Communications lab final project proposal
For this project we drew our inspiration from The Seven Deadly Sins, which is a concept in Catholicism doctrines. Consisting of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust, the seven deadly sins are the representatives of all human villainies. However, instead of depicting the seven sins as evil characters, which is the way they had always been treated with in all kinds of media, we are trying to interpret them in a perspective that relates more to normal people’s daily lives. The idea we want to convey through this interpretation is that sometimes a little bit of some of the sins can make the modern hustling life less intimidating, even if the outcome of the sin is “not good” in a utilitarian perspective. For example, eating junk food when one is stressed, or having just a little longer sleep before rushing like hell not to be late for school and so on. For other sins, we plan to interpret them as the current living and socializing condition of the modern people especially young people like us. For example they could be the quite wide-spread social phobia among young people, or the desire of buying a lot of goods online without efficient of money. In both ways, our ultimate goal is through re-interpreting the seven sins, vividly depict how young people’s daily life look like nowadays. And if we got comments like “that’s so true!”, our goal is successfully reached.
Our idea of seven deadly sins comes from the movie “Seven” directed by David Fincher. The movie tells the story of a serial killer who murdered seven people including himself and one of the two detectives who are in change of arresting him, assigning one of the seven sins to each person based on their action. Based on that, we came up with the idea of no one is innocent from the sins. Also, the style of our project is inspired by an official account in Wechat called “GQ Lab”. This account uses interactive comics to illustrate social phenomena in an entertaining and sarcastic tone while get the readers to reflect on their everyday life.
We are planning to have one page for each sin. Using a basic interactive way like click, drag, hover and so on, the user could interact with the main character(s) in the scene until they finally reach an “ending” for the characters which illustrates how we interpret the concept the sins. For example, in the scene of envy, we are planning to have a bunch of faces talking and laughing in one side of the screen and a small, lonely man in the other side. When the cursor hovers on the talking faces, sounds of people chatting are played, while the man on the side grows smaller. And when the cursor moves away, everything stops. And this scene ends with the man become small to invisible, while the people around scattered away. Our main characters in the scenes would be mainly hand-drawn stick figures, and we plan to make them move around and interact with the user using p5 animation. And we will use css styling as well as audio and possibly videos to make it vivid. The reason for choosing hand drawing is that it is easier for us to have better control over the style as well as avoiding inconsistency. And the internet is a great medium for this project because we can easily embed the interactive elements into it and as the internet becomes highly widespread nowadays, we deem it a great media for our ideas to spread.
