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Free Write Cards

Dates of each of the cards: 02/08/24, 2/13/24, 2/29/24, 3/5/24, 3/21/24

02/08/24: I don’t distinctly recall what my thought process was with the two images I drew. I think I wanted to make like a living toilet with the first image with random shapes, and the second one was sorta like a sea urchin or what Nemo lives in as an underwater creature of sorts. The two different captions that were added by another person I find humorous because I think at two separate points they were definitely thoughts I had while on campus but not while drawing the images.

2/13/24: I still haven’t gotten around to going to the Skeumorph Lab again this semester. I think I should really figure out when they have open hours and if I can work with their equipment again. I have been pretty busy with work to go over there, since it’s a pretty long bike ride from my dorm.

2/29/24: I think that different mediums having different elements from the things that they are adapting will always be interesting because I always see video games take cues from movies, but movies rarely take cues from video games in most of the ways when adapting them. I never see button prompts in the movies.

3/5/24: I still think I did a pretty good job with making a storyboard with what I was given during class that day. I think that I just wasn’t super familiar with the different ways that children's shows are directed. It really goes to show that movies and even other TV shows feel incredibly different in that regard.

3/21/24: The plagiarism discussions were always interesting for me because I was someone who was online when the big James Somerton stuff was going on. I didn’t really know who he was, but understood that what he did was incredibly messed up. I still think about having to consciously make sure that I can attribute as much as I can whenever I am able to.

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Remediation

For my composition notebook project Remediation, I tried to make a remix of several pages, combining several items. I wanted to combine not only my 4 panel comic, but also the actual idea of the comic, with the idea of frustration with eating food being persistent between not only the original but also in this new creation. I wanted to use a more light hearted version of my receipt project, and just have a sort of novel way of presenting the sorts of ingredients on a receipt by having them line up like the actual item being ordered. I thought the concept of a person ordering a hamburger and it appearing like letters and words not unlike an ascii image was humorous in the creation. It also plays in the opposite way of the idea of “what you see is not what you get” with how most people think that the receipt doesn’t literally represent what you are getting, but in the comic it actually does. It also references television ads being often deceptive of the products being sold, especially with food being upscaled and made to look significantly better than when it is assembled at the restaurant.

I considered making the comic 6 panels to better accommodate the story I wanted to tell, but figured out how to represent the basic plot in the same number of panels. For this remediation, I chose to not do any dialogue, and sort of let the information settle in with the reader and let it speak for itself without requiring any dialogue boxes. I wanted to do this version digitally because the aspects I wanted to remediate are quite difficult to do by hand, only being text and in color being something very much more well suited for a digital format. This also allowed me to again add more humor to the image by making it assembled out of only pre-existing images rather than me actually sketching out the different parts of the image and makes the comic all more absurd again.

I also chose to make the comic digital because I already often make very quick edits and very quick images in MSpaint to illustrate points and other such things that require quick visual examples online. I already have a habit of using clipart and stock images for reactions on social media, so I thought of making a larger example of such with the comic I made.

The way that I itemized each individual component of the burger is a bit of commentary about how all of the extras of a meal cost more now, but also is because it reminds me of an old video game meme about how older video games you got all of the components in one purchase, but with DLC all of the “extras” should’ve been a part of the base game and now it feels ridiculous to pay for features that should’ve been included in the first place. I just thought of it again when creating this comic.

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Revision

I chose to revise my map project for one of my smaller projects for my portfolio. In my map project, I made my own view of what the Kirby solar system would look like as a map. Because I currently have limited access to materials right now, I used the same type of sharpie and pens as my original map. I think if I had access to such, I would use a more childish material list like crayons and colored pencils. My main thought process with this new version was to make it less professional than my first one; to really drum up the idea of an amaetur student just trying to doodle in their notebook.

I tried to make it a bit more clean still in this second go around but used tools I think that a student would have access to. I tried to make the big circles with lids of things I just had around to emulate a student without access to proper tools like a compass or any official looking guide for circles.In order to prevent myself from focusing on the intricacies and trying to make the project as perfect as possible and again emulate the style of a younger student, I tried my hardest to complete it instead in a limited amount of time. This also made me think about what parts were most important to the image, and which parts could be easily left out. Therefore, I kept most of the pencil marks, and omitted the labels from the first version I had.

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Rationale

The three concepts I wanted to focus on with my portfolio are the different modes of the projects, the narratives and stories I wanted to tell with them, and how I worked with the audience reception and how I worked with intentionally playing to the expectations of the concepts I am using. I also really worked with a theme of gathering bits and pieces of things that people don’t often think about, and are often in the background and are an unconscious part of our lives. I wanted to work with this idea because I think that there are a lot of minute details and parts of objects that we take for granted in how they are able to be like they are, with their textures and such.

The two big projects I made and the mini project I chose to revise all play with the idea of something forgotten or no longer thought of, with the bigger projects being parts of purchasing products and also the construction of the particular products being purchased, and the mini product being a part of a childhood memory.

My Remediation project is A fruit cup, being something not particularly pondered on, especially as a container. I had considered putting the orange half into a netting similar to oranges sold at the store, but went against this because I didn’t think it added enough and sorta hindered exploring the physical object. If I made a sort of series of fruit containers with different fruits or a bunch of oranges, I think I probably would have included it. I think that the factor of the idea itself being incredibly silly is something I really wanted to play with. The materiality project was something of a more serious idea I wanted to do, and I wanted to do something more lighthearted for my next project. I was deciding between doing a remake of my 4 panel comic, and doing a remediation of one of the food labels or wrappers I had in my notebook. The narrative I was going for involved trying to spin the phrase “a fruit cup” in a new direction, since I wanted to think about the idea of fruit being an adjective not describing what is in the container but instead describing the container itself. I think I was probably also inspired by themed measuring cups subconsciously. I played with narrative and how the audience reacted to the message intentionally; with the label I made it clear I wasn’t being super serious with the creation, and I did this by making it a clear parody of the brand I was basing it off of. Instead of it being a Dole branded fruit cup, it was a Dale branded sporks fruit cup.

For my materiality project, I chose to make a series of receipts detailing the shady details of the companies that they each are parodying.  I played with the idea of the receipts not being inspected but only kept if one is consciously unsure of the purchase, and the project plays with that by making the audience have to be conscious of who they give their money to. People think of receipts as a disposable item, but I always try to get my own receipts at the store whenever I can, so I can not only catalog what I got and how much I spent, but if I need to recall what I spent my money on and also where I got a particular item. For the modes I chose to use, I again played with the audience reception of receipts and tried to replicate the actual formatting of actual receipts, to make the information blend in, and also included actual logos to further achieve this. I considered sizing up the receipts to make them similar to posters and make them larger and easier to read, but realized that having the smaller sized receipts and be to scale makes the message stronger by having the unconscious idea theme be present immediately with the size of the project, and again connect back to the narrative and story of a shady company being exposed through an unlikely document. This project had a large focus on the Linguistic and Visual modes but also a lot more Spatial mode with the actual size.

I made a map with my intention to bring one’s self back to a childhood doodle or scribble within one’s school notebook. Growing up, I always had an interest in the Kirby video games, and it was something that was a big part of my life. I had even watched the animated TV show, and I wanted to represent something in the project I was making. In one of the video games, there was a section where you go and explore several planets at different levels with completely different environments. I think I intentionally wanted to make a version of a map that wasn’t done with intense accuracy or professionalism to again evoke the idea that a child was creating it during free time like during class as a doodle, which also limited the space and tools I could use.

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These are my newly revised write ups for my Remediation and Materiality Projects, linked through Google Docs.