Assignment 5 Planning

I had identified my subject for this assignment quite a while ago. My theme is going to be “anti-hunting/anti-poaching”, but I plan on giving it a bit of a twist. I was inspired by the TV series “Zoo” where animals go on the rampage and start hunting humans. I am constantly sickened by the photos of poached rhinos or elephants, hunted for their tusks and pointless game hunting, which are shared with me by friends and family back in South Africa. I  started to contemplate what would it look like if the shoe was on the other foot, or if you (the human) were me (the animal)…

Initially I thought I would just do one photo, but I am now leaning towards a short series. I will have to see where my intuition takes me.

As the narrative will be totally fictional, I will be emphasising that by photographing in non-indigenous spaces. I couldn’t justify a quick trip to the savannah pleins of Africa to do this shoot.

So on my to do list is to scout out a suitable forest location. I’m looking for some place that has a bit of open space where I can spread out my lighting equipment and preferably where there isn’t much foot traffic. I think I will also need a bit of dense forest as well. Luckily there is no shortage of forests where I live, so this is the easy part.

I also have to procure either a real or a good fake rifle to use. I will most probably go the route of a toy rifle as I don’t want to have to get involved with gun permits and so on. This will also allow me the flexibility of being able to go back and reshoot as I need without having to have the gun’s owner tag along.

I have acquired an animal’s facial mask and I think I can get away with only using the face mask. I can dress my husband up in hunting clothes to compensate for the animal fur, without losing any translation in the message that I hope to bring across. Thankfully I can use my family members as models for this assignment.

I will also need to research how to do bullet hole makeup. I have watched a couple of youtube videos on this and it seems to be something that I can do fairly easily so I’ll do some practice shots of that as well.