The Assignment
This is my first of my ds106 assignments for the next section of this course, “State of the Net.” I know it doesn’t start until Feb. 1, but I was excited to post this. I couldn’t just keep it sitting in my draft box waiting for Wednesday to arrive. I decided to do the Art Comes to Life assignment, which asks you to:
Take a famous painting or print and do your best to recreate it in real life. Capture it in a photo and present the two in a blog post.
It didn’t take me long to remember that I already had an image with a great story that fit this requirement.
The Process
The image that I’m thinking of is a collaboration that I did with a group of friends for a contest in 2009. We did a few images and all of them were based on the artwork of Frank Frazetta, a classic American fantasy and sci-fi artist who passed away in 2010. I’m only sharing one image we did today though, as it is by far my favorite. Before I show you what we came up with, I want to show you the image we were basing it on. The following image is Fire and Ice by Frank Frazetta. Some may recognize it as a movie poster, since it was a 1983 film. (If you’re into badass old fashioned fantasy animation, I recommend it. Some people don’t like the pacing or lack of dialogue, but I think it’s a charming watch.)
The image below was our recreation. I am the one in the luchador mask holding an “axe.”
So, to really describe the process. We knew the characters we needed: A chick in a purple bikini (Princess Teegra), a blonde warrior (Larn), an axe weilding Batman (Darkwolf), and a bunch of ogre things (Nekron’s sub-humans).
Bikini Girl (Princess Teegra): We decided it would be a lot funnier if my friend John played the bikini chick instead of me. I loaned him one of my cosplay wigs and he donned a flesh colored t-shirt. The purple bikini bra he’s wearing is actually an elastic band for resistance workouts that we stretched and duct-taped onto his back.
Axe-wielding Batman (Darkwolf): I was already in a bikini top and shorts so all we needed was a weapon and a mask. There always seems to be an excess of luchador masks, so I used that. For the axe we used a bokken and taped some torn up brown paper bags onto the end to mimic a blade.
Blonde Warrior (Larn): Self explanatory. I had a leather strapped potion bottle that he put on his belt for added fantasy effect.
Ogre Things (Sub-Humans): This is pretty straight forward. They each stuck turn up paper bags in the back of their pants to imitate loin cloths. For my friend on the right he would be the only sub-human with his face showing, so we had him wear a hulk mask and wield a plastic sword.
The Hulk: You’ll notice that the Incredible Hulk is not in the original picture. My friends just own one and decided to include it for extra fun.
We didn’t have a rocky precipice and mountainous backdrop to work with, so we just used my friend’s backyard. We had some other friends present to take the picture and to guide us roughly on positioning.
The Story
So who are these people in the picture? Why Frank Frazetta? Why are we doing this?
The company and website no longer exists but in 2009 a company called “MeatCards” made a little splash on the internet because they had an interesting idea. They were offering business cards made of beef jerky, that had your information seared onto it via laser. Here is a link to an old TechCrunch article about it. They also have an old Flickr page with the process of prototyping Meat Business Cards here.
Photo by Tikaro (MeatCards).
They were having a contest where the top 15 entrants would be part of their alpha testing phase and receive a sheet of 4 meat cards. The contest was to recreate at least one of three Frank Frazetta art pieces (from their pre-selected list). I think somebody told me about this at work when it blew up and then I decided to do it immediately.
My friend John and I would host anime nights at his place on a weekly basis, so that’s where we got half of the participants. The other half of the people involved in the photograph were coworkers of mine (working in the game industry, it’s easy to enlist participation in crazy stuff like this).
We got the photoshoot done on one evening before our usual screening times. I was checking the MeatCard website and when we had finished only 7 entrants/winners had been announced. However a convention over the weekend stalled our submission and on Monday morning when I went to send our submission I saw that all 15 slots had filled! I sent them in anyways and we were given the 16th slot because we “brought it” and because as an anime club we fit their target demographic.
The cards arrived vacuum sealed and we gave it as a gift to John who was moving to PA soon after. Unfortunately his dick roommate ate them.
