It’s never been a secret that I’m a huge fan of Darths and Droids. I find the concept awesome – if you haven’t seen it,1 the comic takes the story of Star Wars and presents it as a big roleplaying game. Even if we exclude the facts that the comic is one of the funniest I’ve read in a really long time and that they’ve really sucked me into the whole Jim-Annie-story now, I’m still fascinated by the whole idea of taking the images of an existing work of art, Star Wars, and by adding new text presenting it as a completely different work.2 Yes, all the images in the comic are screenshots from the Star Wars movies.
I’m saying all this because today’s idea is a variation of that.
As I was saying, I think it’s awesome to take existing pictures and manage to use them to create a new work.
But… Would it be possible to take existing pictures and use them to re-create an old work?
Would it be possible to make a comic based solely on screenshots from a movie, and by adding dialogue balloons and captions, give it the plot of a completely different movie?
Could you, using only pictures from Star Wars, re-create the story of Forrest Gump?
Could you make a comic version of Avatar, but only using images from Pixar’s Up?
Could you tell the entire story of Citizen Kane using only screenshots from Eyes Wide Shut or Harry Potter?
Of course, the more different the two movies are, the more difficult it will be. So if you want to do this, pick your movies carefully based on how big a challenge you want.
Figure out which characters should play which parts. Who’s the Forrest Gump of the Star Wars movies? Who’s the Jenny? Who’s the Lieutenant Dan? Who’s the JFK? The dialogue in Star Wars doesn’t matter, of course, as long as you can find screenshots you can use. Does Star Wars have equivalents of the most important scenes in Forrest Gump? If you decide that Luke should be Forrest, is there a scene in Star Wars with Luke sitting in a place where it feels as if he could be sitting, waiting for the bus, and talking to people about how life is like a box of chocolates?
At first, this feels like a very experimental idea. It could be a fun challenge, but why would people want to read it, if all you do is steal the story from a movie they’ve already seen?
Well, because they want to see how you do it, of course. To see which characters you pick to be which characters, and what screenshots you must use to get this to work. If you did something like this with two movies I was a fan of, I know that I would check it out.
61 down, 39 to go.
- The link is right there, click it! This is worth reading! [back]
- An idea it should be noted that they’ve borrowed from DM of the Rings, which did the same thing to The Lord of the Rings. [back]