Project 1: How Identity V Recontextualized historical figures into their game.
Identity V is an asymmetrical horror game developed by the Chinese game company Netease. In their game, that have several characters based off of real people, with the easiest to recognize being Jack the Ripper, Marie Antoinette, and Niccolò Paganini.
English
For my English portion I wrote about how Identity V recontextualized historical figures into their game. I wrote a compare and contrast essay talking about how the characters differ and compare to the historical figures. In it I go on about how the character design, game mechanics, and backstory correlate to the real people. The characters I had chose who were The Ripper, who was based off of Jack the Ripper, the Bloody Queen who was made after Marie Antoinette, and Antonio Paganini who is based off of Niccolò Paganini.
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Art
For art I decided that I would do the same thing that identity V it and recontextualized two people into identity v characters. The people I chose were Albert Einstein and Harold Shipman. I researched them, then using that I made character designs and who their skills would be. This helped me understand the context of why identity V did this as well.
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Project 2: The perspective of pilots airborne during 9/11.
When the World Trade Center was hit by two hijacked planes, President George W. Bush issued a national state of emergency over the entire United States. This called for all planes airborne to land, no matter where they were in their flight. Some planes had to land only halfway through their original flight, and all planes were grounded for 3 days.
English
For my English piece, I interviewed three pilots, then wrote a summary of each of them. I then wrote a paragraph describing each of their perspectives, which were very different from each other. The first thing I did was I wrote down all of my questions, then weighed which ones would be more important. I then asked my dad to send out a message to other SouthWest pilots on a forum to see if anyone who was airborne during it would be willing to let me interview them. I originally was only going to do one, but I ended up with three, even though there were more people than that who wanted to be interviewed. The first pilot I interviewed was Dick Hoover. His perspective was that he had just landed when the first plane hit, where the national state of emergency hadn't been called yet. The second pilot I interviewed was Mike Weisser. His flight had been cut short because of the national state of emergency, but no one had told him that was why. Finally, the last pilot I interviewed was Dave Uhlman. He was in the back of the plane, so his perspective was more of what a passenger's would've been, but it still have insight to what people where thinking of during the flight. After I conducted and recorded the interviews, I then listened to them and wrote a summary of each of them.
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Art
For my art piece, I wrote and drew a safety instruction card for a flight attendant. It describes what is needed to be done when there is a National state of emergency Most of the information I gathered for this was from an interview of a flight attendant who was airborne during 9/11. I didn't do this interview, but I did use it as a pretty big source. After looking at other safety instruction cards, I planned out what I wanted each part to say, then designed an illustration for each one. After I was finished with this, I then wrote more on what was going on in each of them and connected them to the interviews I conducted.
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Project 3: Why Niccolò Paganini was such a controversial figure.
Niccolò Paganini was a violinist who was the most popular in the 1820s. He was an amazing violinist, still one of the greatest to this day. This doesn't mean that he was free of controversy. Rumors were spread about him being possessed by the devil because of how well he played. His attitude wasn't helping this either making him very controversial.
English
For my English piece I annotated a book about Paganini and wrote about why people didn't like him. The book I annotated was The illustrated lives of the great composers: Paganini by John Sugden. The main reasonings behind why people hated him were his connection to the devil and how he treated women. For this writing I also used other sources to back up information and to fact check everything that I wrote.
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Art
For my art piece a made a painting of Paganini Playing. The reasoning I wanted to incorporate into this piece was about his accusations with the devil. In this piece I made Paganini being controlled by red strings that are coming from the devil's hands. I did this because there was an account of a man going crazy after listening to Paganini play and saying that he saw the same red strings. For this piece I wanted some pieces to pop while the background stayed dark. The circle around Paganini is a spotlight which is a reference to the movie The Devil's Violinist. In the movie one of the scenes has Paganini in a spotlight with the shadow of the devil behind him.
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Project 4: liminally lamented
Bad things happen to good people. For this project I worked with a partner, Asher Gilmore, whose website will be linked below. We synthesized the idea of Liminal spaces with the Salton Sea and the aesthetic Weirdcore. For this we wrote a story of these characters, while for art we designed the characters for it. This project has not been finished as of documenting this, but we are planning to make it into some form of visual novel. For this we created landscapes and sprites for the story.
English
For our English portion, we created a story. The story follows our four main characters, Bobbi, Eden, Luna and kit as they travel to the Salton Sea to meet up with an old friend of theirs, Marlowe. However, when they get there, the party town seems to be abandoned, with almost no one there. While investigating, strange things start to happen, and both the groups mental and physical forms visibly decay. As they explore more and more of the town, they don't believe what they see...
This piece included synthesis in many different ways. We had synthesized the thought of liminal spaces with facts about the Salton Sea, which is a real place in California, as well as the aesthetic of Weirdcore. Each of the characters have different personalities that correlate to how liminal spaces and Weirdcore affect people. We also synthesized types of writing. The story itself is broken into two types. The main story is in 3rd person while each character gets their own diary entrees. These are written in 1st person to show their emotions better and their insight on the situation. |
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Art
For our art portion, we designed characters for the story. We have 4 main characters: Luna, Eden, Kit, and Bobbi, as well as Marlowe, a side character. We based all of the characters on things that don’t last very long; for example, Luna being a flower who rots throughout the story. As the cast gets closer and closer to the Salton Sea, they start to deteriorate more and more, which is seen on their designs from things like clothes ripping or injuries. Eventually, these characters have deteriorated so much that they are almost unrecognizable, being held together by practically hopes and dreams.
Since we wanted the final presentation of the story to read similar to a visual novel, one of us drew sprites while the other began to draw sceneries. The original plan was to create a website to display the story and art together. Unfortunately due to time constraints, the final website wasn’t able to be complete, but we created a small mock-up as to what a part of it would’ve looked like all together. Most of the art process was throwing pieces back and forth between the two of us, with one doing sketches on paper and the other picking up line art and coloring digitally. |
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