For this assignment we had to take a photo from a series of photographs taken by Jonathan Worth of author Cory Doctorow and remix them.   The photos were found here and we were encouraged to draw ideas from the themes and topics of Cory’s books for this remix.

I found this assignment that hardest of the week.  It wasn’t the assignment itself that I had trouble doing, it was coming up with a good idea.  I literally sat in front of my computer for a good forty-five minutes before I came up with anything that I liked at all.

I ended up spending a little bit of time on his website and came across one of his books called “The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” and got my first idea that I really liked (and immediately thought of the really stinking annoying song they play over and over on the carousel of progress in Disney).  Here is a clip to a trailer for the book:

This preview talks a lot how our society is constantly changing and evolving and that is what it makes our future great.  I starting thinking about how I could show that in one of the pictures.  I decided that I wanted to take one picture and show it in different stages of evolution.  I was going to take the picture and make it look “older”.  I was then going to combine the four pictures next to one another so that the changes would appear more drastic.

To do this I uploaded the picture into gimp. I then reduced the size of the picture so that each would be about 200×200.  I then used the posterize tool to make my pictures look older.  I played around with this tool for a bit until I made the pictures look how I wanted them too.  After getting all four pictures to a setting that I was comfortable with I placed them side by side so that you could see the difference in effect.

Here is what I came up with: