Narrative 1

Introduction

The narrative project was a study of narrative techniques that I learned, practiced, and applied in my English, design, and film classes. For English, I created a flash fiction – a short fictional story. For design, I created an illustration of the character from my flash fiction using Adobe InDesign. Finally, in film, I created a film with my partner Katie Bousse, based on the fictional story she wrote for her flash fiction.

 

English: Flash Fiction

The Muffinpocalypse

The world was ravaged when muffins became listed as endangered. It became hollow and grey when they became endangered. The only hope left was a measly banana nut loaf or an occasional chocolate cake. Which meant there was no hope. People wandered the streets restless and unfulfilled.

The girl wandered, lost and alone. She looked around at the people as she counted geese and wondered what it would be like to talk to them, to reach out and feel their warmth. She couldn’t though, because she was too afraid. Mid-thought, she caught a whiff of something baked and delicious as she passed a dark alley. She kept walking though because she knew as her teachers and parents had told her, “gastronomical pleasure died with the last muffin.” But the thought lingered with her as she continued on. She couldn’t stop thinking about the smell, though; it haunted her. It had an ancient familiarity to it that even pesto pasta couldn’t give her. She thought – but no, it couldn’t be. She circled back and peered down the dark and dank alley. It was. But it couldn’t be. A muffin hadn’t been seen for the last five hundred years. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, and it was indeed – a pumpkin muffin, the most magical and illustrious of the muffins. She began to walk slowly towards the miracle, wide-eyed. Slowly she approached it at a quicker pace until she had sprinted right up to it.

Its beauty was lying nonchalantly in the alley, resplendent and surrounded by crispy crumbs. The dark emptiness of the alley made the golden, warm, luminance of the muffin stand out. The fissures along the face of the muffin invited deep bites filled with pure joy. She imagined the core to be soft, yet structured enough that one could bite into it comfortably without having to worry about the muffin’s guts spilling over and onto them like Niagara Falls.

She paused. Breathed in the scent. Approached the muffin.

Design: Illustration

For design, our narrative assignment was to produce a basic illustration of our flash fiction character. We were supposed to put the character together with different parts of animals, which each represented a characteristic of our character. We were then required to add a background and accessories and employ the use of linear perspective to top it off.

This Adobe Illustrator illustration depicts a hybrid creature standing against the background of an empty and abandoned post-apocalyptic town. The creature has the neck of a giraffe, the eyes of a chameleon, the body of a hummingbird, and a the hanging light of a anglerfish from its forehead.

My flash fiction is about a teenage girl in a half-deserted post-apocalyptic city who is trying to survive and fight for her survival. She is sad with the terms of her existence in such a depressed and empty world, but she tries to mask it with a quirky attitude and a scrunchie or two.

The process of creation for my creature started with a compilation of possible animals to match the personality traits of my flash fiction character and basic sketches of what the potential hybrid might look like. I chose a hummingbird because my character developed a flighty-ness to survive in her tough world. The giraffe neck and head represented the camouflage that the character used to mask their uncertainty. The chameleon eyes represented the character’s ever-watchfulness and the angler fish light was the character’s attempt at self-guidance. Out of the sketches of different angles, I picked the one I most liked – with accessories on my character – and took it into Adobe Illustrator. I set up one artboard where I would create the creature and another where I would create the background of the post-apocalyptic hellscape. To create the character I started by placing images from the internet of the animal part that would make-up my character. I would then proceed to trace with the pen tool over the shape and details of the animal part. When I did this to all the parts I wanted, I sized all the pieces and put them together so they created a cohesive hybrid shape. For my background, I was required to provide an environmental context and use linear perspective to add depth of field to my illustration. I implemented the same tracing strategy (over images from the internet) with my background. When I had finished all the tracing and piecing together, I had to select a pantone color scheme to fill my character and background. To do this, I found a section in a color book of pantone swatches and chose a selection of colors that I would need in my illustration to complete it. The most difficult part of the creation process for me was getting the different pen tool-ed pieces of animal to fit together into one coherent hybrid and then match with the background on top of that. If I were to go back and re-work my project, I would spend more time on the details of everything to make it more similarly realistic. I would also certainly spend more time choosing my background and making it realistically detailed. Overall; however, I am pleased with how my character came out considering how much time and effort I put into it.

Film: Narrative Film

For my film, I worked with Katie Bousse to produce her vision of the story of an “average Joe” who aspires to become a pro thumb wrestler, but then breaks his thumb.

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