Montage It: Interior

Background

Add model picture

Floor texture

Add dancers (degas painting)

mirror reflections

Trees foreground

Filter

Montage It: Week 3, Day Montage

Original image

Edit building facades to edit out tree

Swap the sky out for this stormy, cloudy one 

Add building

Add drawing components

Add stairs

Increase opacity of background sepia layer thing, add railing bits 

Add ground pedestrians

Add dancers inside building

 Splice street facade of neighbouring buildings and bring layer up

Add filter to even out colour variations--Final day montage (version 1)

The opacity of the back screen is higher and as a result has a more graphical quality.

This version looks more realistic but it is harder to see details of the building :(

For the submitted montage, I used a opacity somewhere inbetween.

Layers used 

Montage It: Week 2

Original image

Black out existing building

Original colour values of photo were similar to this

Tweaked values

Add shadows

Trees for atmosphere

Original image of dancers

Edited into montage

Add filter

Final montage for week 2

Layers used

Montage It: Week 1

Final image

This is created from several major components: building, dancers (inside building), sitting people, mist.

Original

These were all the layers I had. I'm not good with naming the layers, but I can usually keep track of what things are.

Placing my model into the landscape with some tweaking of colour values looked like this. It was a lot more reddish/pinkish initially (as below), so this already looks a lot better.

Adding some shadows inside and outside to blend it with the environment more...

Dancers + (inaccurate..) reflections + shadows inside

Add a bit of atmospheric mist...

Some people (about 3 layers) for a little bit of a sense of scale.

Montage It: Final Montages

Montage It: Model

The client is a dancer, so I designed a dance studio.

My concepts were drawn from themes of the movie, and a lot of the visual quality of it.

I drew heavily from the (most obvious) black/white motif, with the two mixing and overlapping, and the black enveloping the pure whiteness, as Nina was eventually overtaken by the 'black swan' in the film. I built the model from cardboard that was white on one side and black on the other (bought like that). I had made a smaller test model from cereal box, and tried to use balsa wood for my final model, but it couldn't support the sharp angles I was trying to make. The cardboard supported the sharp angles and the whole construction is quite jaggered to capture the harshness of the film.

The interior is empty, as required for rehearsal space, but feels suffocating and hollow because the ceiling is unusually high and the windows are placed high up. Two of the interior walls are mirrors (shiny cardboard :D), and while this is common in rehearsal halls, it feels unnerving and introspective in this case because it is undisrupted, which is a quality of the film, as she looks into herself and goes mad...

I wanted captured the duality of the film (two distinct personalities of black & white swan), and did so by splitting the roof, making a butterfly roof sort of thing.

The studio is not intended to be used just for the client, as dance studios are utilised by many 'artists', practicing dancers, dancing schools, etc. Note to capture this aspect in the montages (the actual client is never physically featured in the montages, but is instead represented through the model.

Montage It: Client

I chose the fictional 'artist', Nina Sayers from the film Black Swan as my client. If you haven't seen it, she's a dancer/ballerina, who goes crazy, has a lesbian drug dream, turns into a swan and then dies (probably). I'm sort of kidding, sort of not...