The Art of Ping Pong - Analysis

In the process of coming up with my first basic ideas for the project, there was one that eventually came to inspire the final poster I would produce. I wanted to show the feelings of disconnection and isolation, which morphed into representing a block on communication and an inability to convey thoughts and emotions, despite attempts to. I would show this by taking various words, writing them on the bat, and crossing them out until they were no longer legible. This morphed into the more engaging idea of burning/singing them, and this was what influenced my final poster. I made the choice to produce a poster as it meant I wouldn’t be limited by what I could physically do with the bat; it would be more flexible. My original idea (which was sparked from the idea of burning the words off the bat) for the final poster was to find a plain wooden bat and burn it. I would photograph it burning, and this would be the foundation for a multiple exposure poster. I would also take a series of photographs of various things relevant in some way to my experience with lockdown, and then print and burn these, with the final poster consisting of the burning bat and burning photographs overlaid onto it. When it came time to actually burn the bat, I took far more photographs than just the one I needed, because it wasn’t something I could redo, so I needed to make sure I had a wide range to choose the very best one from (I took 184 of the bat burning, and a total of 352 including the photos I printed and the photos of those printed copies burning). Inevitably, I had trouble choosing which to use when it came time to make the final poster, and my idea then morphed into a multiple exposure of the bat covering different stages of it burning, dropping the usage of the burning photos. I selected twelve photos that I thought covered this range, and started playing around, seeing how I could get it to look good. Eventually, I dropped this even further to just four images, which meant that the details of each were far more easy to discern, although the effect of the different stages of burning was diminished slightly. However, there was a sense of chaos and disorder to it (especially in tandem with the use of fire and everything that connotes) that I enjoyed, as not only did this make for an interesting visual, but it also well represented the broad experience of lockdown and everything that had occurred since March. I would expand on these themes subsequently. Eventually, I reached a point where I was happy with how it looked. I then moved on to thinking about how I could enhance the image further. I wanted to play around with the colours used, using a largely black and white colour scheme with the exception of certain colours highlighted and accentuated. This was inspired partially by media I’ve seen with that technique, but also because the colour red carries connotations of chaos, disorder, as well as emotional intensity and richness, and these themes worked well to symbolise and tie back to the underlying theme of my experience with lockdown. The black and white also helped to make the red stand out that much more, focussing all attention on the vibrancy of the red. The last thing I did after all of this was add a slight motion blur around the edges of the poster, making it look like the camera was rushing forwards, honing in on the bat. This added to the intensity and gave yet another visual cue of what the focus was, guiding your eyes into the centre of the image. Additionally, it added a slight claustrophobic sense, giving the impression of inevitability and closing in on chaos, which once again ties back to the original theme. After all of this, the poster was complete.

In summary, the fire, multiple exposure, colour scheme, and zoom are all intended to highlight my experience with lockdown, as well as to create a visually engaging poster.