Inspired by Scary Stories from Strawberry and my fave Creative Commons musician, Jonathan Coulton, I bring you the Reimagined Sign + SongStory:
Creepy Doll
In a town in the woods at the top of a hill
There’s a house where no one lives
So you take a big bag of your big city money there
And buy it.
But at night, the house is dark
And you’re all alone, there’s a noise upstairs
At the top of the stairs, there’s a door
And you take a deep breath and try it.
And the flashlight shows you something moving just inside the door
There’s a tattered dress and a feeling you have felt somewhere before.
<Oh, great, the subject of nightmares…>
<What is that!????>
And there’s the creepy doll
That always follows you
It’s got a ruined eye
That’s always open…
And there’s a creepy doll
That always follows you
It’s got a pretty mouth
To swallow you whole…
So you scream and you close the door
And you tell yourself it was just a dream
In the morning you head into town,
‘Cause you want to go antiquing.
In the store there’s a strange old man
With a wandering eye and a withered hand
When he hands you the old wooden box
You can hear his old bones creaking.
And you know what you will find inside the moment that you see
That someone carved your name into the tarnished silver key.
And there’s a creepy doll
That always follows you
It’s got a ruined eye
That’s always open…
And there’s a creepy doll
That always follows you
It’s got a pretty mouth
To swallow you whole…
And when you come home late, the doll is waiting up for you
And when you fix a snack, the doll says it would like one too
The doll is in your house and in your room and in your bed
The doll is in your eyes and in your arms and in your head – and you are crazy.
Now it’s late and you head downstairs
’Cause you just can’t sleep so you make some tea
And the doll disapprovingly asks
If you really need that much honey.
You decide that you’ve had enough
And you lock the doll in the wooden box
You put the box in the fireplace
Next to your bag of big city money.
As the smoke fills up your tiny room there’s nothing you can do
And far too late you see the one inside the box is you.
And there’s a creepy doll
That always follows you
It’s got a ruined eye
That’s always open…
And there’s a creepy doll
That always follows you
It’s got a pretty mouth
To swallow you whole…
Song by Jonathan Coulton
Talking Tina from the Twilight Zone and Random scared guys yelling (Alan Levine & Bryan Alexander), courtesy of Scary Stories from Strawberry.
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How I did it:
Originally I wanted to do these assignments so I could improve my own skills using the tools I have for work: Illustrator, Photoshop, Garageband, iMovie.
But after seeing many students struggle with these tools (GIMP & Audacity) I’m thinking I might move to the free tools so I can help you out better.
So, I used Garage Band for this audio assignment and it’s a bit of a hack, really quickly done meshing together JoCo’s song with snips of Scary Stories. I changed volume on the song in parts so that the Talking Tina bits would be more audible.
As for the sign, I took the picture on a trail with my phone. Imported it into Illustrator traced the tracks. Then I searched for the Toy Story doll head, saved it to my Photo Library. I imported that image into the iPad using AutoDesk SketchBookPro and traced it. Then back on my PC, I imported the doll into Photoshop and pasted the train track-zipper mouth. I could have done the track tracing in Photoshop but I had actually done another Reimagined sign entirely in Illustrator in an attempt to do the I can Read Movies (Pulp Ficiton)…but I didn’t like it.
