Making the Twilight Zone approachable for new readers…
This is a slight riff from the I Can Read Movies ds106 design assignment, I did not use the templates, but instead mocked it from Biscuit Goes to School
I started with the idea of the Janet Tyler character facing the “beautiful” people maybe putting a mirror in between.
Instead I cropped out the back if her head and put it through some palette and poster edge filters in PhotoShop to simplify the colors of the back of her head. I got the mirror and the pig face from the Noun Project (just using the snout of the pig in the mirror). The text was done with the Chalkboard Font, and warped a bit to match the original.
I thought it a bit literal, so got the idea to GIF the pig nose in. I switched to the timeline mode of the animation paletter, toggled open the available slides for the pig layer, By setting key points in the timeline, I could make the opacity go from 0% to 40% and back to 0%, making it fade in and out:
I’d like to see more book covers as animated GIFs.
The prize of this episode as many are the way it flips our assumptions. When you know the ending its amazing to see the ways they avoided showing the nurse’s and doctor’s faces, yet did not make it too falsely set up.
Wow, I had planned to do some other things today, I ended up doing more #ds106.
Having seen this episode once before (years ago, when I moved away to university), I was fully aware of the ending when I watched it again yesterday. The first time I saw the episode, years ago, it was not at all obvious how the camera movements were contrived to hide the faces of the doctors and nurses, and the reveal at the end was incredibly effective. Yesterday when I watched it for only the second time, it was masterful. Some of the instances are so well timed, it points to the care taken during the filming to maintain the illusion that we are seeing what we would normally see — without actually noticing that we are not seeing faces. I’m sure that if we realized that the faces were continually hidden, we would have figured that something was up long before the final moments (although, being the Twilight Zone, we KNOW something is up!).
I’m going to RIFF on your kids book cover with a different episode. And I’ll see if I can GIF it, too. My GIF-eye-tis seems to make that the natural happening these days, anyway.
OF COURSE we should gif the I Can Read covers. DUH.
This is such a rad idea and hilarious execution. The grey not-smiley-face is so flat affect, it really got me, man.
The sad part of all this is that “Biscuit Goes to School” isn’t a Twilight Zone episode. Because MAN would that be a great one.
Alan!
Stop post-dementing my childhood! Step away from Sammy the Seal!
I’m on it.
G