Past and Future Vancouver

description

The design solution chosen to depict Vancouver's past and future through the use of Photoshop collaging was created in an attempt to portray Vancouver's historically beautiful landscape and natural scenery juxtaposed against the harsher industrial reality which Vancouver currently displays, and that will only worsen with time. The first poster has a focus on the future interpretation of Vancouver, using enlarged pictures of industrial scenery including metal sheeting for walls, dark concrete bridges and a jumble of telephone and bus wires in the sky. These scenes were all taken during rainy nights, and contrast starkly with the pictures depicting past Vancouver, all of which are brighter, very colorful, and display no trace of human existence. A strong symbolic element of the first collage is the crooked stairways leading to a dark tunnelled bridge, which leads to light at the end of the tunnel that happens to shine through trees from a picture of a forest. As if the only salvation from the crude industrial landscape of the future, is to travel towards the light of the natural past.

The second poster places more focus on past Vancouver's lush scenery, and is therefore symbolically layered more cohesively than the first poster with a more fluent composition, as if displaying a watercolour natural scenery. The primary image of the collage is the crow at the top of the page, which the viewers eye constantly flows to and stops at before scanning the page again. The crow symbolizes a manifestation of nature and all living things watching over the forest and guarding the land, but just next to the crow on a lower branch, the silhouette of a man also stakes vigil and is thus attempting to play god, or take over nature's role as the guardian and safe keeper of the earth.