Forrest Gump

Hello! Once again I am back to present to you my second project, Forrest Gump. This post will also be presented in a timeline format too like ‘My Line is Emo’.

Pre-lesson

We were supposed to find 4 movie quotes and distort it’s original meaning using our own imagination. For this project, I chose 4 quotes from the animated movie ‘Rise of the Guardians’.

  1. “Hey, wind! Take me home!”
  2. “Do you stop believing in the moon just because the sun comes up?”
  3. “You’re all hard work and deadlines, and I’m all snowballs and fun times.”
  4. “It was dark, and it was cold. And I was scared.”

I was initially unsure as to what to do, so I whipped up a few sketches and compositions for each movie quotes.

Ideas floating around here and there. No idea where I’m going.

21/9/17

I went to check out some past year works by our seniors and realised that my ideas are too narrow and straightforward. I need to break away from preconceived context that I know and just let my imagination run wild.

24/9/17

I was still quite lost and wondering what I should do at this point.

“Hmmm what would be something weird and funny that I can do”

How about MEMES?

“OH YEA THAT’S GREAT!”

Can we make it even better?

“How about GAMING MEMES?”

WONDERFUL!

And that was how it began. I’m a big fan of video games and memes, so I thought it would be interesting to reinterpret these quotes in the context of video game memes.

Sooooo in case you’re wondering ‘what are video game memes?’ I’ll give you a brief explanation. Memes are generally an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations. So video game memes are trends that have emerged from video games.

I also had the wacky idea of going against the quote, much like Rene Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images’, so all of my compositions will not match up with the quote.

“The Treachery of Images”, 1928-29, 25in x 37in, Oil on Canvas, Rene Magritte. Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b9/MagrittePipe.jpg/300px-MagrittePipe.jpg on 3/10/17.
“Do you stop believing in the moon just because the sun comes up?”

Since I want to go against the quote, I reinterpreted the quote as “Do you worship the moon since the Sun didn’t come up?”. The most iconic moon I could think of was the Moon from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, where it’s creepy moon is the central figure to the plot and story.

Pretty spooky, eh? Retrieved from https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/youtubepoop/images/4/47/Moon.png/revision/latest?cb=20150213010213 on 3/10/17

As for the ‘worship’ part, I started to brainstorm what were memes that people have ‘worshipped’ to. I managed to find 3, which were ‘Hail Helix’, ‘Praise the Sun’ and ‘Praying to RNGesus’. All 3 memes stem from a joke that have emerged from their respective games or culture. And hence I came to my first composition.

Composition 1: WORSHIPPING THE MOON

I had the 3 icons looking up towards the moon, but I felt that the moon’s presence was too overwhelming, and the composition felt very flat and not dynamic enough… which leads to my second composition.

Composition 2: Still worshipping the Moon

I used the threshold level to set everything to black and white since the styles between games are so different so having everything in black and white is more consistent. As for the composition, the symmetrical feeling to the composition also feels very unappealing and boring, plus the characters at the bottom were too black to make out enough of their shapes. So I mixed it up a bit.

Composition 3: Extra worshipping
Composition 4: Spot the difference

The moon is smaller but still enough to catch the attention of viewers first, plus the different characters at the bottom are all pointing upwards to the moon, giving it further emphasis. I changed the Knight from Composition 3 to 4 since the rest of the characters have certain shadow values while the knight was of a flat colour, which gives the picture more consistency too. This was where I stopped before I showed Joy the composition on 28/9/17.

27/9/17

“Hey, wind! Take me home!”

So as usual, I wanted to go against the quote, so I reinterpreted it as something like ‘Hey [some other form of transportation], take me to somewhere unknown!”

So this is what I first came up with.

“Uhhh Hilary what is this…?”

I chose teleportation as the mode of transport, using portals (from the Portal series) and a crazy rabbid (from the Rabbids series) where the rabbid gets transported into this black box of of saltiness. Salt in gaming terms usually refers to someone getting angry and pissed, so in the black box I placed different items that may make people salty, such as the Blue Shell from the Mario Kart franchise or Cuccos from the Zelda franchise. However I felt that this composition is a bit bland and messy, so I added some stuff.

