What would you do if you only had 15 hours to live?

leading on from the video Forevers not so long i tried to do abit of a survey, which i asked:
What would you do if you only had 15hours to live?'
so here are some of the answers i got:

• 'saying goodbye to friends and family and probably spend some time on the ice'
• 'i would get as drunk as possible, fall asleep and die'
• 'seriously telling people exactly how i feel and trying to summarise what i want people to remember to the people closest and doing something nice'
• 'play monopoly'
• 'don't know...i would first call everyone I cared about and said how much I cared for them and loved them then I would do things I would not have done before'
• 'take out lots of loans and spend lots of money on things ive always wanted'
• 'id probably cry 1st then tell the guy i love that i loved him and gather my friends together and just have fun'
• 'id probably do anything and everything possible to do enjoy the last bit of life i had and not look back on anything i did that day'
• 'perhaps eat drink and do everything I wanted to do for so long but never had the motivation'
• 'drugs and sex, and drink jack daniels for the last 3 hours'
• 'spend it with the best gf in the world'
• 'I have 15 hours to live? Go convince Andy Keogh to marry me (And Stearman!). Blow all my money, spend time with family..'
• 'Id want to find the someone who i thought had made me happiest in the world then be with them and my daughter.'
  

This idea reminds me of a blog style website i found called Before i die i want to...
where 2 americans have taken polaroids of everyday people and asking them, what do you want to do before you die? The Before I die I want to... project was inspired by a combination of factors: (1) the “death” of the Polaroid, (2) a psychologist’s tool called safety contracts, and (3) a passion to get people to think about (and act upon) what is really important in their lives through this simple, straight-forward question. I think this is a really clever idea. and it all makes us think about how precious life is and our own mortality. The most touching of images on that site is that they ask patients in a hospice what they want to do before they die, as well as asking the staff who deal with death on a daily basis.
a few examples from the site:

 

Forevers not so long

http://foreversnotsolong.com/

Forevers not to long is a short film that i found while looking for something else, And it really sturred an emotion for me.
While i cant find the video embedded to put in here if you click the link at the top of the post you can watch it.
I think the main hard hitting thing is that relisation that you are going to die. Its set around a bomb going off in america and a guy who finds out that this bomb is going to kill him and everyone around him. It really does make you think, what would you do if you had 15hours to live? the thing that hits me hard is when the main character, rushin home with food, because there is no way of getting away, invites a complete stranger into his home to stay with him, because he doesnt want to die alone, he asks this woman he meets (and is rather mean to might i add) 'would you spend the rest of your life with me?' a question that is over used in stupid romance flicks, (which i hate) is rather poyant here, when both characters know they are both going to die. It basically shows what they do in there final hours alive.
Its a subtle yet very touching short film. It does really make you think, what would you really do if you only had 15 hours to live? and you know there is no exscaping your death.

tutorials

while in the small group tutorials after discussing work, we also looked at each other blogs and Annie had posted a video which we then watched in the tutorial, i didnt know if i should post it on my blog but because of the way this video made me feel.


From the offstart, the dancer painted all black, it brought me back and reminded me of something nightmareish. i know it will sound stupid, but it reminded me of the orcs from lord of the rings. Which i once had a nightmare in which they were chasing me. (i know its the start of a weird collection of dreams ive had.) The second thing that as it were, made me feel uneasy was the movement. the jitteryness of it, that mixed in with the sound, it is the sound that makes this tense, harsh, it made me feel uneasy and even to some extent freaked out. Just the movement in mix with the sound together. It deffo had the intended reaction from me which annie had and what im guessing the director wanted to create.

Day of the dead photo shoot.

