Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Project one "Ideas"

For my project (as beforementioned) I'm thinking about adapting some sections of Alice in Wonderland. More specifically, I'm trying to show the dissolution of reality through the visualization of sections of the book. I'm thinking of using the very first lines in the book,

" Down the Rabbit Hole"

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "Without pictures or conversations?"

"In another moment down went Alice after the rabbit, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again"

I think this is the main text I'm going to work with, although I may add some more later depending on how I make the text visual. I"m thinking of making the later section of text progressively more tranparent, as if it's fading out of reality (and into wonderland), and also making the text spiral down, as if it is the text itself is spinning into wonderland. I also want to set the background as a picture of something iconic from the campus of WVU, attempting to show that wonderland and reality are really the same place. Another option is a swath of different colors for the text, making it appear surreal.

2 comments:

Things I'm Gonna Do said...

I think your ideas about pulsing, transparent text are pretty neat and would do really well to illustrate that story...Alice in Wonderland is a good selection, I think, because of the fantastical nature of its characters and happenings...as for something iconic of WVU, have you thought about maybe setting the background as an image of this computer lab? This is the environment where the projects would be viewed by our class and our professor, and as such that would recreate the whole "down the rabbit hole" aspect of the work...it would be very surreal to see the images disappear and move about on a screen within a screen...just a thought...good luck!

Sandy Baldwin said...

Louie: I really like the graphic you made in class. The text is funny and subversive, and the graphics - while simple - work really well. Now, I think adapting Alice, or sections of it (smart to take on a small chunk), is a great idea. You state: "I'm trying to show the dissolution of reality through the visualization of sections of the book." Excellent. So the task is to use text and graphics, typography and visuals, to show this. How does this dissolution play out in text, for example? The Tenniel illustrations to the original Alice books already do some work in this area. I like the idea of working with transparency with your text. You should be able to set opacity/transparency in Gimp; not so sure about PowerPoint, but probably so. I look forward to seeing this!