Yea I know it looks almost the same as the previous one… haha

I thought the splashes give the image a more “shocking” feeling compared to the other one, but I still wasn’t really satisfied with it. However I stopped here for the day since I was tired and decided to ask for some consultation before continuing.

28/9/17 (First Group Consultation)

During our first group consultation, my classmates have given me great advice regarding my compositions.

The ‘Moon’ composition: They recommended that I added some context to the composition, since most people would not be able to understand the meaning behind the work and the references to the different memes were somewhat obscure.

The ‘wind’ composition: Some liked the idea of the teleportation, some not so much. They felt that the clutter of items in one corner does not really make any sense, and that it was just there to dump the items in one corner. They were unable to really see that the Rabbid was ‘teleporting’ from one place to another too.

Hence, I completely overhauled both of the compositions above, which I will go on to elaborate below.

3/10/17

“You’re all hard work and deadlines, and I’m all snowballs and fun times.”

For this quote, I chose to reinterpret it as “You’re all easy work and unlimited time, and I’m all fireballs and bad times.” So while racking my brain to come up with a composition, I thought of an iconic line from a game called Undertale, which was “You feel like you’re going to have a bad time.” From that quote, I thought of another iconic character from the game Danganronpa called Monokuma, which is a symbol of “Despair” within the game, so I decided to mash the two of them together.

Upupupupupu…

This composition ended up looking slightly ambiguous, since the line could mean either the character on the screen is having “a bad time” or could be the reader having “a bad time”. I also added fireballs to the composition in a falling meteorite manner to make it look more chaotic. The whole composition is also in pixel style to match up with the UI of the original game. What a great time to despair!

…until I realised I can’t have a landscape composition, so I changed the layout slightly (2 days later when I discovered it.) 🙁

“It was dark, and it was cold. And I was scared.”

This was reinterpreted as “It was bright, and it was hot. And I was calm.”

I was researching a meme called ‘The floor is lava” as part of the “hot” part of the quote, but none of the compositions or ideas really clicked with me. Then after some more thinking, out of nowhere (like really, I don’t remember how I thought of this wacky idea) I remembered about this Sun Goddess Amateratsu from the game Ōkami, which is in the form of a dog. So I googled “Okami meme” and I realised that Doge Amateratsu is a thing and it’s so adorable!

Such bright. Much hot. All goodness. Retrieved from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/08/e3/93/08e39332b63d4c8aa3e7155ae7831768.jpg on 5/10/17

Doge is an internet meme that is associated with Shiba Inus and is usually captioned with interior monologues written in comic sans. The Doge is generally very nice and innocent, much like the “calm” part of my quote. Furthermore, since this is the Sun Goddess, it makes everything really “bright” and “hot”! So now the question is, how do I show that? I immediately thought of the “Sweating towel guy” meme, where an illustration of a dude sweating profusely while wiping his sweat away with a towel is accompanied by some text which describes a sticky situation and the difficulty to resolve it.

When you have 5 projects due next week and you haven’t started on all of them yet (Retrieved from http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/013/306/2dd.jpg on 5/10/17)

This illustration spawned countless parodies, usually replacing the guy with a different character, so with a little more digging I managed to find a variety of game characters all with this action of sweating or in some sort of peril and placed them around the Sun God.

Intense sweating intensifies

I found this composition really funny, hence I stuck with it.

5/10/17 (Silkscreening practice day)

This was the day where we got to come back to reprint our works. Unfortunately, the water jet was not working well, so most of our designs were unable to come out on the silkscreen. Furthermore, I accidentally tore my silkscreen, resulting in 3 hours of effort all saying goodbye to me. Thankfully enough, with Joy’s assistance, I was able to come back the next day to complete my work.

6/10/17 (Actual silkscreening of composition)

Thankfully, the water jet was working on this day, so with a bit more effort and time my design was able to come out. I ended up using my ‘sweating’ design since I was more satisfied with that one compared to the rest and I still wanted to further refine those.

Success!

