My Final Image

Here is my final image. Here is a breakdown of what each element I feel represents.
The portrait: The obvious idea of listening to music!
The soundwaves: To represent the power of the music
The blue glow: To represent a 'force' of a different world/a 'bubble'
Noise: Authentic effect
Gig photos on the head: To show he is thinking about live music that he played; inflicted by the music coming through the headphones.

Editing Examples

1. First I opened up my downloaded image in photoshop.

2. Zooming in on the image.

3. Using the clone tool, I pressed ALT and clicked around the grey area, then painted over the fly away hairs.

4. On the layers panel, I dragged down the current layer to the new layer icon to duplicate the current one.

5. Filter> Other>High Pass, this makes the details more punchy, but also gives a glowing effect, you can change the amount of the glow, whether it's fully grey, or has a glowy effect through the original colour.

6. I put the blending mode on color and it gave the photo a cold effect with the eyes more blue!

7. I opened up the image of the robot eyes, then I used the clone tool to source what I would copy over.

8. I painted over the eye when I clicked back onto the portrait, it showed smaller, so as soon as I felt enough was copied, I expanded the layer (which was also separate) so that it fit the size of the eye.

9. I tidied up the layer, with the erasing tool.

10. I changed the blending mode to subtract, it gave a very robotronic colouring and effect to the layer.

11. I copied the layer, flipped it round and then placed it on top of the other eye.

12. I made another layer then painted it grey over the face!

13. I chose luminocity and lowered the opacity so that it gave the skin a silvery look.

And there it is! An example of how I usually work out my editing!

More ideas

I decided to ask people what type of memories music brings to them.
Many people mentioned live music/gigs.
I then decided to ask the person in the photographs I took what music brought to him.
He mentioned relationships, but in the end I thought a more suited option was live music.
I decided the contrast between live music and music coming through earphones/headphones showed the way you imagine the music and environment being different and possibly better which also flows through even more memories since when you attend gigs, you usually create memories at the event.

I remembered the person talking about a specific gig he enjoyed playing drums at with his band, so I've saved the photos from his profile ready to edit onto his head.

'Sounding Out The City'

Page 32 mentions how you go on a 'journey' when you listen through your playlists. I agree with this as each different song reminds you of something different. You go through to different places, different times or maybe each just following on from each other in terms of the scenes in your head.
A lot of the time, you hear about albums being written as if they were life stories, experiences and general things the musicians were going through. So lyrics can be personal to some of the listeners which may bring back their own memories too.
More often or not though, the band create music through their experiences, whilst for the listener, it brings back their own experiences and memories. Songs can also create memories when they're played at certain events so when heard again, they remind people of that specific event.

Photoshoot

These are the original photos from a photoshoot I did recently that I will use for this project.

Music Videos and Lyrics

After reading: 'Culture, Technology & Creativity'
I decided to look into visual relationships between lyrics and their music videos.

http://www.slideshare.net/Jaredtw95/the-relationship-between-the-lyrics-music-and-video
I looked on this website after a simple google search.

My information collected is as follows:
There were scenes picked out and represented quite in literal terms, 'there you were and the floor was empty..' Usually visuals of a dance floor comes to mind. So what was used was a dance floor and spotlight for the setting of this part of the scene.
Another line was represented less literally with the past tense being used, the guy watches back video clips and tears up photos to represent seeing the old trust which juxtapositions the new hate shown through the photo tearing.
The music/genre is linked through themes and clothing worn. The lyrics are viewed as 'emo' but the music is more 'indie'. So casual clothes and general footage portray the 'indie' side of this. But the skinny jeans and shown story lines portray the 'emo' side of it.


My next step is to ask people what type of memories music brings them, so that I can think of ways to link/represent through a visual context.

Another Edit

It's been a while! But last week I managed to create another edit.

From my feedback in class, I was told that the soundwaves of the last music edit was standing out pretty well and that it showed the music itself. I decided to use this even further and put in actual soundwaves. 

I also did a small poll over facebook asking what people think about when they listen to music. The most common answer were memories, so I have decided to take that into more consideration regards the theme.

However, I am struggling to decide how to represent memories in image form. I chose an image from the internet of polaroids as that is a common way of representing memories, but this did not work for me.

I am going to take my own photograph of a person wearing big headphones tomorrow as the sources I find on the internet aren't quite what I'm looking for.

My original idea was that I take photos in the studio with him wearing headphones, but to represent the mind being somewhere else, I decided placing the person in another environment/setting would be more contrasting as opposed to being in an empty space.

My next step now is to go through more of my text books that I have taken out to read to gather more ideas and inspiration.