The Article: http://www.gq.com/story/video-game-rehab

1. Summary:  The article is about a guy name Callum, a World of Warcraft fanatic with an regular office job, most of his life is spending long night playing Warcraft till the sun come up at his office computer. When the morning would dawn, his would sneak into his home so his mom mistake the entrance for the housekeeper. Even though his gaming habits weren’t as bad in his teenage years, it worsened through his college and adult life; to the point that he was doing poorly in college and dropped out of Southern Methodist University. After dropping out, his mother’s boyfriend spotted him a job as a legal aide in his law firm, running errands and helping with the firm, he used World of Warcraft as a the only part of life outside of his aide job. Callum would spend 20 minutes at the job doing legal aide work and the rest was blacking out on his Warcraft life, ranking in the top 10 in the world and using $2000 of his savings account on a PC. From dusk to dawn, his life pertained to his normal nine to five job and his addiction to World of Warcraft.

2. My audience would more pertain to the ages of 20-30, young adults both males and females

3. My approach would be metaphorical with both the portraits and props.

4. It would include mainly models, and still life as well as an alternate.

5. The models would be both males and females to keep it universal to all people.

6. The objects would be video game controllers, headsets, a laptop.

7. I would use strobe lighting, with a 4:1 lighting ratio to bring more drama to the shoot.

8. The technique would need to give me a dark tone for my shoot, the strobe lights and a depth of field to work with both the props and models

Summary:  

Human sex trafficking has always been an issue with no spotlight nor media coverage in the United States, as to most people, it mainly goes on overseas. The United States has had issues on human trafficking for years, as according to the article, it states that “it is estimated that there are almost 300,000 women, children and even men who are trafficked for sexual purposes in our own country.” For the boss, the pimp, it fills his pockets, “a single pimp can earn more than $1.5 million every six months with 6 women or children in their “stable”. An underground hustle that can earn more than the average drug dealer on the corner, by just selling sex in the dark nights is detrimental to somebody’s physical health, but mostly mental health.

Communication Problem:

The problem is to shoot and make images to spread the word on the human trafficking issues around our local communities.

Image Ideas:

A model with the right props can give the right feel for an image for the article, like money, signs, handcuffs, rope, or even a wig. When editing the photos, a darker tone, more gloomy look would create a more meaningful message for the images.

Summary:

The poem “she bring Brand” by e.e. cummings describes an awkward but exciting metaphor of driving a car through Boston in the 60’s. Cummings description of “giving her the juice” and the “slipped up the clutch” line gives the way he’s feeling and his actions when driving the car.

The other poem “Coming Home, Detroit, 1968” by Philip Levine describes the narrator driving his car to work through the city of Detroit during the time of the race riots. He describes his day to work on a Tuesday during the winter, he views the burnt buildings in the city, the dingy streets filled with papers and signs left from the riots. He also receives some flashbacks of how Detroit once was before the riots and industrialization; describing the snowstorm with bears, wolves and wolverines.

Image Ideas: 

The Idea would be creating the right portraits for the two poems, the picture of the toy car in the right lighting, a 1:1 or 2:1 lighting would create a poetic approach to the toy car photos to add concepts of the poems were shooting for.

Summary:

The article provides the commonly private cycles of how American potatoes are manufactured and planted in factories today. The millions of potatoes that are cropped everyday are now being more reproduced through the process of genetic engineering, which the manufacturing companies use to ” protect themselves from insects and diseases without the help of pesticides”. The new growing potatoes in the farms are being put through toxic chemicals procedures to keep the potatoes lasting longer, but with the side effect using the information on the potatoes plant cells to keep a cycle of enhanced potatoes in the right procedures. The making of our plants, or even agriculture itself is being portrayed as a “software”, “robotic, acomputer-like system in the farms and factories and how we crop our plants.

Communication Problem:

The communication problem would be in which way can we portray that the toxins being put on our potatoes detrimental to our healthy. It should be a message that the chemicals that’s being put in our food is basically as putting drugs in your stomach, how genetic engineering is risking our health and putting poison in our potatoes.

Image Ideas:

The image idea should be something not too graphic, but a simple, clever way of sending a message. Here some examples I found (Pic 1)(Pic 2) to inspire some ideas for the shooting.