In this post I’ll be going through the thought process and methodology I used to arrive at my final images used to describe the poem, Fire and Ice by Robert Frost.
“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.”
The Cold War is often used as an example of how icy tensions and brinksmanship by both the USA and USSR almost led to all-out nuclear destruction.
Even the colour palette was perfect.
Dr Chee Soon Juan, leader of the SDP, at a GE2015 rally. Besides Red being the primary colour of the SDP, I felt it also represented the Fire within Singaporeans and the outspoken social media support for them.
As such, I took a picture of my street, utilising the concepts of vanishing point and implied line, to create a sense that such conflicts had no visible end.
Original image. Note the use of the white road line, and central horizontal axis, to create a vanishing point at the centre of the image.
“From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.”
Original Image. My hand on the right, my girlfriend’s on the left.
First, I took a picture that I felt represented passion, excess and unforeseen consequences. The use of hands symbolises how humans’ indulgence in the sensual and comforting, especially with the advent of global wealth, are the root of our demise.
A Lorenz Attractor, a mathematical Chaos Theory model and one commonly associated with the Butterfly Effect.
The formation of the hands resembles a butterfly, a reference to the Butterfly Effect, a scientific and literary term used to describe how small actions can build up to massive changes and consequences later down the road.
I don’t think this one needs much explanation. Hell is hot stuff.
Finally, I applied a Neon Filter effect to the image, which inverted the colours of the image and turned the shadows of the image into a red-tinted white. This created a burning effect, as though the butterfly was on fire, while the wood grain of the table behind created a very fiery hell-like effect. This was in line with the concept that our decadence was leading us to damnation, and the idea that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
Image 3: Ice
“But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great, And would suffice.”
To be fair, London’s weather is pretty much already like this all the time.
The Blue and Green of the plate symbolise the purity of the plant life of Earth, and the Oceans.
I wanted to create an effect where the ice from within people, within the world, was slowly freezing the world over, and blurring everything into frozen white.
Taking reference from the line “if it had to die twice“, I decided to superimpose two similar images over each other in a fashion that made the viewer feel that the ice in the centre was encroaching upon the rest of the world. The result was an image that had a mass of frozen white in the centre.
Fun fact: the Norse version of hell, Helheim, is not fiery, but rather frigid cold. Mostly because it’s for cowards and you’d generally theme your crappy afterlife option after something that sucks in your daily life. Y’know, Scandinavian weather and all that.
Finally, I applied a blue tint filter to cool down the image and reinforce the sense of ice and frigidness.
Additional Musings:
After in-class review, some of the takeaways I had was that while each concept image was strong in itself, they did not have a central theme and were not linked to one another. I will take this into consideration for future projects.
Another feedback was that the images were overly quiet and did not have much in the way of human interaction or presence. This will also be addressed in future 4D projects.