I chose love and war as my juxtaposition for this montage book. Love and war are these two heavy ideas in their own ways, but when associated, love finds its way forward. It’s a natural phenomenon that occurs and makes people realise that at some point, there will need to be mutual respect and love. As cliche as that sounds, I believe that the action of individuals sharing positive sentiments with one another can be so potent that it reflects on the individuals around them. A subliminal message that I was hoping to get across to the viewer was that the root of war is pride, and pride also affects the way we love. When we decide that our pride can be humbled, both love and war become simple ideas. After all, love doesn’t have to mean having a direct relationship, but rather, respecting who they are and being understanding of how they feel. I titled my project, “Technicolor Sky,” because the sky is synchronised in technicolor.
To gather appropriate content for my montage, I used a variety of history books that were focused on war periods, which showed both the chaos that was going on but also the love that was being shared after the war. It was also a great representation of my narrative for this book. An element that I wanted to tie all the pieces together was the color scheme of the montages. Each of them have this sort of orange and warm feel to them. Doing those changes to the color of the images was also another way for me to express juxtaposition in my book. How there was a lot of war going on but the backdrops were peaceful and beautiful. The montages are more literal than abstract, and I planned it that way because I wanted the viewer to identify that the simple idea of love and war can be transparent.
For the text portion of the book, I decided to come up with six different phrases that I felt said something small in correspondence to the montage it is next to. I wanted it to almost be like these phrases that leave the reader in thought and that forces them to take the concepts to themselves and think about the phrase in their own context. I also found that the phrases and the montage they correspond to, can be things said by some of the figures in the montage. Finding out that it worked was something I could only really see when the book was laid out. All in all, for the text, I wanted to throw small ideas of love and hope at the reader, and let them interpret it how they wish.
The process for creating the book started out with choosing content for the montages. Once I found the appropriate content, I started cutting out certain figures and elements, and placing them together in one image. After I saw what worked and what didn’t, I took it into Photoshop to bring it to together. I needed to bring them into Photoshop early on in the process because I had to re-size some things and add do some editing to make sure that the elements were seamless and didn’t look like they were just cut and pasted. Once the main elements were added in, I brought in my textures, which filled the requirement for something that was hand-made. My textures were used as effects of the things that were happening the images. The textures ended up fitting the narrative perfectly and it added uniqueness to the montages. Lastly, once I had all the images, I started writing out the text. To make the text more captivating, I played with the spacing and added leading. This gave the text more space and made the reader read it fairly slow, just as it looks.
