The issues that needed to be resolved in the design were both of aesthetics and functionality. The issue of aesthetics was resolved through a change in method of production. While the first iterations were all meant to be printed by conventional Xerox printer, turning to risograph printing allowed for a natural grain and texture to add richness to the work. Additionally, the limited color palette allowed by the risograph made the color scheme much more manageable. In the new iteration all the outlines and highlights used fluorescent pink, unifying the aesthetic, while the body of the figures were colored in orange for Act I, green for Act II and blue for Act III. This simplified tone and created a more cohesive work, resolving the issues of style.
Once I established the color scheme for the beat cards, I used it as a basis for the illustrations as well. The letter colors matched the colors I used for the outline and fill of the figures, while the gradient fill in the background matched.
A second round of testing ensued with the illustrations printed on the back of the cards. What I found this time was that there was still little interest in engaging with the mechanics of story structure without an immediate payoff. Turning over the cards to reveal the illustrations meant first going through all 102 cards to pick choices and laying them out, all before receiving a payoff.
In addition, the visual system using colors was not working. Once printed, the colors were gaudy and distracting, and the sheer number of different colors made it look random rather than systematic. There was also no way that players were going to memorize nine different colors in order, which made the intent of the color scheme a moot point.
While I created the beats and action cards, I also worked on illustrations that would be on the back. One of the suggestions from tutorial was to make the illustrations horizontal rather than vertical, mimicking the way in which movies are projected.
One of the ideas I had was to make each film into its own color scheme so that it could easily be picked out as a group when face up. I created multiple drafts of the illustrations, but the outcomes fell short of feeling resolved.
Following feedback from testing the first iteration of the structure cards, it became apparent that the color scheme was not working. The gradations were too subtle when printed, and without an obvious way to organize the cards, it was to difficult to engage with them. When printed they also proved to be an unwieldly size and shape.
The second iteration fixed the design issues from the first by changing the color scheme to be more obvious, adding numbers to the cards for ease of play, and adjusting their size and shape to fit that of a standard playing card deck.
Once the beat cards were created, it became necessary to land each beat in a set of examples that illustrated how they manifested in stories. Using the same top 100 film examples from the AFI, twelve corresponding cards were created for each beat, that outlined actions that fit the narrative arcs of many of the movies.
After presenting the initial iteration of this work, I realized that it needed more context to make sense. The three act structure specifically needed to be further elucidated for the cards to make sense, and to give audiences a way to reorder them. I did a quick survey of literature about story structure and settled on using two sources: Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Both authors break down story structure to help readers understand the beats, or moments, that create a story. Snyder’s work is very much focused on Hollywood genre films written for a general audience. His formula breaks down screenplays to the point where beats have specific page numbers and he is very specific in the action that should take place during each beat. Campbell on the other hand, uses myths and stories from ancient Greece to the present and from all over the globe, to demonstrate that all stories have a universal structure made up of three acts, each of which serve to propel the hero’s journey forward.
I chose to use them together because I found an interesting convergence in their points of view as practitioner (Snyder was a prolific Hollywood screenwriter and teacher) and academic (Campbell’s book is a heavily academic survey of world mythology). I also chose them because they are both highly popular works, but they are also not without controversy.
Snyder’s book is seen by some as a “paint by numbers” approach to screenwriting that produces formulaic and prosaic screenplays. Campbell has been criticized for oversimplifying the complexity of the works he cites, and for leaning heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis in his explanations of human behavior. To my mind, both of their perspectives are instructive and compelling, but I felt that if I could combine the two, I would have something that was more solid in terms of depth than Snyder’s approach, but also more accessible and modern than Campbell’s.
Campbell divides the hero’s journey into 17 parts, while Snyder himself has created his own “beat sheet,” a 15 moment play by play of what should go in each section of a screenplay, down to the page where each should occur. To my mind, Campbell’s approach is appropriate for the analysis of mythology (his main focus) but too bloated and repetitive for film, while Snyder’s is too rigid of a framework to permit experimentation or much originality.
After analyzing both theories of story structure, I created a flexible, eight-beat system that is divided into three acts: three beats in the first, four in the second, and two in the third. I then created cards with a very top-line description of the action in each beat.
The first iteration of my project divided iconic Hollywood films into three acts, the most basic structure of a story, and turned them into illustrated cards.
The illustrations are stark on purpose, the goal being to create the impression of the film without leaning too far into figurative representation. Since the cards were meant to be shuffled and reordered, I also wanted them to be able to make sense in different contexts. Thinking through production processes as well, I knew I wanted to try riso printing, and so I colored the images to reflect that outcome.
The idea of prompts from my last project brought me back to one of the things I love most: storytelling. Having studied history, film studies and business, one of the things that is most striking is how everything is about the story you tell. History is the stories we tell ourselves about our past. Films are the business of storytelling. Businesses rise and fall by how well they sell their story to the public.
Storytelling is one of the essential things that we do as humans. It colors how we experience the world around us, how we think about the past and how we imagine the future. I knew I wanted my final project to encompass the universality of storytelling, showing that good stories can help us to empathize and understand perspectives that are not our own, and find commonality in the human experience.
In order to land this idea, I went back to the idea of creating cards. It has become somewhat of a theme throughout my time at CSM and it felt like a fitting form for the final project. I also wanted to lean in to films and filmmaking, as that is what I know and care the most about. Finally, I knew I wanted to try my hand at illustration again. I had avoided illustration in my last few projects because I had received negative feedback about my style and execution in the first term. However, part of the reason I came to art school was to step out of my comfort zone and feel challenged, so it felt right to test myself once again.
The project began to take shape inspired by an illustrated shufflebook created by Richard Hefter in the 1970s. The idea was that each card represented either a subject or action, and could be ordered to create different narratives. I appreciated the simplicity of the form and the interactivity it invited. I also liked the fact that there was potential for virtually endless permutations, mirroring the way in which stories exist.
I thought the idea of the pulp fiction imprint was a fun one, but I received quite negative feedback on both concept and execution. Given the very limited time frame left to create a final project, I turned back to the idea of the alien encyclopedia, leaning on the existing assets and copy I had generated.
Rather than making a publication, I turned the work into a set of cards that could be used by creatives looking for prompts to make their work. I thought the parallel between prompting AI to generate content and using that content as a prompt was an interesting one. It felt like a new way of working that integrated AI into a creative workflow. This paradigm was different to the one being posited in the media, which argued that either AI was going to replace creatives entirely or AI’s inability to create and execute fully fledged concepts meant creatives were irreplaceable.
To my mind, both sides of the argument were missing the point that AI, in its current iteration, can also just be a tool. Like all tools, it works great for certain things and is terrible at others. This project aimed at exactly that, showing one way in which the technology can be leveraged to help rather than harm the creative process.
I began to give some thought as to the origins of the genre of science fiction, and what kinds of formats could work that would give more narrative context to the images. I found that science fiction became popular in the 1950s through pulp fiction magazines, cheap publications that contained short stories, many of them in the realm of science fiction. Many celebrated science fiction writers started out writing pulp fiction and then became respected authors in their own right, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clark.
With this in mind I started to sketch out a pulp fiction imprint by creating magazine covers that mimicked covers from different eras. The goal was to create a sort of uncanny valley of pulp fiction, one in which audiences would question whether what they were looking at was man- or machine-made.
