The inspiration of our project comes from “The Seven Deadly Sins”. Pride, greed, lust, wrath, envy, gluttony, and sloth are seven vices that were mentioned in the Christian teachings. They were seen as an abuse or excessive perspectives of human nature. Works showing the seven sins in the mass media tend to be in a dark and gloomy tone. In this project we try to explore a different approach to depict the seven sins–we would like to show how these sins exist in our everyday life in a light and entertaining way. The reason why we want to use a less serious manner is that as is mentioned above, seven sins are actually something rooted in the human nature and we would like to show how these sins are represented in modern times, especially in our daily life. Also, in an age where people are encouraged to embrace and celebrate their nature and imperfection, these “sins” are no longer seen as evil. We are actually committing these “sins” unconsciously everyday in order to make life easier and somehow happier.
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 shows his criticism of the seven deadly sins in human nature in an extreme way–killing those who are seen as a symbol for these sins. However, in the end of the movie, the killer himself also becomes a symbol for one of the sins–envy. He envies the perfect family that the detective in the movie has, and kills the detective’s wife, which suggests that the seven sins are actually rooted in everyone’s nature. No one can say that they are innocent, not even those who claim to be a hater and rebel of the sins within human nature. Therefore, we try to show the universality of the seven sins from a daily-life perspective by making this project. 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 as well as sarcastic tone which help readers reflect on their everyday life while being entertained.
We will have a start page where all seven sins will be displayed. There will be one page for each sin and there will not be a storyline, it doesn’t matter where to start or where to end. The user can start with whichever sin he/she wants. Users can interact with our webpage by clicking, dragging, hovering and so on. For example, for the “sloth” part, the user can trigger the alarm by clicking on the page and thus, waking up the main character; and for the “envy” part, the user can trigger the audio by hovering the cursor on a specific part of the webpage. We will hand draw all the scenes and use animation as well as audio in our project. We will create our animation using p5. The reason why we decide to hand draw our elements in the page is that we would like to have a better control of the overall style of our project and hand drawing is a great way to create a casual, less serious style. We choose the Internet as the medium for our project, because it is a place where various interesting ways of interaction can take place. More people can see and interact with our project via internet, especially young people who can relate to the theme of this project.