Visual Manipulation
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<<Studio: Final Project>>
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For my seminar research paper, I am exploring how female protagonists’ portrayal differ from the 20th and 21st century VHS and DVD covers of Disney movies. The movies that I am to analyze are Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, which are one of the original fairy tale films from Disney, and the most recent films Brave and Frozen. On the covers, the fairytale characters are presented with certain fashion that by analyzing their behaviors, gestures and appearances, the certain social expectations of the females of both 20th and 21st century can be denoted.
However, not only do the physical appearances and behaviors demonstrate a certain message to the audience. The technical aspect of visual communications of these DVD and VHS covers also differ from each other, which also gives another perspective into how princesses are being portrayed. Such visual cues are colors, size and scale, composition and typography. These elements are what interested me to develop my studio project as the effect of visual communication can manipulate to a certain perception.
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PROGRESS
<<Optical Illusion GIF>>
To start and explore the idea of visual manipulation, I first started with a literal take on the subject, where I have created a GIF that was inspired by optical illusions that change our perception of an image.
<<American Propaganda Poster>>
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My initial idea was to translate Disney princesses and the context of the stories into a Propaganda posters, utilizing the similar concept of how visual communication allow to transmit messages that reflect on the social and cultural values of that particular time and setting. I am also going to use this idea and link it back to my culture and background to South Korea and North Korea and further explore on the idea of visual manipulation and explore and analyze propaganda posters from North Korea, which then I will make my own cover/poster that changes the portrayal of Disney princesses into a completely different and new cultural and social perspective. I initially chose my primary sources as the DVD and VHS covers as it was from my own experience to see these 20th century Disney princesses for the first time on the VHS covers and I want to explore how that would have changed if these VHS have been exported to North Korea, where propaganda still continues from 20th to 21st century.
Combined outcome:
“Although the usage of the Propaganda idea was interesting, I could not deliver an exact sense of a Propaganda poster. Developing from this Idea, I researched more into campaigns and awareness posters that were also under the category of Propaganda, yet that approaches the audience more in a subtle light. From this I began to search Sexual Assault, Cyber Bullying, Domestic Violence, Pedophilia, Health awareness campaigns which I found very captivated. “
Sleeping Beauty
<<Sexual Assault awareness posters>>
I downloaded the Disney Sleeping Beauty movie and took a screenshot of where I could possibly insert a health awareness campaign that was ironic to the movie, then researched sexual violence/ rape campaigns online.
I then tried with Sleeping Beauty Princess Aurora and her prince to make the context shifted into the sexual violence campaign, inspired by the actual posters above.
Although I tried to use an existing campaign, my remake version did not seem as authentic due to the visual elements such as the fonts, image resolution, and composition of the poster. So I tried out other versions with different visual cues to experiment. Also the original screenshot of the Prince kissing the Princess did not seem as impactful to be used as a sexual violence campaign, so I photoshopped the Prince’s face from a scene where the prince fell off his horse.
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- Original
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- Photoshopped
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- With white background
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- Final poster
I downloaded a Disney font to make it more recognizable and more ironic.
Cinderella
<<Sexual Assault awareness posters>>
Screenshots of the Disney film Cinderella. Initially I did not think of using this particular screenshot of Cinderella sobbing on the floor, however while researching I found an image with all the Disney Princesses lying down and crying. From this, I developed an idea of manipulating the image to seem like she was ‘drunk’ and not ‘sobbing’. I then photoshopped the image of the Prince onto the background with Cinderella to create the final poster.
Setting it in a realistic background. The photo was taken on a Saturday night in New York.
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