For my second idea memory I decided to take something that wasn’t a specific memory to me. Something that I have never had the pleasure of experiencing while growing up, something called the boogie man. An apparition to me certainly, but to other people something far more frightening. I looked at this notion that only children are scared by this creation of the mind. My first image that I edited was to depict a child’s bedroom with a strange sadistic feel about the room. Initially I wanted to create a night and day effect where the room comes to life during the night. So for example the teddys. You can see that there are quite a lot of teddies in this room and I wanted to edit these. I’m sure I’ve seen these around somewhere, but there are some evil teddies with massive mouths and sharp teeth, and they appear to be a kids teddie (I might actually be dreaming this however!). But I can’t remember for the life of me what they are or where they’re from. I wanted to photoshop these evil teddies into the photo and change different aspects of the room. Firstly to make it look more scary the night photo should be lit just by light from the window. Immediately I thought of lightning. As I was unable to create a set and create this room myself I was unable to light the room accordingly, so I therefore decided to darken the room the photoshop. This then gave me a slightly more evil feel. Then the lightning would be put into the photo, and this was done by editing out the window panes and pasting a photo of a thunderstorm behind. Giving the effect that there’s a storm outside (I figured that while a thunderstorm of sorts was present this enhanced the effects one feel while thinking of an apparition or ‘boogie man’). Unfortunately editing the bears was proving quite difficult and I was unable to continue that path, I therefore had to think of another way of creating this feel of fear. That’s when a pair of eyes popped into my head, literally! I thought that something we find really scary is just seeing a pair of eyes with light only just showing them up. I tried to edit some eyes off either pictures of me or ones of my mates so I can make them slightly more scary. Unfortunately this proved quite hard to do and I opted to see if I could find some better ones elsewhere. I managed to find some quite sadistic looking eyes and decided to edit them slightly. Eventually when I thought they looked right I copied them and faded them on top of the image I’d already created. Giving the rather scary effect of your room constantly being watched by something you think is there but can’t ever see.
For my second picture I’ve decided to keep with the boogie man only this time I want to make his visible, be it barely. As I have no idea (as I’m sure no on else does) what the boogie man looks like, I thought I’d try looking on the internet to see if I could find some interpretations of it. I managed to find a weird looking thing…
and from this I toned down his colour by desaturating him which created a black or white image. This was then cropped and fitted into the picture. Ahh yes the picture, I found an old picture from a holiday a while ago which I felt was perfect. I needed a bed and someone laying in it in order for it to look and feel ‘real’. Once I had both images in place I wanted to create night again, as I said earlier, because the boogie man only comes out at night. This was done in a different way this time, I managed to create a flash light effect giving light in a directional way and slowly becoming weaker going outwards. This created the effect of someone else being in the room perhaps being frightened, getting out of bed and finding a torch… for some reason. I won’t get into the characters involved in this picture, mainly because there aren’t any. I digress. Also I’ve tried to make it so the boogie man is not completely visible, for a start he’s hiding behind the bed and the torch can only just see him.
The Boogie man picture
This video could be used for both my memory and power themes.
While doing my research I came across this magical little poster…
… I checked out the link and to my amazement theres a song written about the boogie man! The first words are: “Thought I heard a noise, sort of creepy noise ” Next term I hope to have learnt it on the guitar to play for everyone to have a sing along, sing song.
