Entry 8

Playing with Photoshop in seminar one day got me to do this. I had just seen this film and loved it and also done a presentation on it in Debates in Media Studies. I like to rotate around similar topics and themes for all my modules. Keeps it compact.

Now, this is a very sad and touching film but it's main poster at the same time was very bright and colourful so I took it and changed it to this version. Not much I had to do actually but what I was really trying to do was to see what I could interpret from a black and white photograph of this style having already seen the film.
Maybe this style echoes what goes on throughout most of the film but the ending is a soothing one and perhaps that is what the colour poster is for; to signify that every sad story need not end in a sad way.

I did this because I wanted to take all black and white photographs with a silhouette of red in each of them (the red being taken from Superman's symbol which stands for hope).


This is the effect I wanted to bring out in each photo with the focal point in red and it's surrounding in black and white. This is of course one of the 3-4 scenes in Schindler's List which had colour in the otherwise Black and White Film

Why this Effect? In the film Schindler's List this effect is used to signify loss of life. Millions of people were killed by the nazis. In this frame our attention first goes to the girl but we are looking through the eyes of the protagonist  Oskar Schindler in this film. He sees this girl and is moved by her plight. Schindler´s soul is touched by the child, he feels her pain, cries for her. The plight of the one little girl in red touches him in a way the shear numbers make unreal, it is easy to get lost in numbers. He transforms the faceless mass around him into one real palpable human being. This one child is a symbol of all the 6.000.000 victims, exposed to ruthless slaughter. Each was an individual, who had dreams, who had a life, who had a family. Similarly I wish to have the focal point of my image in red for it to stand out and signify hope. Hope because mankind is not alone, we have each other for us; we don't need a superhero to ruin the equilibrium that we possess.