Jan Von Holleben Inspired Photoshoot

 In today's lesson my class and I created our own Jan Von Holleben inspired experiments. We thought of some ideas to stick to theme of Jan Von Holleben's 'Dreams of Flying'. In the previous lesson we thought of basing our experimentation on one of our class members birthday (Shaniece). We all liked the idea of having a large cake as the main focus with all of us popping out of it, whilst Sheniece was floating above it holding birthday balloons. (The section with the balloons was inspired by the image below created by Jan Von Holleben).

Once we tried to think of materials to use to make the cake, we realised that it would be too difficult to make a cake out of materials, e.g:sugar paper, large enough to be visible when taking the picture from a birds eye view angle. We then decided to change the idea and have four different characters in one photo. The four characters we thought of were: one person with rocket shoes; another with angel wings; a third inside a balloon and the fourth person would be holding balloons. Throughout the proccess of creating these images we ensured that each person looked as if they were flying in the sky, so that it relates to the theme of: 'Dreams of Flying'.

These are images of some the students in our class preparing the props for the photoshoot:

The photo on the right shows Sheniece making the angel wings and me cutting out fire flames from card.










The photo on the left shows Dee-Kay tying balloons together.


















Overall, the props that we used were:            - balloons
                                                                 - string to tie the balloons together
                                                                 - orange and yellow card for the fire
                                                                 - large sheets of clear plastic for the bubble
                                                                 - white card for the angel wings 
                                                                 - a large blue sheet for the sky
                                                                 - white cotton wool for the clouds 

To begin with, we spread the blue sheet out, as the sky.

We then placed the objects for the first photo onto the sheet in the composition we thought looked the best.

Three of us; Dee-Kay, Toni and I instructed our two models; Ben and Shaniece on where would like them to lie down and what positions they should be in. This picture was unsuccessfull because it is visually unclear that Ben, on the right is in a bubble, however the way that Shaniece is holding the bubble is obvious that she is supposedly flying in the sky with balloons. Another aspect to this picture that made it fail is the layout of the cotton wool; it doesn't look like clouds.

As a result of the unsuccessful image above, we decided to change the model inside the balloon to Dee-Kay as he would embrace the role more, we also changed the character that Shaniece was; instead of holding the balloons she was an angel. We decided that Shaniece should be an angel because we thought about the aesthetics of the picture; rather than using pink balloons we decided to create a colour theme using; blue, white and a semi-transparent piece of plastic. This theme creates a calm mood which ties in with the other theme involved; flying which is also 'calm'. 

This picture was created using guidance and instructions from Ben and Shaniece.

This picture is the development of the picture. In this photo we have three characters; a boy flying with rocket shoes (Dee-Kay), me as an angel flying with wings, and lastly, Toni flying with balloons. Also, in this picture Shaniece is fixing the props in a way she thought looked best.

This is the final photo of Dee-Kay, Toni and I, which I believe turned out to be very successful as our characters are visually clear & I think we actually look as if we are flying in the sky. The only negative side to  this photo is the layout of the clouds; as the balloons have been placed ontop of some of the clouds, it is hard to realise what the cotton wool is supposed to be.