My original sketch idea had a woman walking into the distance down a long road. I started browsing images, and found some, but the figure was in the mid distance and too identifiable. It wasn’t generic. This is a personal card – a final “screw you, farewell” – and I wanted it to transcend gender and skin colour. So I dropped the idea of showing an individual and focused on the image itself. This magnificent sunset seemed perfect as a metaphor. Cliched, perhaps, but instantly accessible.
The road was centred in the frame. This was rather boring, I felt, and didn’t lend itself to the rest of the composition. I wanted angles in the perspective, so I offset the image in the frame to give it a natural left to right flow. The image feels more calm as a result, I felt. Do you agree?
Rather than using images of people I opted for text - “you” and “me”. This gives the card a first person feel. The images becomes the experience of the viewer. It’s seen through their eyes. The person being abandoned, in my mind, is dull and lifeless and boring: a comic sans of a partner. And the sender of the card is free and liberated: I went for my favourite cursive font here, dear Joe (seems poignant too) but could easily change this to a more flamboyant one if required. , banged on the brakes, kicked him out of the car etc. All very dramatic and subtle, I hope!
I wanted to show transition to a new life. I’d already touched on that with the text typeface but decided to grade the image with a saturation fade to remove the rich colours from the foreground and blend them slowly in to the colour and vibrance of the distance. I was reminded of the Robin Williams character in Woody Allen’s film ‘Deconstructing Harry’, where the director uses a visual trope of throwing Williams out of focus to message his inner turmoil and the social and emotional issues surrounding him. I’d like to explore this approach of using subtle effects to represent the human condition and can see how this could be very powerful and thought provoking.
Finally, the arrow for the escapee was boring. I composited in a jazzy neon arrow – which I could easily have made much larger but didn’t want to impact the landscape beauty – to slam home the message of a new and bright life, out of sight. A small plain text slogan ‘This is as far a you go’ was meant to project a final unsubtle goodbye. It needed a full stop, in hindsight. Breakups are full stops. If time had permitted, I’d have dressed this with roadkill or an oil stain as an additional metaphor. If you guys want to pay for me to go to Arizona for a couple of weeks I could shoot this, with armadillos too.
Arrows take the place of images of the people involved, introducing ambiguity of identify and specific location. And for fun I painted on tyre marks on to the road, to introduce an extra narrative element. She couldn’t take any more
Resources Used – Sunset road
https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-smhmr