Digital Pictionary Reflection

I was really excited about the Digital Pictionary project, when I heard about it.  Back when I was at home, my family used to play that a lot.  Of course, when you are playing the game, you want your partner to be able to guess whatever word or concept you are trying to describe through images, so that you can win.  This project was so exciting for me, to be able to try be more ambiguous, and clever. To present a solid stash of information that in context would obviously point to whatever word I was given.  But hopefully, out of context, would be much more unclear.

When I learned that we were supposed to make three different takes on the project, so whoever was guessing would have a wider base off of which to guess, it worried me a little that I wouldn;t be able to make that many.  However, I realized that, though this presented a challenge, it was a very good challenge, and forced me to work and think outside the box.  In the end, I lucked out, with the word "ironic", which, in regards to English and grammar, actually has exactly three different types of manifestation: verbal, situational, and dramatic irony.  This was perfect.

Of course, in trying to represent these three different aspects through images, the lines were no longer so sharp: I could not actually represent verbal irony, truly, without audio.  So I used the picture of the guy with the fingers crossed behind his back, implying a lie.  But then, whoever is looking at the picture knows he is lying, and the guy he is lying to doesn't, and so it becomes dramatic irony.  

It took awhile for concrete ideas to start formulating, but once they started it was easy.  I made the situational irony one first, then the verbal, then the dramatic.  One of the first ideas I had was of the curbside prophet actually witnessing the end, whatever that was.  I couldn't find any suitable picture of one (I looked through a lot of Non Sequitur comics), so I drew one.  After that it was easy to assemble common images from an imagined apocalypse.  Again, my concept for the verbal irony image centered on the fingers crossed behind the back and the silver tongue to signify lying.  Hyperboles are a common form of verbal irony, and so I included the image of the snake that had eaten a horse, rather than just stating "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"  The dramatic irony was really simple actually, with the audience watching as the thief snuck up behind the unsuspecting girl.  It was interesting because, in terms of the three images as a group, this one seemed to throw people off the most.  In the background of the third one, was the text "this year?" and then "nope" repeated 8,000 times.  Ideally it would have been able to fit 1,000,000 times, to represent the hyperbole "not in a million years."