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Tim Burton Style Reconstruction

To further my understanding of style and form I decided to look into a variety of  different art forms and construct a style recreation from one of these mediums. After looking at a number of different films and also artists, I came to the conclusion that a darker themed film would match surrealism much more than happy, jolly paintings. Due to this I decided to choose Tim Burton as my Director, and specifically Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, and Alice In Wonderland to be the movies.

Based on the image to the right it is instantly portrayed that the film will have a dark, twisted underlining theme. This can be seen firstly through the colour scheme used, and also the make-up definition shown on the actors face. The use of red hues and black shades adds a dangerous and murderous feel to the film poster. This is the type of style and theme I will also be trying to recreate in my reconstruction. The reason as to why I want to recreate this style is because the dark, twisted theme seems to lend itself towards the surreal movement. Delving into the strange and weird is something that thriller, horror and even fantasy films do, it is also something many surreal painting and photographs do. 

Within both of these images to the left you can see that they're dark, and dangerous looking. These mainly show desaturated colour with the occasional saturated colour. For example within the first image it's mainly desaturated and then saturated with the bright crimson hue within Mr's Lovetts dress and the death chair.

Based on the image to the right it is instantly portrayed that the film will have a surreal, or unrealistic theme. This is evident due to the disproportionate people known as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb standing at the front, but also with the red queen, Mad hatter, the Cheshire cat and also the face figures within the flowers. Although unlike most Tim Burton films you can see that the colours are extremely saturated and somewhat burst in your face as soon as you look at the film poster. I will attempt to emulate these colours and strange colours within my photos.

As you can see from the two images to the left it is obvious that the film shows the opposite to reality. It's is completely not realistic and does in fact show surrealism very well. You can see that the characters have large eyes and disproportionate bodies as well as  are mainly saturated unrealistic colours. For example their clothes and also character designs are bright colours normally against a destaturated background.

Props List

  • Camera ( Cannon 600D )

  • Tripod

  • Top hat

  • StreamPunk Goggles

  • Suit jacket

  • White shirt

  • Tie

  • Deer Skull

  • Squirrel Skull

Creation Process

To start of the process of recreating this chosen style, I needed to take the initial photos. Once the photos had been taken I then put the photos into Photoshop and began the editing process. Starting with loading and chopping up some images of leaves I'd taken, I practically stitched multiple images together to make the background. Then I placed the top hat on top of the background, and also added the squirrel skull to the side of the top hat.

Once I had added all the parts of the photo I began to add shading and change various levels, colours and tones throughout the different images which had been overlayed. These photos looked like they had been obviously placed onto different images therefore I added more shadows in Photoshop to give a more realistic feel.

 

The final part of the process was to add the 'miniature'. This was originally taken as the model sitting on a white chair and white backdrop. The white background was removed in Photoshop and then placed on top of the hat. Once this had been done, I added shading behind the miniature to give a more realistic type feeling.

 

Final Pieces

Contact Sheets

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