2D Foundation – Forrest Gump Process and Final

The first piece here is the one I eventually printed on my tote bag as it was the design that I liked the most. The quote in Gone Girl was from the husband who is the protagonist trying to understand his wife, and this is the line that he says at the start and at the end of the film. The beauty in this line lies in the fact that when the audience hears it at the start of the film and at the end of the film, they have very different outlooks on who the husband and the wife are as their characters drastically change and evolve as the film progresses.

I used a skull to represent the wife’s head as I felt that it was the rawest and most naked visual representation of a person’s mind and what’s in their head. When you think of a person and their thoughts you naturally think of their head, and I wanted to strip away the layer of skin as to align my artwork with the theme of the movie, which tackles how much you think you understand someone and also, death and murder. In that sense, I felt like using the skull was the most appropriate.

As for the flurry of ornaments that lie behind the skull, i used a series of patterns and designs that coincide with the wife’s character and thoughts in the movie. Even though in the film it is not explicitly stated what the wife was thinking about or going through at each point in the movie, it is nevertheless evident that she has very convoluted thoughts that are peppered with flowery language and fluff. At the very end of the day, what she thinks or feels is a complete mystery to the audience, and the audience was meant to struggle with finding a way to relate to the wife, even though the film starts out ensuring that the audience sympathises with wife more than the husband.

My next quote comes from the horror movie IT which I watched recently.

I got the inspiration and idea for this piece as I loved what the red balloon represented in the movie; it was a symbol of death and being trapped. Whenever the red balloon appears, people were bound to lose their life to the antagonist and I wanted to capture the essence of that in the red balloon.

I used pop art style depictions of people screaming as the captured souls in the balloon as the texture fit my concept and ideals for what the piece should look like. As for the antagonist that lays in the background I tried my best to hide him as much as I can in order for the picture to have an ominous feel to it. The clown antagonist rarely upright kills someone; his motive is actually to instill fear as he feeds off the fear that people have for him. Therefore I wanted to capture the essence of a creeping fear that the clown represents, hence having him in the background.

Scream was a movie that I watched when I was really young and it was one of the movies that stuck with me in my nightmares throughout my life. The mask and the character himself were often so scary that I would have difficulty falling asleep at times whenever that image randomly pops into my head.

I framed the picture this way as I wanted a very obvious vibe that the psycho is encouraged by the movie or in the movie, as stated in the quote. In a way, I took the easy way out and this piece could have been done with a less symbolic and outright image and I feel that that is an area that i could improve on; to be able to see things in a more abstract manner instead of having to use the frame of a film to represent the film aspect of the quote.

I included the main antagonist’s mask in the picture as I felt that it was only fitting. Another manner in which I took an easy way out was using the lightbulbs to represent a person having an idea. Such a symbol is so ubiquitous and common that I feel like in a way I skipped over some of the thinking process and just took the most convenient way out for myself. To be fair to myself I struggled a lot with thinking of ways that I could better represent having an idea.

All in all i feel that this piece of work has a lot of areas of improvement, another being the pure amount of blank space that lies behind the main antagonist in this picture. Such is an area that I will seek to improve upon in my future works.

My next quote comes from one of my favourite movies of all time, The Dark Knight.

Twoface has always been an interesting character to me in the sense that he was once the pinnacle of what people would consider to be the face of “good” but due to circumstance and the Joker’s well planned actions he eventually turned into the quintessential villain.

I wanted to capture the idea of death in this picture, and not only death in the literal sense, but also the death of an ideal in a human. I picked flowers as I felt that flowers were something that most people would agree on being considered “pure” and innocuous; they were something that in fact represented happiness, love, and all that was right with the world. And so the frame of flowers that decay behind the main character’s face in this picture was to symbolise the decay in Twoface’s morals and character. It was a symbol for the death of a superhero and the birth of a villain, and in his own words, to truly put into a picture that “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” because there is no helping a flower when it has to eventually wither.

I also picked a picture of superman as the human half of Twoface as I felt that Superman, although a superhero with actual superpowers, represented all that Harvey Dent (Twoface’s real name) stood for before he turned evil, and therefore i used a household character so that people could relate better to what that face and that superhero stood for. As for the other half of the face I picked a skull as it represented death and decay, which was what Twoface has transformed himself into to represent.

My next quote comes from my favourite romance movie of all time, The Vow.

When I first did my first draft for this quote I already knew that I wanted the idea of a polaroid frame in the picture as to me, pictures were the best representation and way that someone could hold onto a memory or an important moment in life. However, the subject matter that my polaroid frames held were too subtle and too “safe” and I was advised to look more into the word “impact” which is also a part of the quote.

I therefore settled on the design as shown above so as to in a way interpret the quote humourously and out of context; to take the word impact literally and therefore give a new life to the quote.

 

Rejected design for Gone Girl Quote

Rejected Design for The Vow Quote

Personally unhappy with this design as I was only experimenting with photoshop. This was for the Dark Knight’s quote.Personally unhappy with this design for my work as well. The quote was “so are we going to stand around all day, or are we going to fight?” from the movie Kingsman.

 

All in all this project was truly a learning journey for me and a good introductory project for the use of photoshop in my everyday life. I would say that I still have a lot to learn as to being able to more cohesively link and fuse different pictures together but I had quite a bit of fun just fiddling around with the photoshop effects and layers.