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Hello, everyone! I’ve always liked telling and writing stories, so it seemed natural that I would go with the Five-Frame Story prompt for the Visual Assignment. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do for this particular prompt, at first, but in the end, I decided to tell a story featuring some of the little dolls I owned, revolving around a little figurine I own wanting to get its portrait done by a wily (and perhaps kind of dim) fox, only to be disappointed by the outcome.
While I mentioned in my first blog post that I prefer reading fantasy stories, I personally find that telling comedic stories comes more naturally, to me–I most of all want to combine fantasy and comedy–and it just seems easier to tell a more comedic story in a few panels, in my opinion.
First, I took a note card and drew a cheeseburger on the back of it, which would end up being the fox’s final drawing. When setting up the two dolls, I placed them on top of my closed record player, so that they would best be in the light. I taped a pen to the fox in order to create the illusion that it was holding it on its own. After I was finished taking all the photos, I uploaded them all onto my computer, and then I used the Autodesk Sketchbook app on my computer to draw additional effects onto the panels, in order to better convey the comedic tone of the narrative.
In the end, the punchline is a bit random, on reflection, but being a fan of Monty Python and the like back in high school, I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for random humor.
The idea for the story came pretty easily. I wanted to depict an average day out that quickly turned into nuclear apocalypse. I knew of this worn-down building downtown, so that’s where the second half of the shoot took place.
I used Pixlr to edit the last two images in the story. Here is the before and after:
I got the bright flash png and the smoke png from pngtree.com, and I took out the chunk from the building by carving it out and deleting it with the lasso tool. I took the same lasso shape, positioned it over some clouds, copied, and pasted them. The resulting clouds fit perfectly into the corner I had cut out. To blend the lines the process created, I took a medium shade of grey and brushed over the disconnect between the background clouds and the pasted clouds.
To convey something bad was going to happen, I under-saturated the photos and added a pale off-white filter to all the images in the series using Instagram.
It was a typical winter everything was peaceful , it was the night before christmas and we were all excited for the new year. But on Christmas morning all the snow and ice melted away overnight. The weather man didn’t say this would he said it would be below 30 degrees. But now it feels like the 70’s.
So we took joy in the unseasonably warm weather, we all went swimming at the beach it was great best unexpected Christmas surprise yet. Or so we thought it kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter. Wildfires started out of nowhere we didn’t know what this happened.
The fires kept growing and growing we had to get out of there.
So we hopped in the RV and hit the road for the caverns to escape the rising heat. We didn’t know if we were going to make it intime we just kept driving on the back roads to avoid the madness. And to avoid all the deaths that were happening.
It keeps getting hotter and hotter and i don’t think Ill make it I dont think I can stand this heat any longer or that terrible smell that comes with it. Oh my god that terrible smell is me ouch ouch im getting burned from the air I just want to..
I will post my zom5ie story first so that you can interpret it before I give anything away!
Here are the spoilers!
This story is featuring my sister and my dog.
The first image depicts a normal life with a girl and her dog. Then, a zombie suddenly comes out of the closet. The girl runs away, with the dog nowhere in sight. She has left her pet behind in order to save herself. It is two years later, and the dog never left that room. She waited for her human after all that time, alone. In the last photo, the girl returns to her house, and is happy to be reunited with her dog. She is also surprised that her dog was able to survive for all those years alone.
I found it easy to create the story I wanted, but I found the creation of the second photo difficult. I downloaded an app with zombie faces, but it lowered the resolution when I saved it, making it a slightly lower quality. I hope that it was obvious what story the pictures told. If I had to change an image, it would probably be the fourth one. I tried to take a picture with my dog looking more sad, but thinking back, I could have had the zombie on the floor in the background to tell how the dog was able to survive.
I would do this assignment again and found it fun!
Tell a story using five photos. Basically, that’s it. Figure out the story you want to tell and then take five photos to tell it. If you need to edit, add filters, etc. in order to get the effect you want, go for it.
