Fluffy & John

Artist statement

 

• Within the first room you meet johns mother and father giving him their condolences about his cat getting killed. His dad asks where he wants to put fluffy’s old toys and this makes john very sad and he just wishes he had one more day with his best friend fluffy.
• Room 2 he gets sad and just wants to go to bed but while he’s asleep the universe transports him back in time to spend one last day with fluffy. But there is a catch, john has to go find all of fluffy’s old toys in order for him to go back in time.
• Room 3 is john asking his dad where all the toys are and he goes and gathers them, then he’s transported through time and sees fluffy! Then they greet each other and decide what they want to do for the day so they head off to their favorite tree. 
• Room 4 john sees a mouse and knows fluffy loves to chase them so john makes a game out of it and tells him that if he catches the mouse he will give him a slice of pizza later. Fluffy catches the mouse and then they go eat pizza and wonder what they should do next. 
• Room 5 they decide to go watch tv and just love on eachother for their last moments. Then john has one more thing he wants to show fluffy before he has to leave. As they are crossing the street a car comes and hits fluffy again. Then john is transported back to normal time and realizes that he’s not a good cat owner. 

Now we are going to talk about McCloud's concepts of abstraction, transitions, and timeframe. These concepts are very important in storytelling and we have not only been reading about them but we have been using them in class as well. Time frame is where there are different panels almost like a comic. Within these panels you have different events happening within them that make up your story. It makes up your scene or idea. It’s not a panel of just random things it is a panel of a sequence of events that line up. We’ve done a few exercises in class like this where we filled out panels, like our most recent with the rollercoaster. A transition is the action between frames. For example, if someone is in a haunted house and the first frame was him fighting zombies and he kills them all then he hears voices in the next room and walks down the hall to go find it, the transition would be him walking down the hallway and hearing the voices. Lastly, abstraction wants the readers to think on a more theoretical level. Thinking in an abstract way is thinking how you can make your character and or scene more interesting with more feeling, action, and or emotion. Abstraction is in a short term, thinking outside the box. All of these things are very important within story telling. Abstraction to me is the very most important aspect to a story, it allows you to add more sparkle to your story. Thinking outside the box is something a lot of people struggle with but I think if you push yourself to do it, you could surprise yourself. I think it was very helpful for me learning these things and applying them to by bitsy project and any other storytelling project I do in the future.