Process

At first, I used GarageBand, though the tool that is used to easily make instruments out of sound files died sometime after 2011, which really limited what I could do, considering my plan to make a song out of Skype sounds. Then GarageBand kept crashing, and it was really hard to make a rhythm using short tunes that already existed and I could never make something I was satisfied with, so I abandoned sound entirely since after several hours of work I had produced three seconds of dissonant music.

I used Photoshop to create this artwork. My process involved creating one collage of images for each person with their respective themes. I then created a layer mask to make the shape of those collages the same as the people they represented. I then changed the layer type to hard light to simulate the overlay and lowered the opacity to 67% so that the features of the people and the content of the artworks would be distinct. I then made another layer to create the black background (the original image used white, but black seemed more appropriate due to its connotation of darkness and the void and so the rest of the image would stand out better). This layer was black where there were no people and transparent where people were. I then used a Gaussian blur on that layer to create the glow around the subjects. My tablet was used to make the words "save us," which I scrawled to make it seem more dark and desperate.