Background Images

Above are the still image background scenes to be displayed behind the deer head. These images are almost finished. I especially enjoyed creating the second image of inside a hunters house, by using my body parts to create animal-like trophies on the wall. Below is a video of the animated background which shows a family of deer. I am hoping that these images will successfully get the point of the project across.

I need to try different time scales for the video as the transition takes too long.

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Finalising The Project

I’m now so close to finishing the project so this is an update of where the project is before it becomes finalised and ready to submit.

 

The background images are complete, apart from a little tidying up, the images are soon to be finalised and exported to JPG format ready to be added to MadMapper in separate presets. The deer head had a lot of hiccups while I tried multiple techniques to try to get a deer head image to fit onto the physical head. I found that the way to do it involved a long process of using triangles to add elements of the deer head to be projected. I firstly had to take photographs of the dear head from different angles and then bring the photos into Illustrator. Following this I had to draw lines around each section of the head, this was then taken into Photoshop to be used as a template to create a texture to add to the deer head. I created a brown and a white fur texture and added these to outlined deer profiles. These images were then used in MadMapper to select triangular sections of the images to project onto the head.

Once the head had the textures and was lined up correctly I knew that this part of the project was complete and all thats left is to export the image as a JPG. I then added the video of my eyes onto the deer to see if it works or if I need to create some eyes to add to the deer. However the eyes blended well with the deer head, as seen in the videos below.

Next step is to finalise the images and export them into MadMapper before gathering all the relevant files needed for submission.

 

 

Style Experimentation

Today I have been experimenting with the style that the images should be. I took a series of images from areas that deer populate, in different areas of England and Wales. One of the problems mentioned at the peer review group session was that a clash of styles may not look good, so I need to decide on a realistic or vectorised style and stick to this style throughout the project.

When testing using the projector I noticed that when using real images there was a number of problems:

• The image is stretched when projected, so a vector image would be best for this.
• Original photographs looked very busy and actually clashed with other original images such as the deer head, due to different lighting at the time of the photos taken and differing image quality.

After using Illustrator to live trace my photographs to convert them to vectors I am happy with the results. I think using a vectorised image will keep everything in unity and create clean images which will project well. I now need to decide whether I want the images to be very vectorised or slightly and still keep an aspect of realness. I will return to this once I have created my assets for my scenes, such as additional deers.

This is the high fidelity image trace

This is the original photograph

This is the low fidelity image trace

This is the original image

This is the high fidelity image trace

This is the low fidelity image trace

This is the original image

This is the high fidelity image trace

This is the low fidelity image trace

This is the original image

This is the high fidelity image trace

This is the low fidelity image trace

This is the original image

This is the high fidelity image trace

This is the low fidelity image trace

Testing Day 2

Today I decided to create a mock up of my project to see whether my idea will work and get a visualisation to work with to improve it further. Straight away I stumbled across some issues. I noticed that i need the projector about 15 to 20 feet away for the deer head for it to be proportionate. I have also worked out that I need 2 more projectors for the sides of the deer, which i’m hoping will be able to project onto the top of the deer and fill in the background covered by the deer head.

The above image shows that the head is too large for the forest background as the projector is too close. I also need to used an image which has some sky, or less colours towards the top where the head will be as it is very distracting, and blends the head into the trees.

This is a stag skeleton added on top of a  forest image, this was to see whether the skeleton with the deer head would work together.

As i couldn’t stick the head on the wall at the time and wanted to just make a mock up, I used a picture of a deer head to save time. This is so I could visualise my idea to see what I need to change. From doing this I’m not sure whether I should have the head connected to the skeleton or have the skeleton on the floor, perhaps with some deer around it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Testing

Below is some of my testing I did to see whether using an image of a deer could work well, or whether I would need to illustrate this my self. I think that this has worked really well as a quick mock up/prototype. Once I established that I could add the deer image over the head I began messing with it. As I can not get my interactive code to work, I decided to mess around with my own human features to add to the deer to give it a human element. When I added my eyes onto the deer head I actually thought it worked really well as it blends in quite well when i add blend effect to it, so it actually looks as though the eyes are actually the deers eyes, making it look alive. I like the effect this has as its slightly creepy, which I think will work well with my project. Unfortunately the camera has picked up some rainbow colours over the projections which kind of ruins the colours on the deer, however you can get a sense of what I’m doing so far. Next step is to add the head to a woodland background to see if it actually works together.

 

 

 

 

 

Change/Finalisation of Idea

Over the easter break I took some time to fully explore and expand my idea to create almost like a visualisation of the slogan ‘take a photo not a trophy’. After some research of what has already been made I came across an artist called Ralph Ziman who created a series of art pieces called ‘Bones’ related to trophy hunting. His pieces of work show a contrast between the landscape and the skeleton, sometimes showing the other animals alive in the distance. As seen below:

I used this as a source of inspiration to further develop my idea from just the basic animal head on the wall. I am going to use a natural landscape that a deer would live in to contrast the dead animal head on the wall. The deer head will be attached to the wall in the same style as it is traditionally done by trophy hunters. I will be using photoshop to add a skeleton coming from the animal head, to put the deer into the landscape. Along with a baby deer at its feet. The dead deer head will also have some subtle blood added to it. I think that this will provoke an emotional response from the audience.

The style of my project was going to be illustrated however, with a mix of styles this may not be the most appropriate medium to choose. I will conduct testing of this to see if this is true.

I’ve found a gap!

Whilst researching what animal charities would be interested in my project and which charity I could potentially raise money for, I noticed theres a gap in the trophy hunting campaigns.  Born free is a charity focused on raising awareness and ending trophy hunting as a sport. However, when I contacted PETA they were unable to help me with trophy hunting campaigns as they don’t currently have a campaign. So, from this I know that my project could raise money for Born Free, or be a campaign for PETA.