Making Blank Canvases

So now the photo choices have been narrowed down and I know exactly where I'll be filming, I needed to begin the painstaking process of wiping them clean of any signs of life or movement, in order to convincingly add my own.

What I mean is, it wouldn't look right if I'm adding my own person walking along the street, only to see a person walking in the background, but not moving and frozen in time as part of the original photograph. Sure, it might not even be seen, but I just thought it would be best to get the shots and streets as clean as possible before putting in any additional movement.

In some of the busier street scenes, this would be way too tricky, and as a result I made my photo choices with this in mind, choosing what WOULD work better as opposed to what wouldn't. Such photos, like this one for example of Wicker Arches...

...had way too much going on in order to wipe clean effectively, as doing so wouldn't leave enough of the original photo intact in order to bother.

But for the ones that did work I tried to remove as much as I could and make the streets empty, while still keeping the look and structure of the originals intact. These would then provide the base foundation for my old crossfade transitions when I added life and animations to them later.

So using a Photoshop combination of smudge tool, clone tool, and good old fashioned cutting and pasting from other suitable image sources, I started working on each photo in turn. I won't waste time showing every single edit I did and photo I tweaked, but here are just a few examples of the process...

Goodbye Mr. Policeman!

Goodbye old jay walkers!

Now you see them, now you don't!

So long horsey!

Due to the monochrome colour set and low quality of the original images, the process wasn't too hard to pull off. Obviously, I probably wouldn't have got away with this kind of edit on today's increased level of digital quality, but for the task at hand, it proved effective enough. Plus, baring in mind that I intended to add old grainy film effect to each shot, it would cover up any dodgy bits suitably.

At times, the process itself became quite spooky, such as when fading out each individual person in the streets. This one in particular sent a shiver down my spine a little...

Fading out these people from the past, like ghostly echoes of a time long gone, serving as a distant reminder of people, characters, personalities that are no more. It had a kind of bittersweet poetry to it.