At college I studied photography and graphic design (two obvious choices when I knew being an equine photographer was what I wanted to do) but I also studied English. Despite being Dyslexic, meaning I struggle to get the words from my head to paper, and having horrendous spelling (I actually got 0/10 on a number of spelling tests, which I am no longer afraid to confess) I still loved it, especially the metaphors (a poetic representation of an object or concept by comparing it’s likeness to something else).
When studying The Handmaid’s Tale, a classic Dystopia by Margaret Atwood, I had a book filled with highlighted sections, as the book was strife with such figurative expressions. My lecturer asked us to keep a look out for metaphors in every day life and at this point I would start noticing the use of them in articles, posters, facebook advertisements, they are everywhere!
During this period I went to the theatre with my partner to see “An Inspector calls”, a narrative we had both studied at school. Because of this the metaphors through speech jumped out at me instantly, as they were the words we had acquired knowledge of, but that wasn’t all. As the performance played out, I found myself immersed in the visual connotations that were present on the stage before me. The use of levels to put dominant characters on a pedestal before those of a lower rank, the house filled with secrets being torn apart when the inspector exposes the treachery that the Birling family had tried to cover up. THAT was when I realised there was a reason I loved and needed English, as now I could see the possibility to tell a story with a deeper meaning without words, just using imagery.
every movie has a tinge or filter. Horror movies (for example The Woman In Black) has a Blue/grey overlay throughout, removing the bright happy colours, in order to make the atmosphere more chilling. On the contrary, period dramas such as Sense and Sensibility have adopted a slightly warm overlay, to make the appearance more vintage, like an aged film, helping the footage slip seamlessly in to the time of which it is set. These are things we aren’t really meant to notice, but are picked by our subconscious.
I felt the image below was a perfect way to show you the understanding of colours, as it taken of Morgan and Duke in 2019. The image on the left shows the colours which were present in the original image taken by my camera, however I didn’t feel they were right, as Morgan was riding side saddle, dressed in a traditional habit (a dress created specifically for ladies riding in the 17th Century). For this reason, I opted for a more traditional film style colour scheme to Bring the image in to the right era.
A great example I find for this is the Netflix series “Stranger Things”. For anyone who hasn’t seen this, the evil parallel universe called the
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