GW PRODUCTION: CREATING THE ARCHIVAL PHOTOS

Once the shooting was done I also needed to create the fake archival assets to use in the piece of Ben Wright. As he never existed this involved finding an actor of the right age look and feel for a young Ben wright and then creating assets that could have actually been around since the late 1960's documenting him and the Global Warmning movement. These will be added to the news piece for a sense of authenticity and may also be used in the installation as ephemera from the time. The photoshop work is a little outside of my comfort zone and I wanted to outsource it but colleagues I approached were too busy to meet the big crit deadline but did say they may be able to help for the actual installation. However they did show me some tips and tools and effects to bolster my moderate knowledge and also I used them as sounding boards to prepare for the shoots to get these right.

Photo-Shoot of Actor for Archive Composite Photos

Shoot of the actor playing Ben Wright in a multitude of positions and lighting to match the figures in the sourced photos to be doctored. For this I was really restricted for time and only had my actor for half an hour as they are really busy. Due to a timing clash before they went away for the summer. I really liked the look of a friend's son Tom Amos and thought he was ideal so decided to try and work with it. The initial aim was to get him over to a real photo studio I have access to In Ipswich and shoot them there but time would not allow so I set up a makeshift studio in my house. Lights, white sheet tripod and camera. The white background was a necessity to aid the cutting out of the heads to replace the heads on the archive photos I had sourced.
The photos were of head and shoulders only as I wanted to keep the period dress of the original photos as sourcing costumes would be time consuming and expensive. The shoot went fast but OK I shot photos in a multitude of positions trying to capture the posture, lighting and mood and tone of the original characters in the original photographs. the lighting was the main issue due to the space that I had backlighting was an issue.

Photoshopping the elements together to create the fake archive photos.

Once I had created the new photograph of Toms head (Playing Ben) I needed to then get them into photoshop and composite them with the originals. The before and after of this time consuming process is demonstrated in the images below. 

• Firstly the original sourced archive photos were imported into photoshop.
• This photo was then duplicated so there were two copies of it in 2 different layers.
• Next the right corresponding photo of Tom was imported and the head only cut out from the background using the lasso tool. This was also scaled to try and get the pixelation similar to the original photos and of a similar scale.
• This cut out head was then placed like the jam in the sandwich between the two identical original archive photos in photoshop. 
• The cut out head was then scaled and positioned over the original head.
• The cut out head was desaturated to make it black and white and the brightness and contrast tweaked to make it closer to the original.
• In order to reveal it the top archive photo was then rubbed out in the head area using the eraser tool to reveal the image of Tom underneath.
• The image then could be re-sized and tweaked using the free-transform tool.
• Any background images where the heads did not overlap could be tidies up using the clone tool or  a mixture of this and the paint or blur tools. Zooming in on the image to see the pixels made this easier.
• Finally the added new head could be blurred a little if necessary to look closer to the original.

I chose the above image as an example. It is not 100% there but I had a lot of these to do before the big crit deadline so I got as close as time would allow. It is a hugely time consuming and skilled job which I am a little under-qualified for. Some of the images I created work better than others and are all Ok if you do not look too close. This is something that I will need to develop to get to the 98-99% realism I am after for the TV News piece and I am looking to hopefully draw on the experience of colleagues to help achieve this.

NOTE:
Some of the images needed text to be replaced on banners and this was even trickier to get to work. This also included the Newspaper headline I am really unhappy with as it was a very difficult job. The same process as above was used with a few new tools used to try and create these.

• Use the clone tool to go over the existing writing on the sign with the texture from the original photo.
• Use the font tool to write the new slogan for the banner.
• Use the transform tool to skew the perspective and scale to try and match the original photo.
• Pixelate and blur the new text to try and match the pixelation and blur of the original photo.