The Final Project For my final project I will have pictures of my own photography (pictures of magic tricks) hanging from string in which my hands will be filmed underneath doing a selection of real magic trick in which, for the finale, i will be using stop frame photography to do an impossible trick. To give the video a stop frame effect i will be rendering the video in frames as JPEG pictures in which i will delete some of the frames inbetween every however many frames and increasing the time length of each picture. I want a completely dark background in which only my hands, the tricks and maybe a very feint view of myself can be seen. Although it is obviously edited and ignoring the random floating orb, the hands in this picture are how i wish for mine to look in the video.

To make my hands have this effect i lit candles around my workspace in which the light's radius only lit up my hand and the tricks themselves. I got my mum to take a picture every couple of seconds and then put them all in order so this switched quickly and seemed like a video and added some music to add to the magic/eerie mood.

My idea is to photograph illusion. As a child i loved magic and wanted to be a magician myself so i learnt a lot of the basic tricks found in magic books etc, One of these tricks was how to make the emotionless face of the Queen on notes smile or be sad. I decided to photograph this stage by stage without showing the creases that have to be made as a magician never reveals his secrets.

I think both emotions can sybolise different feelings about money for example, when she smiles it symbolises the happiness people experience when they get money and the strive people have to get it. But the picture of her frowning could show how many people feel that money is the route of all evil and is ruining the nature of peoples dreams and lives and that there is more to life.

Illusion My idea is to show how through photography, we can mislead the eye into believing things are, what they're not. I will be touching on magic and the whole career and history of illusionists, comparing the the old illusionists who started off the trade e.g. Houdini, to the new illusionists of today e.g. Derren Brown and David Blaine. I started off my project by doing some studio photography of normal everyday objects available from most classrooms, i then adjusted the Depth of Field and aperture to blur the picture so i could then add it to another picture off the internet and make it blend in as a different object. Firstly I photographed a banana up against a black background as I planned to mask this out later. I made sure the photo was sharp and the best I could get it. I then decided the shape almost resembled a flame so I blurred out the main details of the banana such as the bruising and stalk to amplify the flame effect. After I had done this I found an un lit candle on google images and masked and pasted the banana in the place that the flame would be. I all I actually feel this worked very well as I have tricked quite a few people into believing it was just a picture of a candle.