In today's shoot I am going to be looking at the character Avatar from the film. I thought that this would be a good character too look at and create for my project as the 'Avatar' in the film was an entirely new race/species that was represented through the human body (therefore linking well with my project).
I am planning on using myself as a subject and creating the look of the Avatar myself using makeup. The focal point of this shoot is going to be the face and therefore my work will be portrait based. I also think this shoot will give me the opportunity to work on my editing and I plan on using tools such as the liquify tool and blurs.
Shoot Evaluation
I am extremely happy with how today's shoot went! Although I encountered some problems to begin with the shoot ran fairly smoothly. The first problem I encountered was my ears (or my Avatar ears) they ended up looking like blue elf ears in all the photos and they look odd/out of place, so I ended up scrapping them from the final look. The next problem was choosing a background that worked well and complement the blue on my face, which proved harder than thought as the white makeup on my face was photographing so bight. In the end I settled with an aqua background and turned my lighting down so that the white was photographing so harshly.
Here are some the final photos from the shoot:
I love this photo and I think it's one of the strongest I have ever done. I angled the camera down to ward the subject as this accentuates the eyes and highlights the angles on the face nicely. I used the 'bloat' option on the liquify tool to make my eyes appear bigger like that of an Avatar's, as well as altering the colouring of them using the colour balance option in Photoshop. I created a gaussian blur around the edge of the face to again accentuate the eyes and make them the focal point; I liked this effect and though subtle it really added to the overall effect. I love the contrast in colour in the photo and I preferred the tight cropping of the photo so it was around the face. The brown hair contrasts nicely over the aqua background and the tight cropping agains adds emphasis to the face. I like the expression - the eyes are connecting with the camera really well and it almost makes the rest of the face hard to read.
This second photo is one where I included more of the neck. Evidently, I increased the contrast seen in colour here in this photo and made everything brighter - this has made the photo stand out more. I also made the eyes illuminate more. I added the white pattern on the neck (as seen on the cheeks and nose) after in Photoshop as I think it bought the look together more. I then again added a subtle gaussian blur though to make sue there wasn't too much distraction from the face. I wouldn't normally edit my photos in this way as I think it looks too much, but on this occasion I think it worked.
I used a similar cropping in this photo and used the hair the 'background'. The brown of the hair worked well against the blue and I think it makes both the photos more striking than the aqua colour I had for the background. The angle of the camera here faced straight on toward the model and I think this worked with having the neck in the photo too.
Overall I am really happy with how the shoot went today. I would love to do another character based photo shoot like this again as it was so fun to create.
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