Narrative
How well can you visually tell a structured story?
Introduction:
My narrative project w combined English, Design, and Animation. I wrote a story of a chef in a kitchen who is fired for stealing, and at the end she says she only did it because “it was worth the whisk”. In Animation, I animated this story as a stop motion animation. In design, I created an animal based on the main character and put it in an environment I drew in Illustrator using 2-point perspective.
Flash Fiction:
In English, we wrote a narrative flash fiction without any dialogue. My story is of a chef working in a kitchen.
I’ve ended up in quite a situation. I honestly don’t know why I did it. I loved my job at the bakery. Now, here I am, without a job, and for what? There has been no moment since that fateful day that I have even a brief respite from the regret I feel.
After years, I guess I was starting to get a little bored with my job. I’d come in, pull on my apron, crack eggs into a bowl and beat them until they were fluffy. Add sugar, butter, milk, and vanilla, whisk together, and pour into a pan to bake. It gets monotonous after a point. At first, of course, I loved it. My favorite part of baking will always be whipping egg whites to make a light and airy meringue. I had been doing this since my very first day of training to top the pie I had so carefully made, to show the head chef my skills, but I digress. Despite there being so many things for me to make at the bakery, from cakes to mousse to pies, it was all just variations on the same task: mixing and waiting. I just couldn’t stand it any more after so many years.
I am not too proud of what I did to solve this conundrum. I definitely pondered over it for some time. Thinking- should I? Should I not? Yet, in the end, I knew I had to do something in order to spice up this tedium. At the end of the day, a few weeks back, instead of throwing out the old cookies as we usually do, I decided to toss a couple in my pocket.
Immediately, I felt a rush of excitement at doing something so forbidden. The mental high though, was followed by a crash of regret. I pulled the cookies out of my pocket and threw them out as well. At the time, I decided it was best not to risk getting caught.
A week passed, and day after day all I could think about was how I almost stole those cookies. The thought consumed me. How could it not? All I do is work for this bakery, the same tasks every day. I had the right to, at the very least, think about what I almost did. Little did I know thinking this way was just the first step down a slippery slope. That evening, I actually did take home a couple cookies, placing them in my pocket and this time not returning them.
The following days, I took home more and more cookies. I knew it needed to stop. They weren’t anything I couldn’t make myself. I had to get back to my old life: the one that, despite being a bit boring, didn’t leave me feeling a sense of panicked dread whenever the head chef glanced over. Just before heading home for what would be the last time, I decided that there needed to be one last heist before putting off this petty theft for good.
The target had to be that whisk. The one I had coveted for the better part of a year. I was the only one who ever used this particular whisk, as it was slightly broken in such a way that I was the only one who actually liked it. My eggs always turned out perfectly beaten with it, in such a way that I could never replicate with any other. I had to take it.
A risky move, however, because my shift ended before everyone else’s on this fateful day. Mostly notably, before the head chef’s. I picked up the whisk, caressing its icy wires and slipping it gently into my pocket. I treaded carefully around the head chef, who was between the door and myself. Those three feet were miles long at that moment, and every inch was filled with an unfathomable peril. The danger weighed heavily upon me.
He whipped around, noticing the bulge around the kitchenware in my pocket. His accusatory stare haunts me to this day. I gambled with my life treading past the head chef, and I lost that gamble. I pulled the steel piece out of my pocket and handed it to him, not daring to look him in the eye. It was the end for me.
You may ask, why did I do it? What could possibly drive me so far as to get fired from the kitchen? Well, at the time, I felt it was worth the whisk.
Animation:
In animation, I created a stop motion animation based off of my flash fiction story. It follows a chef in a kitchen.
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Design:
In design, we used Adobe Illustrator to design a creature to reflect the character in the flash fiction that was written. This character had to be put into an environment drawn in perspective.
Looking Around
In a story for English, I wrote of a girl who worked as a pastry chef in a kitchen. In this kitchen, she began to get bored of her job and turned to petty thievery, eventually getting caught for stealing a whisk.
For this project, I used Adobe Illustrator in order to create an illustration of this character as an animal. I decided to use a fox’s tail, a cat’s head and body, and a snake’s tongue. These are all supposed to be crafty and sneaky animals, as my character is. The color scheme for the animal is purple as purple is a color associated with being sneaky. I used other dark colors as well to represent being shady. For the background, I used two point linear perspective to make a cafe scene. As you can see two sides rather than just one as in single-point perspective, I had to use two-point. The color scheme for the buildings is light oranges and pinks. I chose these as the cafe is named “Sunset Cafe”, so I wanted to use similar colors to its name, and I also wanted to use brighter, happier colors to contrast the character somewhat. The sidewalk and sky, however, are purple to show that it is not daytime but dusk, which is a time that matches the character more as it is thought of as a more sneaky time.
I am fairly proud of this piece, however to me the background feels a little stale. I feel as if there are cast shadows that I have either missed or done wrong. The background is also very large and does not put enough focus on the character. The table as well seems off to me. Overall, however, I am fairly proud of this piece. When doing linear perspective work in the past, I was not able to do the inside of buildings properly, but here I did. Furthermore, I am happy to have learned how to use Adobe Illustrator.