Fashion:Constructed image - group 11

On Monday 30th of January we chose the groups that we wanted to be in for this project and were then set the task of making a presentation (for tomorrow) to show the ideas that we had come up with.


Mood boards. The start of everything. We came up with all of this in under a day.

Our mood boards consist of 1920's-40's black and white films

More contemporary films

Psychological films and fashion photography

The idea of hoarding and OCD

 Make-up and characters

Styling

But having so many ideas and only creating one image at the end of this project meant that we had to narrow things down, we came up with the idea of looking into Duality (Donnie Darko, Fight Club and also taking ideas from Dark City, American Beauty and Blue Velvet).
In our tutorial our tutors gave us Gregory Crewdson and Edward Hopper as references which we all found very interesting and gave us all a few similar ideas of how our set could look.

Gregory Crewdson's sets are extremely elaborate and closely resemble something that you would find in a film.
His main influences for lighting and style are taken from the artist Edward Hopper, Ray Bradbury - American fantasy/horror writer, The Twilight Zone - American TV series and then such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blue Velvet. Using 'the witching hour' with artificial lights like street lights and lamps within the 'houses' he creates a very strange and unnerving feel to his images.

One of the biggest influences you can see in Crewdson's work is from Blue Velvet, Crewdson even states that he was struck by the film and it's dystopian world beneath the suburban America town.

I have also included a few images from http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/ these show behind the scenes of Crewdson's film like sets and give a better insight into the minor details like for instance the second image of a man putting in or taking out some of the dirt on the window.

After the presentation tomorrow we will move on to start thinking more in depth of our set and how to style it and the character that we want to portray.

A few more mood boards that we have created with a narrowed down idea of character, setting and styling.

Written by Salvador to sum up our idea:

Just so that everyone knows what is going on; the concept of our fashion construction piece is looking into the American dream, more then anything the “Dark side of the American Dream”. The focus of the shoot will be to demonstrate how America – The America of small suburbs of white and pastel wooden houses nestled into a soft landscape of gentle rolling hills, with there well tended front yards, a America where everything is close by, where the high school still looks exactly like it did in the 1950’s. The America where everything is brilliant, what we want to unearth is that everything has a dark side.

What has been rolling across our mood boards etc is that I believe would be best suited to look at the American House wife from the 1950’s with her perfect family, perfect house, her perfect husband that comes homes happy from work, her perfect children that are A*** students. (Character)
(Room/set) - would be the heart of the house where everyone comes together, thus I think the dinning room would be best fitting such as the image I posted up not long ago we have the perfect family coming to dinner together.

The duality that we have been talking about, with references such as Fight Club, American Beauty, Blue Velvet, Donnie Darko etc. Is that the this house wife, has gone into delusion, has basically become schizophrenic, has lost her own individuality by forcing on a “Political correct” face to the public and to her self, and that this character has become so in denial of everything that she is alone, has nothing, this perfect would she has built up only exist within her. Thus the family portraits in the room, are not of her family but other that she wishes to have, she lives in a 5 bed room house, alone, she dines on a table that is set out for the entire family, but eats alone.