Class Exercise 03

Enchanting a Visual Story

In today’s class exercise, we were tasked to improve on an existing visual story, which originally looked like this:

You can view the original images here. Though the comic strip was titled “Curiosity makes for a magical few minutes!”, most students in the class felt that the images were not effective in portraying a story that is magical or even relating to curiosity. Some of us were also quite unsure about what the story was, and it just didn’t seem to be living up to its grand title yet. For a moment, I also thought that the photographer had simply attempted to form a sequential narrative from a pool of random point-and-shoot photographs.

I could only interpret the original story to be something like this:

“A deer was travelling with its herd until a human and her camera caught its attention. Now this is where curiosity sets in. The deer, fascinated by the foreign objects, walks towards the human and looks at her curiously, before walking away again. That close, yet brief, encounter with the deer was a considerably magical moment for a wandering photographer.” In other words, curiosity gave rise to this brief yet precious moment that the photographer cherished deeply, hence the er… magical and curious title.

My group mates and I felt that part of the reason why the image strip seem to be lacking a magical feel was due to a rather dull, unprocessed background. Perhaps we could make the forest look more enchanting, because backdrops are so, so important if you want to transport the viewer to a realm outside reality. We even thought that something surreal should happen to the deer too when we edit the image later on…

So we overdid things. Way too much.

Credits go to Xinni for her wildest imagination. We colourised the forest, added sparkles and changed the storyline to something that ought to belong to the fantasy genre:

“A deer was travelling with its herd until a bright, red flower caught its attention. The deer, fascinated by the glowing petals, walks towards it and starts to chew it, causing the poor doe to transform into a glowing winged beast.”

Oh well, I guess this alternative storyline fits the title too. *twiddles with fingers*. When we shared our work with the class, most of our peers giggled or flashed a “What did I just see!? =.=” face. Yes, we know it’s funny, and we made such a pompous edit in the name of fun and surrealism.

This was certainly the strangest class exercise for the semester. I look forward to something similar in the near future too.