Week 9 Ways of Seeing

Storyboard

I am a spider. As yet I have no name. I’ve no idea where I was born.

All I remember is that I was making silk in a dampish dark place when, for the first time, I saw a cat.

This cat, I heard afterwards, was a member of the laziest cat species; an Ieneko, one of those cats who, in return for being taken care of by two human beings, perform cute actions in their house.

I hear that, on occasion, this species catches and kills us. However as at that time I lacked all knowledge of such creatures, I did not feel particularly frightened. I simply felt myself jealous of this cat; what an easy life this cat has!

After a few days of observation, I had noticed that this two human beings loved stroking the cat’s fur. Every day and night, they pet this cat as if they were touching fur from heaven. I could not stop thinking it was the fur that made this cat so special.

Tonight, I decided to take a journey. I am going to collect this cat’s fur and put it on me, so that I should be able to have my life as easy and lucky as this cat.

Process

First, I randomly picked a character by rolling dice and it was a spider at night. Then, I did brainstorming about a spider at night / cat / cat's fur / the novel I am a cat / etc and how to approach this assignment.

While doing so, I needed to make some decisions. The first decision was which to work on at the beginning, photo-taking or narrative. I chose photo taking because I don't take photo regularly and I wanted to challenge that. I took some random photos without thinking about story/narrative, but I had to say it did not work well because I did not know what I wanted to do with those photos. So I decided to work on my narrative/story first then took photos according to the narrative/story.

To make my narrative/story, I remixed Soseki Natsume's I am a cat, which I worked on my second project, and expand that idea to a spider at night. Because the title of this assignment is WAYS OF SEEING, I wanted to work on how a spider at night sees a cat. I ended up treating a spider as feeling jealous of a cat because it has easy/lucky life, being treated as Queen and pet with care, whereas a spider is disliked by people and has more difficult life than a cat. I picked cat's fur as a symbol of its cuteness and made a story/narrative about a spider trying to achieve that cuteness.

After making my narrative/story, the rest was not hard much. I chose to draw images based on the picture I took since I did not see a spider in my room.