Assignment 3/Tutorial 6

Assignment 3, Urban Fantasy, was particularly tricky because it tested our skills for manipulating images and assembling them together in a creative manner. The collage, to my interpretation, must be set within an urban area, and must contain a message, concept, or issue, which cannot be interpreted at face-value. In other words, the collage won't tell viewers its message at the first glance. The requirement of the putting images that altered one's imagination and perception proved challenging to me because, though, abstraction is something I liked, creating something surreal was another thing altogether. How to transfer my imagination into reality? Will I be able to manipulate images to how I see it in my head, given the limited Photoshop skills I have?

I started out by sourcing for images of buildings and skyscrapers online, specifically Google Images. Urban Fantasy means fantasy within an urban area, and hence, buildings must be part of my collage because they are such symbols of progress and urbanisation. As I browsed through the images, one by one, I had an idea for the collage. Some of the buildings really looked like weapons of destruction, so why not imply that with urbanisation, society, nature and the world are steadily - and stealthily - coming to an end? Pollution in land, water and air serve as a constant tug-of-war with the progress that comes with urbanization.

I developed this idea, having in mind to create a point of view in the collage that showed how different types of buildings, or "weapons", were being launched and zooming into a city. A spiraling and burst effect would also be achieved within the collage, signifying how humans experience a schizophrenic feeling of wanting to achieve more with urbanization, and yet the psychological fear of spiraling out of control and the desire to want to break free from it all are also present. And yet the over-reliance on technology and hunger for progress are, again, pulling humans in a downward spiral of destruction. Such a split feeling is what I want to show with the collage.

So I started editing, cropping and basically applying whatever I learnt in the Photoshop tutorials in this module to manipulate buildings like these:

Then I searched for images of swirls and explosions online and found these:

Apply Overlay and Colour Dodge in Photoshop to these two images, and the resulting image would look like this:

Then I looked for some images on cityscapes and added them to my collage. To me, collages have repetitive elements, so instead of using different buildings to create the scene of a city, I just used a single image of a cityscape, copying and reflecting the original image, making it a surreal city. Some more adjustments, and the resulting collage for my third assignment is this:

Class critique: Bringing this draft to class, there were negative and positive feedback received. Every student's work was flashed on screen before the class for critique. The class commended on my use of strong colours and complimenting colour choices to evoke feelings within the viewers. However, they felt that the perspective of the way the collage was presented could be improved. In other words, instead of looking like the buildings at the edges are attacking the city below, they look like they are being launched by the city. And so, Jing suggested approaching the perspective from below or above, by having the city be in the middle of the collage and buildings all around the edges appearing to be "zooming in" towards the city.