Recognition Day - Shortlist

This was my favourite idea on paper, it looked very promising.

The basic idea was to have a piece of paper ripped in two representing a grudge between two people. A plaster joins them back together representing that they have apologised and forgiven each other and everythings now fine and dandy.

That was the original idea, very plain and simple but I added a lot to it... in hindsight this might have been a mistake as I might have overcomplicated it. The first ammendment I made was to add the word 'sorry' over the plaster as I thought this would clarify the message, rather than forcing the viewer to figure out the metaphor themselves.

This was the result:I added colour to the plaster purely for aesthetic reasons.

I then decided to take clarifying the message a step further by using an actual image of two friends and using photoshop, make it look like the photo has been ripped and joined together, again with a plaster.

The first image was part of the development stage when creating the rip (which proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought!), I really liked the simplicity of it, and I think could also make a strong contender on its own.
The photograph I used for the rest of the images was a digital photo and I wanted it to look like a print, so I added a film grain effect to it, and crumpled up an old photo and scanned in the white underside of it, and overlayed the shadows that the scanner picked up.
I was playing with the idea of making it look like it was put in a scrap-book, to show that it has value but I thought that having the photo fill the entire frame was a lot stronger.

Heres some of the development work:
Above is the scan of the plaster I used and below that is experimentation with typography that was overlaid on top of the plaster. I wanted it to be hand-written as it has a more personal feel.

The left and middle image contains the photo that I used to create the tear effect. I put a coloured piece of paper behind it to make it easy to delete using the magic wand tool. It was really difficult to delete the rest of the image using the ereaser tool to just leave the tear remaning thus I used a marker to darken the area around the tear so that again, I could use the magic wand tool (its magic!).
The last image is the photo that I crumpled up and overlaid on top of the photo to make it look authentic.