First, I took a picture of someone after posing them in what I hoped was a surly, interesting-ish position. I chose the picture of him with the orange headphones partly because I liked the slight difference in colour and partly because I felt the pose in this picture was the most natural.

After playing with the Brightness and Contrast of the photo for a while I decided that I wanted to make the picture look almost cartoonlike with its unrealistic contrast, and went up to over 100. The whites are now blinding against the black of the t-shirt I posed him in, an effect I liked.

I then duplicated layers and deleted the background until my model was isolated in a completely white area. I took the photo in the area shown beforehand because I knew it would be easy for me to white everything out with very little trouble.

I then upped the contrast on these raven photos in the same way as the model, to make them semi-cartoonlike in their block colours. I also liked the way their black feathers were so sharp on the white background. I blurred the ones farther away to give some depth to the photo. I then decided I wanted to change the colours – the fleshy tone that matches the underside of one raven to his headphones and skin is something too human and comfortable for me to keep; I want it to be a little jarring on the eyes and strange.

After adjusting the Hue and Saturation for a little while, I came to this. At first I liked the subtle blue tone and the alien difference (it being the opposite colour) to the original flesh tones. I especially liked the way it looked on the raven that had matching flesh colours. After a while, though, I thought that it was a little too different to the norm and there didn’t seem to be a particularly good reason for this.

I darkened the photo’s saturation and altered the hue to a little more of a purple colour, just to see what it looked like. I happened on this end result almost by accident (because I like the colour purple) but I think it looks good, and conveys what I wanted: the alien concept of having a boy with no human flesh tones, almost the colour of a dead body, while being entirely opposite in colour to the environment around him. I love the small reflection of alien colour in the one bird to the right, as it represents – however superficially – that the only refuge Gabriel can find is through a group, or a death, of ravens.

The way they are circling him is another point: to me they look like vultures circling their prey, though he himself looks so eerily similar to one of them that it could be interpreted that he is their ringleader instead of their prey. It’s entirely up to the audience’s interpretation, and this ambiguity is always a good hook for a static advert, I find.