So i managed to get my 'day of the dead' inspired photoshoot up and running.  To start with i planned how i was going to shoot it. I decided that to make this more interesting for me, that it was to be a self portrait, and that i wanted it to be just a close up of my face, So for the perpose of self portraits i got Camera control pro 2 which allowed me to control my camera via my laptop, which ment that using my laptops remote i could change iso,shutter speed, appature. I also wanted to create rather a contrasted image so i adjusted the exposure compensation.  I desided to light it using avalible lighting and a flash gun, which i did move after the first couple of shots. I also desided to make a time lapse video while applying the makeup, just for a bit of fun, i have a feature to do that on my webcam, and now i have found out that camera control pro 2 also allows me to do that.
this is the time lapse of my prep:



So here is what i achieved doing this photoshoot:

after the first few images i adjusted the flash gun slightly to get better light by adding a diffuser as well as adjusting the location. i also decided to encorperate some small skull heads that i owned to recreate the look of the Mexican Madness shoot that i featured earlier in my blog. While i lke the straight on portraits, i think te images that stand out mainly to me are the photos that are almost extreme close ups and strange crops of the images. i really like the close up of the mouths and the close up of the face. I guess it links to my passion for surrealism and there way of 'cutting' or cropping the photo on just one body part, detacting the audience from the body as a whole. maybe this is something for me to look into? i also like the playfulness of some of the photos.

So i thought i would share a few of my fave images  from the shoot:

Its really strange, i was rather confused that i prefered images of mine that wasnt like the photoshoot of Mexican Madness, but rather my own ones.  I also found it really easy to take the photos, normally with models i find it hard to ask them to do what i would like and i guess by cutting the middle man out i feel alot more at ease. i dont really do alot of portraits as i really dont like my self image, my self esteme is rather low, so maybe this is something i can explore more? self portraiture and experiment with using myself. I do feel that part of me wants to make this more personal to myself and maybe that is one way of doing it.

Days of the dead

I found a good link to a collection of photos an american paper put together between halloween and the days of the dead. some of the photos i really like, but i also like how its a mix of cultures all surrounding the dead.  I like how none of the images are morbid in anyway and theyre all bright and colourful. it just reminded me of this project.
The link is below:

Days of the dead

Some of my fave photos from this link:

I like the use of light and colour in this. while there is no symbolism of death in it, as an image its very powerful. I like the use of silhouette and how it contrasts the colour with a block of black, and how the focus of the jars go from distingishable to just small dotted blurs the further from the camera you go.

This image is another that i really like, The gashia is a symbol of beauty and elegance, and here we see them mutilated and cut up, its a bitter sweet contradiction. i also like how the subject isnt the closest to the camera and the depth of focus is different. 

this image was taken at the halloween celebrations at the white house, and really reminds me of the 'remains of the day' video from the corpse bride. 

Plan of action

Tomorrow i plan on my first mexican day of the dead shoot, I have got a basic design for the makeup, i have also decided that i want to make this a self portrait.
My plan is to set up my tripod agains a plain white wall, however i have a selection of bright coloured card that im going to stick to the wall to create an interesting background.  I have have perchased the softwhere to shoot through my laptop so i will be using this to my advantage and using it to help me frame and shoot the images.
for the makeup idea i want to encorperate jewels so i brought some of those craft gems to stick to my face, i also brought interesting glue on eyelashes, as well as using the facepaint.
I will upload a contact sheet once i am done.

Danse Macabre

While Looking for some exhibitions to go see to do with my current projects one leaflet caught my eye 'DANSE MACABRE 2009' The reason this caught my eye is because danse macabre is the dance of the dead which i looked at while in ASLEVEL and wrote about in a blog post before! I looked at the leaflet and while i couldnt get to the exhibition on the dates it had left, (london) i have since visited the website.
Danse Macabre is a gothic art exhibition that was on in Nottingham and London and included artists, photographers and live performances.
I looked on the websites of some of the artists and photographers and here are the more interesting ones that i found and liked:

michael cowell:

illistrator and artist (some photography but mainly just of areas of interest to him) his main work that interests me is his illistrations. They seem really eeary to me, often looking at isolation, or those with large groups seem even more haunting expesh when you cant see the faces (as in the image below)  The very sketchy and messy approch reminds me of the 30days of night comics. the shading and colourisation also has that 'dark gothic feel' with many of his images using this sort of tea stained colouring rather then pure white.

http://www.michael-cowell.com/

Photographer and illistrator Mark Leary who does a mix of work- some of his manipulations have a very surreal almost Dali feel to them which i do really like. His photography is a mix of different kinds of portrait, being alternative in style, and weird and clever set ups to put his model in. I really like this photo of his work  and its almost fitting that the title of his website is http://www.asylumseventy7.co.uk/ because the subject looks as if he should be put in an asylum. Obviously making a statement about vanity and obsessivness with how we see ourselves and how important it is how other people view us.

