The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing
ENG181.11 Fall 2019
I chose to recreate these pair of scenes because I am a huge fan of the horror/slasher genre, and there is no better choice to recreate a scene a from than one of the original movies that brought the genre to the mainstream than Psycho.
If I’m being quite honest, I haven’t seen one of the Friday the 13th movies, but I had the mask and machete from Halloween so I decided that’s what I would go with. I’ve seen a couple video games with Jason decapitating people so I figured they got it from the movies, I was wrong. It took me a while to find a clip of Jason slashing someone’s throat so and the fake blood was already on my friends neck so that’s what we had to go with. The photo was nowhere near an exact replica but it gets the gist of the scene and I think that it has its own flair.
This one was a really fun one for me. I was not planning on making this one at the time but then as I was rushing through my house (which is five minutes away from campus) picking up some stuff I stumbled upon my old lego collection and this idea struck me. Once I the idea was in my head I couldn’t get it out so I stopped everything I was doing and sat on my floor and played with legos and cut out paper until this creation was made. I’ve never been a big paper cutout person, so this style was different for me, but overall I’m happy with how the whole image came out. The hardest part was getting the camera at the right angle. Initially I planned to hold both pieces of paper (for the background and foreground) and set a timed pic on my phone, but it was too hard to get the angle of the camera to stay steady at such a low position to the ground. So instead I got a stool out and taped the background pic to one of the stool legs which freed a hand for me to operate the phone camera with.
I got the inspiration from my favorite Finance Meme Instagram account and decided to use that topic for this Sunday Sketch assignment. The movie scene from the recent Star War: The Mandalorian depicted a bounty hunter and a protector in a fierce fight while the baby Yoda, the bounty target, stood aside watching them peacefully and sipping soup. The baby Yoda who might be the child of big Yoda, the late Jedi Master, went viral online and became a major meme material.
The scene itself is not of much significance and easy to recreate. It is just because I really like the Star War series, and the memes are so funny that I decided to recreate it.
Assignment Link: https://eng181f19.davidmorgen.org/assignments/sketches/sketch-11-recreate-a-movie-scene/
The day before getting this assignment I had just watched The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford. This movie spoke volumes to me, as it was about a man who was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Ever since hearing an assembly in high school about the “Innocence Project” I always found the topic very interesting. That’s why I found it fitting to use this as my scene to recreate.
This scene was taken from the movie Get Out and somewhat hard for me to recreate. The main difficulty came from trying to get the expression right and I still never actually did. My pictures always ended up in me either looking like I was yawning or I was very lost which in a way I was when doing this assignment. The only other struggle was the tears because the water dried up way too often so there was a lot of re-applying. Apart from this, I couldn’t find a good and similar background so just ended up using my dorm room and my head always seemed to be tilted a bit. Overall though, this was a pretty fun assignment not only to create but to also see other people’s outcomes as well.
I watched Léon: The Professional a long time ago. Honestly, at first, I wasn’t thinking about recreating this scene at all since Mathilda (Natalie Portman) is a much younger girl with short hair. However, I ended up doing it because the scene was relatively easy to set up – all I need is a sad face, some tears, and a little bit of sunlight. That said, it took me such a long time to get it right. The idea of replacing the gun with a DCT banana was inspired by Banksy’s Pulp Fiction, which I think is pretty funny. With my ‘gun’ in hand and tears (eye drops) in eyes, I did my best to frown and cry but I could never make that complicated expression of hers. And when I finally got the tilt of my head and the position of my hand right, my artificial tears were drying up. Got nothing more to say but my respects to the 12-year-old Natalie Portman.
(Plus, I really enjoyed this assignment in the afternoon sun:))
