Creating the artist's photograph

In order to film the shots of the artist painting, we need a photograph to start from that the artist will use to create the painting. We have chosen a still image of the leading girl who plays the girl he loves in the music video. Using Photoshop, I then duplicated the layer so that there were two copies of the image.

I added an average blur filter over the image, which did not alter it much. I then added a surface blur with the radius of 51 pixels and a threshold of 116 levels, which created this effect.

I placed the duplicated layer over the blurred layer and then cut out the head by deleting the unblurred background, revealing the blurred background of the layer underneath.

I reduced the size of both the background image and the head image and aligned them, so that more of the background was visible and the blur was more obvious. This was the result, an image in focus with a blurred background to create the impression of a fantasy, with only the girl in focus in the artist's view, representing his obsession with her.