collar she has might also be a factor.

The clothing has a good theme in this music video, so her colourful shirt doesn't stand out. It's interesting that the banana stands out exactly because his clothes are the only non-colourful of the four.

In this example Dillon is posing on a red background, but brighter than the brick red from before, closer to maroon, with a light blue, tie dye shirt and yellow prop. The best thing about this one is that all the primary colours are represented, unfortunately the background is too dark while the prop and shirt appear faded.

Once again the white lines in the t-shirt makes it hard to look at, the black and gold hat also doesn't really seem to fit with the rest of the image. With black clothing it's good for it to be reflective, this way it still pops out even though it usually swallows light. We see this in a lot of music videos:

2nd Shoot

This time we were given more specific places to go and the shoot went much faster, the results were also much more effective. This reminds me that when prepping for my music video I have to try out the locations, clothes and techniques beforehand in order to be able to pull it off effectively on the day.

This second version of me is much better than the first:

The primary colours are all present and all of them are equally bright. This creates a sense of cohesion and makes the image much more pleasing to the eye. Even the lines on the shirt - which we were unable to fix - look better than before. 

We replaced the yellow prop with my red bottle here in order to once again have all three primary colours in the picture. The white lines worked out surprisingly well as they lead the audiences attention to the bottle and the presence of the white shirt at the bottom of the frame makes them not feel out of place. The black cap is still somewhat of a problem but the gold emblem fits well with the background. A very interesting and picturesque image, and a good example of using pattern in tandem with colour.