Shooting the Digipak

After getting our key shoot day out of the way, we set about the task of securing our accompanying products. One of these is of course the Digipak. We still maintained our idea of amalgamating the faces of the band into one single portrait. We organised a shoot date with the band and arranged the photography studio accordingly. This was a chance for myself and Rachel to utilise our photography and photo editing skills for a different subject.

The studio was arranged in a fairly simple manor with a small infinity background, with the aim being to make this as white as possible. This would not only make the edit more simple but would also create parallels with the way we shot the video itself. We arranged markers on the floor both for us as photographers and for the band so they would all be standing in the exact same spot, making it easier to blend them together. As the taller of the pair, I took the photos. 

We got a standard portrait of each band member asking for them to look neutral, and directly into the camera. We then did the same but with the back of their heads to create the affect that we wanted. This was a fairly simple shooting process, and we knew that the edit was likely to be the more challenging. 

Once collating the portraits, we then ran them through professional photo editing software Adobe Lightroom. This is a software that I and Rachel are both well aquatinted with from other creative projects we have done in the past. This allowed us to heighten the 'clarity' of the photos, therefore emphasising the density and richness of the shadows and lines in their faces. It also meant we could use the 'soften skin' tool, while also pinpointing particular spots and dimples which we could exterminate with the precision that the software offers. This created four 'hyper-real', visually impactful portraits.

Before

After

Before

After

We then uploaded these photos into Adobe Photoshop where we could convert the files from RAW to JPEG, yet maintaining all the higher quality. Here we could start to amalgamate the photos and contort them with ease. This was an experimental process where we could try lots of combinations and see what we liked best. We started by sticking to the original design plan and chopping the photos into four sections;

This created an affect similar to what we had imagined but wasn't quite as fluid and seamless as I had hoped. We realised that this style is far more affective with three faces, as opposed to four, as it is easier to distribute the features of the face more evenly. We then began to try new layouts, and I came up with the idea of drafting single facial features that have been cropped from a different portrait. This would mean that there would be one 'base' layer of someones face, with other peoples features mapped over that;

Arguably, these photos are far more visually striking and interesting to look at. They distort the face in a very strange way and often change the mood of the original photo, as it begins to look like a different facial expression all together. It has an intentionally messy style which makes it resemble Pop Art in some ways. Both myself and Rachel considerably preferred this method. We are going to go forward with this editing style and try to blend it with text. This should help us make some key decisions on whether we would like to include all four portraits or just our favourite one. However, we still had to do something for the back of the heads so decided we would try a similar method but instead separating the image up into four quadrants, each containing a quarter of each band members head. We chose each quadrant specifically based on the hair cuts of the band so that it looked natural, yet still odd and almost unnerving. We were happy with the way this looked as it creates a small bit of contrast from the front, which is laid out in a alternative way. We found it interesting how well the haircuts actually fitted together as one, which acts as a juxtaposition to the seemingly 'shabby' style in which they have been amalgamated.