The concept for my digital surrealism was to display the
different sides of our personalities that don’t always show. I was trying to
explain how sometimes we don’t show our true selves and how we act differently
& alter our personality and our actions based on our audience and our
surroundings. That our true selves are rarely shown or seen. I portrayed this
by taking multiple shots of me in different positions and outfits doing
different things. Each variant signified an alteration or piece of my overall
personality. One was on the floor, laying belly down watching TV. That one is
the “Core Persona”. Being the main part of my overall personality, he’s wearing
simple street clothes. I figured the aspects he would represent would be things
related to my most notable traits, such as humor, etiquette, and my mostly
relaxed nature. There were two other copies of me representing the other parts
of my personality that wouldn’t really be noticeable just by looking at me.
I started out by sketching the
birds-eye-view of my living room layout so I could determine where to position
myself and where to position the camera. I decided on placing my camera on a tripod
beneath and arc like entryway that leads to my living room. I set the camera to
the 10-second countdown mode. I would then get in position and wait for the
camera to take the picture. Once the picture is taken I would go over to see it
and check if I needed to alter the environment in terms of lighting and stuff.
Once I got all the pictures I started working in Photoshop. I used a picture of
just my living room as my background and I altered the brightness and contrast
because it looked a little dark. Next I started dragging in the pictures of
myself and editing them out of their original pictures and putting them onto
the background. After all of the Josh Variants were in I also inserted my cat
into the picture just for fun.
Throughout this project I learned
a lot more about layering, changing things like brightness and contrast, and I
also learned how to use opacity. I’m pretty satisfied with how the end product
turned out. It didn’t end up exactly how I imagined it but I’m still happy
about how it looked in the end.
