Be part of the revolution, start loving your body

At Uni, we were recently given a brief of creating an advertising campaign for a cosmetics company, I chose The Body Shop. My initial idea for this project was to create an advertising campaign based around the tag line “start a revolution, start loving your body” and influenced by revolutionary art work. I later changed the tag line to “be part of the revolution, start loving your body” because the phrasing of it makes the audience feel more involved, like they are part of something powerful and important.

 A painting that I wanted to take inspiration from was Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading The People. The painting was based on a moment when the people of France has succeeded in overthrowing the king, all different types of people, upper class, peasants, men, women all just coming together for one cause. I want my image to be based on this, all different types of women coming together for one reason, to create a new ideology. I originally wanted to have several women climbing over diet books, fashion magazines etc, brandishing a flag in the air. The concept being that they are rising above all the items which suggest that the women are not perfect the way that they are and are starting their own revolution in which women are comfortable in their own skin. However as I started planning and shooting the image, I dropped the idea of the books and magazines and just stuck with the women and the flag, I think it’s a strong enough image in itself without the extra props. I wanted to recreate the dull, muted colours that are used in the painting, so I did test shots using polarised glass over the lens and this did the job. When I went to shoot I used this glass and experimented with different white balance settings to change the colours. When I had my tutorial I was told I needed to reshoot because the background was “distracting”. However when I went to reshoot I couldn’t get hold of the polarised glass and so could not achieve the effect that I wanted in camera. I tried my best to achieve it in Photoshop, I don’t think it looks very good though and I think that this is a weakness of it. Although I quite liked the challenge of trying to figure out how to achieve it digitally, the end result is not how I wanted. I think that a strength would also be the stand of the model’s, particularly the one at the front, her legs are bent, wide apart and looking strong like she is leading the way. The others are lower than her and looking up, hands on each other’s shoulders like they are uniting together and following the character in front. This really puts across the message that I wanted it to. However a weakness would be the expressions of the models, they could do with being more convincing.