I was also excited to see that two former DEMONTFORT students were in the lineup, Both photographers:
Hamish Walker (fine arts degree)

 Hamish's photographs attempt to capture the exhilarating and terrifying atmosphere felt when walking through the city alone at night, where all your senses are heightened. Light reveals only details in this landscape, serving to reinforce the shadows.

and the work of Grace Elkin who also has a fine art degree from DMU whos work is a mixture of portrait, glamour and fashion with hints of the gothic and alternative scene with some surreal and some fetish (latex ect) work 

Day of the dead and corpse bride

So while looking at the day of the dead the one thing all the bright garish colours and the candy skulls reminded me off was a scene in TIM BURTONS  corpse bride.
This is the scene it reminds me of:


singing skeletons playing instraments made from each others with garish colours and a mix of floresent coloured lights. If death was really like that most people wouldnt be afraid of it.
The whole premice of the film is that the lead Victor accidently marrys a corpse while practising his wedding vows in the woods and ends up being dragged to the underworld. However  the way Burton shoots and planned this film is that the normal earthly world is dull, unexciting, people do things because they have to not because they enjoy it, infact the characters in the normal world arnt ever seen having fun. Everything is dark, colourless, and to almost some extent greyscale, but the ironic thing is when victor enters the underworld, everyone is drinking, having fun, singing dancing, bright coloured. Almost as if to say that death is more fun then life, and that lifes only the que to get into club death. or never feeling so alive till your dead.

'Real life'

'Death'

This whole premise is very day of the dead, and corpse bride even mocks both the living and the dead.
And this is not the only Tim Burton Film to do so, infact many of his film focus on how maybe death is better then life. Another example of this is Beetlejuice where two resently deceased ghosts are trying to work out the ins and outs of haunting while trying to stop its house being taken over by the new occupents and stopping the psyco dead guy beetlejuice (DONT SAY HIS NAME 3 TIMES!) featuring many scenes which show that the dead do have more fun like in this scene where the two main characters (the ghosts) are trying to scare away the current tennents:

Facepaint day of the dead photoshoot reserch

After looking at the day of the dead, and seeing photos documented by Mary Andrade, I noticed that a common thing to do was to paint faces to look like a skull, which gave me an idea of a fashion style shoot but to include facepaint of a skull.
the first thing i thought was... how the hell do i do that?
so i serched online and looked at a few videos on how to do a skull facepaint, some step by step guides, facepainting books, but the best i found was a guy who has a few posts about SFX style makeup (mainly for halloween!) and came across this video post:



So i grabbed ahold of my makeup kit, which while i do have alot i was limited to the stuff i had for the first experiment.
I did have white face paint from a themed night out, and a few different shades of eye shadow and eye liner that i had to make do with to experiment with.
Just for experimenting i did do it on myself and i did copy the half a face skull look. However for my shoot i am thinkin full faced skull would look better. But while i was settling for the half a face look i did a basic 'mexican day of the dead' style eye makeup on the other side of my face. anywho! this was the results:

Once i perchase the right makeup for this (a dark black facepaint) and next time i attempt this i will design it out first rather then just do it as i go along, from afar it doesnt look to bad, I need to try working on my blending for the shadow and of course as i just said a design ready but i mean for 30mins work it didnt come out terribly bad.

Ideas while looking at the Day of the dead

From the day of the dead reserch i have done so far, i have managed to get two ideas really.

One was from looking at the work of Mary Andrade: My idea was to go to a graveyard just before nightful armed with candles and lay them across graves, Maybe with brightly coloured flowers to almost recreate a day of the dead ritual. I think it would look interesting maybe with a close up of the grave followed by a zoomed out so we can see that it is the only grave decorated like that and that maybe the original photo isnt all it seems (mainly that it wasnt actually taken at the festival!)

I also had an idea of using candles to form a coffin shape on the ground and photographing that, inside and maybe outside, even an idea of placing a photo of a person inside or even maybe (i know i know! health and safety!) but surrounding a person in candles in the shape of a coffin.

My final idea involves facepainting and doing a fashion like photoshoot, almost like that of Steve Neaves, but with the face of the model painted like a skull.