For the design assignment Four Icons/One Story, I chose to use Stranger Things, set in 1984. I chose this design assignment because it sounded fun and engaging while giving me the freedom to add a 1980s twist to it.

I wanted to use Stranger Things as my story because it is one of my all time favorite shows and it fit the theme for our class. First, I started off using Creative Commons image search to find a 1980s related picture I could use as the background. After I found a fitting picture of some random people circa 1980, I moved into Keynote on my iPad to add some symbols to represent the storyline.

First, I chose a dragon. The dragon symbolizes how the gang started the show by playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons in Will’s basement. This was there beginning of the downfall for the small town of Hawkins and the Bower family.

Second, I chose an upside down arrow to symbolize the “Upside Down”. Clever, I know. The Upside Down is the backbone concept of the show and what enables Eleven to find and get Will back.

Third, I chose a police badge to symbolize Sheriff Hopper and his role in the plot. Sheriff Hopper plays a major part in solving the mystery of what is happening in Hawkins. His devotion is what kept Hawkins and Will alive.

Lastly, I chose a waffle icon to symbolize the shows most important character, Eleven. Eleven is the inly reason Will was ever able to be found and she is also the main reason why Hawkins did not fall to the Russian scientists running experiments in the town.

I learned a lot from this design assignment. I learned how to dissect a story into four crucial aspects and what design imagery to try and find to relay that message to the audience. Using nothing but icons and a background image to tell a story is intriguing and a great way to tell a story through unconventional means.

Assignments: Our Story/FourIcons
This idea was first suggested by Tom Woodward and has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment. The assignment is to reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them. Write your blog post up but do not give away the answer, let people guess! The challenge is to find the icons that suggest the story, but do not make it so easy. For icons a great resource is The Noun Project.

This is one of the harder assignments even though it’s so simple. The creation of it was super easy…the process of finding the right pictures and choosing what to put on was difficult because it was only 4 icons! I tried to make it work by which scenes in this movie stood out to me the most but I have seen it so many times that I think every moment is important…that made things difficult so I just choose a big moment in the movie (the part where the conflict began)

HOW IT WORKS:
1.) I found four icons that represent this moment in the movie
2.) I added them on Krita as transparent layers and lined them one by one according to the order of events.
3.) I exported this image as a .png file and added to this blog post!

I picked the Karate Kid for the One Story/ Four Icons because it is one of the 80’s movies that I know by heart. The chopsticks represent Mr. Miyagi’s precise skill and his famous scene of catching flies with them. The washclothe represents all the chores Daniel has to complete for training including wax on/off when cleaning the car. The broken leg represents all the adversity Daniel faces including an injured leg during his final battle. The fist represents Karate which is the premise of the movie.

For the Four Picture Movie assignment I visited The Noun Project website that the prompt recommended. I thought this would be a simple project which it was, but choosing which icon to use without being too obvious, that was a challenge. There is so many option on this website, so if you are working on … Continue reading “Four Picture Movie”

For my fourth Assignment Bank project I completed the  Four Icons/ One Story assignment, as suggested to us.

This was a little trickier than I thought. I picked a movie (it’s from the 80’s) and then began the search for Clip Art. It was a challenge to find which icons could be used to tell a story without being too obvious. I had to do a little shopping around. After collecting the images, I placed them into a PowerPoint to align the icons in the configuration I wanted and then converted it to a PNG file. I wasn’t able to come up with exactly what I wanted, but in the end I hope you’ll be able to figure it out!

I decided to go with the recommended assignment since I thought it was cool. I also made it related to the theme, which made it more fun for me.

I used the recommended website for the icons and then I just used powerpoint to string them next to each other. It was easy to search for the individual icons, but hard to decide which to string together for the cryptic messaging.

I think its really easy…but this is also one of my favorite movies, so there’s that too…

This was my favorite assignment this week. It really made me have to think. The move that these Icons represent is the 80’s hit movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I felt like this assignment was having me find the 4 most essential elements to the movie. There were things in the move that I felt were more important than the things I included, but they weren’t as broad as I needed. One part of the movie that I would have liked to included was Indiana Jones’ dad, but I feel like just an icon of a dad would not help anyone understand the movie at all, even though it is such a crucial part of the movie. All in all this assignment made me think about the movie in a different way than I had thought about it before. I think it would be cool to try to do an assignment like this with lots of other movies.