I chose the One Story, Four Icons assignment.  Can you guess my movie?

I found all the images on The Noun Project.  To put them together I simply took a screenshot of each individual image and then pasted them together in Microsoft Word.

Can you guess what movie this is from?

Here is the answer. 

This week, for one of my design assignments, I opted to do the One Story/Four Icons assignment. I wanted to attempt to reduce a movie to four symbols. Although I am not a huge movie-goer, I realized that after completing the Five Card Flickr activity last week, I needed practice in brevity of storytelling.

My first quest was finding a movie that could be conveyed with icons BUT not easily distinguishable. I searched through my mental movie library of favorites. When I had one or two, I went off in search of icons. I found a bunch using the free icon finder. As I started to peruse, that’s where I found my inspiration to help me hone in on the story I wanted to portray (Clue # 1).

Since the movie is a more obscure choice from my childhood (Clue # 2), I opted to tell the story using icons that represented the pieces of the plot rather than characters (Clue # 3). I looked for symbols that would resonate as if I was playing a game of charades. I copied each of my icons from the site and pasted them into PowerPoint. I then top aligned them and horizontally distributed them across the page. I then put a black border around the pictures and turned it into a .jpg using a snipping tool. I just hope that I told the story as well as its award-winning director (Clue # 4).

You can find the answer here!

For my first Design Assignment I decided to do the One Story / Four Icons challenge. I think the hardest part of this assignment was decided which movie to use! I love movies and love the idea of taking a new approach to classics in society, so I knew I wanted to choose an old classic movie (hint #1) in order to modernize it through the use of solid color icons. Once I decided on the movie, I went back and forth on how to represent the movie. Did I want my icons to demonstrate various plot sections of the movie? Did I want them to represent characters in the movie? I ultimately decided that the point of the assignment was to represent the essence of the movie, so I decided to go with themes and elements of the movie that have stood the test of time (hint #2), or in other words, what you would draw when trying to represent the movie in a game of Pictionary.

I used Flat Icon for all of my images and chose the Mask, Cat, Typewriter, and Present icons for the assignment. I downloaded these images for free, and inserted them into a PowerPoint slide for editing. I re-sized the images so that they were all the same height and width for symmetry, and aligned them so they fell on the same line. I spaced them out using the “distribute horizontally” tool so that they were evenly spread. I then put a border around them, added in elements of color (hint #3) by layering shapes behind the images, and grouped the images all together. I then selected the grouping and saved as an jpeg image for embedding into this post. I may have been a little too obvious in my design, but I was having way too much fun with colors and themes.

Happy guessing!

We had a Netflix movie that needed to be watched, so movie night it was.  I had read some of the assignment ideas earlier that day, and while I hadn’t intended to make the movie I watched the subject beforehand, I started to think about as I was watching and began noting words that could represent the film.

Once I settled on the four words I wanted icons for, I went to the Noun Project website and took a look around.  I finally ended up creating a pro account (worth the $10 for the month- I figure I can surely find some other icons that will come in handy) after another web search of free icons came up with nothing I wanted.  I downloaded the icons (2 of which were actually free), pasted them onto a Power Point slide, aligned them horizontally, put a box around them, and then saved a snip of it with the snipping tool on my laptop.

I’d be happy to tell you my opinion of the movie, but you have to guess!  All I will say it that the star of the movie has shared the big screen with Darryl Hannah, Elizabeth Perkins and Shelly Long (I’m making some old references here) and the film represented by the icons was nominated for an Oscar last year.

Background

A few weeks ago, I was browsing Amazon Prime On-Demand movie listing and came across the movie title graphic for Forrest Gump, an image of a man sitting alone on park bench looking up into space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Gump

 I remembered that this was one of my favorite movies for a lot of different reasons, one of which how the movie passes through so many different parts of US history, from the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam War, Watergate, and the inception of Apple.  The way the movie was shot, with a dialog mixed in a combination of retrospect and present day context provided a set of key, consistent  icons for this assignment.

Assignment

I chose the “One Story / Four Icons” assignment to capture the movie in four icons. First, I chose the image of running shoes because the movie phrase “Run Forrest, Run” echos in my head as words teammates would use to make fun of each other, referencing how Forrest just kept running.  I chose the park bench because that was the platform Forrest used to share the first part of his story.  As he jumped from story to story, Forrest and the park bench were the constant as strangers came and went.  Another constant was Forrest’s reference to his mother and how “life is like a box of chocolates.”  The last image, an image of a shrimp, aims to strike up memory of the shrimping business that Forrest and his Vietnam War buddy Bubba planned to start but that Forrest had to start on his own when Bubba died.  This image lasts on today in the form of a number of Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurants that played off the movie’s popularity.

Process

I used the same approach that I used for Design Assignment #1.  I did a web search for the images and arranged/resized them on a PowerPoint slide.  I inserted a text box to frame the icons and inserted the title text.  I then took a screenshot and saved the file as a .jpg file.