I was very fortunate to get the print right on my tote bag on the first try. Although the ink came out a little too thick, I was still very satisfied and happy with the work. Woohoo!

9/10/17

I decided to completely start from square one again, thinking about how  else I could interpret the quote. Since I want the work to still involve some level of frustration, it led me to think of Kaizo Mario World. Kaizo Mario features extremely difficult levels using hacks, and breaks the normal accepted rules of game design such as invisible blocks to block the player from where they are supposed to jump. Hence, I decided to incorporate that element into my work. Next, I had to reinterpret the word home, so I thought instead of going home, which is generally seen as a safe haven, it would lead the character into a dead end. This led me to think of the meme ‘The cake is a lie’ in the game Portal, where the character was working their way through the level to receive a cake as a reward will eventually realise there was no cake to begin with. With these few elements in mind, I came up with this composition.

ERROR, ACCESS D E N I E D

I made it such that the character was literally teleporting from one area to another by making use of the enclosed rectangles which serves as the different areas. When he comes out of the box at the bottom, he enters a black void and a dead end, all while seeing that ‘the cake is a lie’.

12/10/17 (Second Group Consultation)

This time I showed my 2nd (the cake is a lie), 3rd (sweating) and 4th (bad time) composition to the group. They gave the following suggestions:

2nd: Joy felt that by separating the images into 2 boxes, it makes the individual designs look really small, and that the pipe teleportation part isn’t really necessary and important to incorporate into the work, and there are other ways I could change up the design. She did like the idea of false reward though, but thought that I should put some indication of the player collecting ingredients to make the items along the level, such as eggs, flour, etc., since the composition first needs to be understood by people without contextual knowledge of the memes, and those contextual knowledge just serves as an additional level of understanding to those who get the inside jokes.

3rd: The group was generally okay with this composition, except that the dog in the middle should be bigger to show that the focus is on him or it would look like he is fighting for attention with the supporting characters around him.

4th: Once again, since the composition is quite deeply rooted with contextual knowledge, they only understood the game’s UI, but not the character (Monokuma) shown on screen. They thought he was a big cuddly teddy bear, so I had to rectify that to make him evoke a more sinister feeling.

All in all, my wonderful group provided me with some insightful advice, and I begin my final stretch on working towards the final compositions.

16/10/17

“Do you stop believing in the moon just because the sun comes up?”

This was my final composition for the first quote.

I decided to put the huge moon in the spotlight against the backdrop of the town it belongs to in the game, along with the little ‘praise the sun’ creature looking up and worshipping the menacing moon.

“Hey, wind! Take me home!”

I kept the level design of the work, adding some power-ups along the way to lead the viewer from looking from the top to the bottom of the picture by following the arrows, much like how the character in the game would progress through the level, before falling into a bottomless pit that says ‘the cake is a lie’, hence leading us to realise that it is a false reward and there that the game has no goal.

“It was dark, and it was cold. And I was scared.”

Only minor changes were made to this composition, such as making certain characters at the sides smaller and making the doge in the middle bigger. This is probably still my favourite composition out of all 4 of them. 😀

“You’re all hard work and deadlines, while I’m all snowballs and fun times.”

I added some characters from the Danganronpa game where they died pretty gruesomely, mimicking the game’s somewhat gory nature and also to let the viewers have a bit more context regarding the bad situation they are in when viewing this picture.

19/10/17 (Judgement d- I mean presentation day)

Memes come true

The presentation went okay, and my classmates were amused by my funny movements. They also liked my quirky ideas and compositions, while Joy provided even more valuable feedback on how I could have further improved my works. Thank you to everyone for your valuable input! <3

Some reflections

All in all, even though this project started off on a somewhat wrong foot, I have learned a lot throughout these few weeks, from how to silkscreen onto the tote bag, to some photoshop skills and to thinking out of the box. I might not have been completely satisfied with some of the compositions myself either, but at least I had some fun with it trying to come up with whimsical ideas.

And now, on to Project 3!

With that, I’ll end off my ultra long post here, and thank you for taking so much your time to read through this! Much appreciated 🙂