final assignment - essay

All of these assignments have been educational and challenging, but I think the previous assignment – storyboarding – was one of the most enjoyable to me. Analyzing the Toyota commercial really gave me a chance to see how it was done by professionals; tight, concise, and a complete narrative, all without facial expressions of any kind by the main character. It’s amazing how much one can convey by a sequence of 1-3 second shots. I probably enjoyed storyboarding ‘Das Rheingold’ by Wagner the most, since I allowed myself to relax and enjoy my take on it, which was both extremely oversimplified, as well as a heavily edited version of the interaction of the characters. There was a lot of room for simplifying the interactions between the characters, since the opera itself is unbelievably mired in detail. I recently watched a video on youtube with the famous chorus from ‘Die Valkryie’, with subtitles. There are eight women onscreen, and much of the singing dialog is about keeping their horses from jostling each other too much. I was also inspired by the oversimplification of the old ‘Classics Illustrated’ comic book series, with 1200-page literary tomes reduced to 20 pages of half-tone illustrations. When I was talking to Miles about ideas for the final project, he showed me some of the set designs done by David Hockney. I decided to do set designs for a non-traditional version of ‘Das Rheingold’, by Richard Wagner, which is the first of the set of four operas comprising ‘The Ring of the Nibelungs’, which took Wagner 30 years to complete. I did some drawing, but because of my limited drawing skills, I felt that I could convey much more effectively my design concepts by moving towards more digital imagery manipulation. If I would have limited myself to only drawing, the visual differences between the twin version of the Golem, and the Barbie they hold for ransom, would have been too subtle to appreciate. Interjecting different cultural references was part of the fun of this.