Following my exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins through other artworks, I now began to use my own works. I set up a series of photos with one model to illustrate six of the sins, bearing in mind I would be continuing to animate the photos afterwards. I wanted to try and avoid h comic element of my earlier work by going for a darker, more serious feeling.
Looking at other artists, like Rosie Hardy and Aaron Nacer's Seven Deadly Sins series above, and a few others (here and here) gave me inspiration to come up with a list of keywords for each sin to try and portray:
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A page from my notebook with my preliminary planning for my own photos
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- Wrath - imagery of anger, knives, kinetic motion, blood, pain, death
- Gluttony - imagery of food, excess, chocolate, luxury, appetite, hunger
- Pride - imagery of mirrors, excess, self-portraits, vanity, makeup, obsession
- Greed - imagery of covetousness, wanting, clsoefisted, excess, yearning
- Sloth - imagery of tiredness, sleep, waste, unfulfillment, yearning, boredom
- Envy - imagery of betrayal, magazines, loathing, hatred, media, cowardice
I decided to follow these photographer's by also using a female model, inspired in part by the classical art world's use of female models.
The first image I shot was Wrath, with a knife as a prop and a natural light from a window to cast stark but not too harsh light on the girl. I shot several photos, but chose to go with a standing shot, not lying down shot in the end to balance out against the other final photos. The girl holds the knife in her mouth, to symbolically convey her mental wrath and aggressive speech through imagery. The animation I added in photoshop afterwards makes her mouth twitch and eyes open to look at the viewer in hopefully a shocking way - at first they won't notice that it's an animation as there are several seconds of pause between each motion.
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| 'Wrath' Animation |
Following Wrath, I opted to shoot Gluttony - the sin of excess appetite. For this I bought a box of Belgian Chocolates to signify the luxurious nature of this sin. I got the model to try and gorge herself on the chocolate, trying to eat as many as possible at once. This was easier said than done, as the food was incredibly rich! The movement I added to this one was slightly subtler, with only a small movement of the hands to indicate motion and eating.
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| 'Gluttony' Animation |
Following Gluttony, I shot Pride, one of the more complicated sins to portray through a small animation. I positioned the model in front of a dressing table and mirror to show her obsession with her own appearance. I posed her looking into her own reflection as she applied lipstick - an indicator of exploiting your own appearance for gain. In post-production I had to digitally remove her eyes, to allow me to move them. Drawing them back in required a light gradient for the white of the eye, and a dark ring around the iris as well as a thin eye light to make them look shiny.
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| 'Pride' Animation |
Greed is a sin on excess as well, but of material possessions. It is often referred to as covetousness, and I wanted to convey the sheer opulence that a greedy individual would desire and revel in. For this, I thought that the ultimate display of materiality is wearing jewellery. I began by covering my model in chains, rings, bangles and necklaces whilst she was lying on the floor, but decided this did no adequately show her possessiveness over the objects - it was also slightly too much of an action and not subtle enough for this effect.
Therefore, I reshot the image the next day with a different pose, this time the girl held her wealth in hand and clenched her fist over it to show how much she protected it and wished to greedily hide it from others:
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| 'Greed' Animation (Final) |
The next sin I shot was sloth, the sin of boredom and wastage which I tried to emulate by using clocks as a prop to illustrate the abundance of time left unused in our daily lives. I collected all the clocks in the house and laid them on my model whilst she 'slept' in a bed. I used natural light from a window, and later animated the chest to move to illustrate deep breathing of sleep. Unfortunately, this effect was not very convincing as the movement was much too exaggerated and quick. I should have been more subtle in my animation.
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| 'Sloth' Animation |
The final sin I captured was envy. This made me think of betrayal, loathing and the effect the media has on our society. I toyed with the idea of having a multitude of cut out magazine pictures of what the media deemed 'attractive' surrounding a model, but decided it may be a visually overwhelming image. Instead I had her sit cross-legged on the floor, holding a piece of paper with a symbol for death covering her face to show how our envy of image and beauty can lead to broken morals. I had trouble making this animate well, so decided to invert it momentarily almost as if a flashbulb had gone off, as if photographers were taking photos:
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| 'Envy' Animation |
Throughout this series, I went with a classic 'movie poster' colour scheme. This meant that I highlighted areas of importance with a warmer orange tint, added with photoshop through an adjustment layer and radial mask. The background and areas I wanted to focus the eye away from were coloured blue to make them colder and slightly defocussed and desaturated. This meant the eye was drawn to to the more colourful areas and helped me draw them in to notice the small movements within each piece.
I would have changed a few things, mostly with the sloth and envy photos to make them less jarring and more subtle. The more subtle and small the movement, in general I think the better the effect, although I think the greed and pride images worked the best, but weren't necessarily the simplest or most subtle movements.
