I did a thing.

A bunch of different flavoured nerds got together last month with Stephanie’s idea: pick a director out of a hat and create a photo that captures the style of that director. I got two names – Terry Gilliam and Federico Fellini. While I haven’t done my Fellini project yet, the above link will take you to my Gilliam attempt.

I was especially challenged by this entire thing, given that I do not watch movies and haven’t seen anything, ever. Gilliam is a founding member of Monty Python, but is also an influential director. Some of his films that I have not seen include Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, The Brothers Grimm, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and more. I was pretty much limited to what I could read on the internet, and several things struck me in particular: both Twelve Monkeys and Brazil feature dystopian societies (Brazil is a parody of Orwell’s 1984), and he was responsible for all the weird animations that appear in Python sketches: namely, his shit is fucked up.

I thought for several days about what I wanted to do, and figured my version of dystopia would be somewhat doable. I don’t exactly have a large number of identical people lying around, so I did the next best thing: a barren, hopeless future acted out by dollar store toys. It works, sort of. At any rate, it’s pretty fucked up.

I don’t know that I did Gilliam’s work any justice, but I had a great deal of fun putting toys in bizarre poses. My favourite shot is probably the one of You Tube – to me, nothing could possibly be more depressing and dystopic than a future in which we are all ruled by what we see on You Tube. The 1984 Apple Commercial was my attempt at tongue in cheek – not only did the commercial spoof on the very thing one of my director’s films also play on; but my “Big Brother” is in fact the very computer the 1984 commercial was introducing. Full circle; I haz it.

So, check it out. My Fellini project won’t be quite so many photos, but if I can pull that one off I’ll post it later. I don’t think my entry is nearly as good as some of the others – Shan’s is awesome, and not because I was her model – but I had fun with it, and my own little in-jokes give me a great deal of pleasure.

I’ll post links to the other projects as I find them!