So remember last week when I said I had a cool Shaun of the Dead-based mini-project on the go? Well here it is.

(PS If you’re looking for my Frampton post (DAN!) look at last week’s post)

As I mentioned in my last post, we watched four films last Tuesday and Dan picked out about five key frames for each and uploaded them to the OTF blog. Our task was to pick one (any one!) from any of the films and do two recreations of it. Because I enjoyed the film so much and because I thought it would be fun to recreate, I picked the above screenshot from Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004).

The first recreation had to be a reasonably close imitation of the original, and for me, this was the fun part. It was never going to be as magnificent as this shot (which I’m glad Dan pointed out because I have to admit I didn’t notice the superb framing the first time around), but I had a lot of fun making this up:

As with all my photography, due to using my phone camera it’s not great quality, but the focus worked better than I had expected. Obviously the shirt is empty so it doesn’t achieve quite the same effect as in the film, although I’m pretty happy with my pink food dye blood (which I applied in RMIT’s media lunchroom much to the amusement of my peers I’m sure). I also may have cheated a teensy bit (the running girl is actually a photo on my laptop as I didn’t have a friend with me at the time to help me out) but I think (hope!) it does evoke that sense of depth.

Our second frame I found much harder. This time, we had to reinvent the picture (so we had a bit more creative license), incorporating a theoretical element from last week’s Deleuze reading. I found it really difficult to think of a way to incorporate Deleuze’s highly theoretical concepts into a photo, so eventually I settled on his discussion of geometry versus physicality. Deleuze discusses the universal measurement given to subjects by a camera, and argues (I think – I did struggle to understand some of it!) that a cinematic frame has to be either geometrical or physical, not both, and interestingly Dan disagreed with this. So, I decided to see if I could in fact, using the same effect in the Shaun of the Dead frame that is shooting the subject through something else, still create a frame that appeared to be entirely two dimensional. This is what I came up with:

Fairly simple, I know, but that was kind of the idea. I used notepaper as the stripes provided a good contrast with the striped couch behind, and I cut out a hole to take the shot through (as with the Shaun of the Dead frame and my imitation). While I think the depth is somewhat lost (and yes, I realise the strangeness of a photographer trying to eliminate depth), using my phone I found it difficult to hold the camera flat, and it was equally difficult to hold the paper still, so you can see where it moves around and I think that does give that sense of the third dimension. However, what is lost is the viewers’ ability to determine how much space there is between the foreground and background, so in that sense I achieved my aim.