CI 5475 Week 11 - Man vs. Mild; Comic Life and Visual Rhetoric

For this week's assignment with Comic Life, I decided to create a short comic to parody the wildly popular (pun intended) Discovery Channel series Man vs. Wild (MVW) starring wilderness adventurer Bear Grylls. For those of you not familiar with MVW, each episode follows a rather basic formula:

1.) Bear Grylls is creatively "dumped" via plane, boat, and / or motorized vehicle into the middle of some vast expanse of nature including deserted islands, rain forests, rivers, desert plains, and so on.

2.) Bear Grylls is "alone" (just ignore the camera crew with him...), and supplied only with the most BASIC survival tools; often only the clothing on his back and a simple pocket knife.

3.) With nothing more than his basic supplies, surrounding environment, and expert knowledge of the wilderness, Bear Grylls narrates various survival techniques as he makes his way back to some form of civilization for rescue. For example, the viewer sees Bear Grylls create shelter, hunt for wild (often dangerous) game, treat wounds, and create signals, boats, and so on out of nothing more than what his immediate environment and expertise affords him.

And you may ask, WHAT IS THE POINT? Well, as Bear Grylls points out at the beginning of each and every episode: "I'm going to show you the skills needed to survive here." So, if I ever find myself in a deserted canyon, river, rain forest, desert, and / or so on and so forth, watching this show will teach me some survival skills, right? Wrong! Reason being: it is HIGHLY unlikely that myself (along with the majority of the "panzified" viewing audience completely adjusted to an extremely "mild" style of life), would be able to put these survival skills into action in the true "wild."

To get a quick glimpse of this formula in action, check out this short clip from an MVW episode filmed in a Copper Canyon, Mexico:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX09dkEhGRM&feature=PlayList&p=gmQ-KaK054s

For my parody comic titled Man vs. Mild - MN Lakes Edition, I wanted to draw attention to the enormous gap between the urban / suburban-ized and otherwise "controlled" / "mild" environments that 99.99% of the show's viewing audience experiences during their daily existence, and the truly desolate / "uncontrolled" / "wild" environments featured in MVW that said general viewing audience would have NO actual shot of surviving in, regardless of any television-based survival skills they learned before hand.

To begin to accomplish this task, I first wanted to contrast the senses of openness, freedom, isolation, and so on which viewers vicariously experience when watching MVW, with the boundaries / limits viewers experience in their realities. After digging through my collection of nature-themed photography, I selected a number of images of myself kayaking on Silver Lake in North St. Paul, MN, which is one of the smallest lakes in the metro area. In contrast to the vast openness of the enormous canyon Bear Grylls treks across in the above clip, these photos of Silver Lake communicate much more confining boundaries / limits (you can see the shore line in the photos!)

Next, I wanted to contrast the often wild and dangerous game Bear Grylls has to hunt down in order to nourish himself, with the fast food drive-through window much of the general viewing audience depends on for sustenance. In contrast to the dangerous wild bores Bear Grylls traps, kills, cooks, and eats with his bare hands, I portray the comic book character "hunting" one of Minnesota's most common animals; the goose. In contrast to a wild bore having an exotic and / or dangerous connotation, the images of the geese may express irritation (after all, geese = tremendous amounts of goose poop to potentially step in), but hardly express any sense danger or risk. Lastly, I refer to the geese as "unprocessed chicken nuggets" to further remind the general viewing audience that all of their food is basically trapped, killed and cooked for them, and that they would have NO shot at survival if actually placed in a similar situation as Bear Grylls, regardless again of any television based survival tips.

Lastly, I parodied my character's narrative style of speech to match that of Bear Grylls's as closely as possible. As you can hear via the above clip, Bear Grylls speaks in patterns of brief, relatively emotionless narrations of his observed surroundings in a charming British accent. For example, even when a wild bore or fish gets away from Bear Grylls, he expresses almost no anxiety or frustration (even though his food supply just took off!). As you can see, I attempt to parody the same sort of emotionless, objective narration, even in the face of my character's only meal of unprocessed chicken nuggets taking flight!

Without further adieu, I give you Man vs. Mild - MN Lakes Edition. (Click on thumbnail for enlarged image).


Overall, there are many differing conventions utilized / operating in reading and creating visual vs. print-exclusive texts. Specific to my Comic Life creation, I argue that creating a sense of perspective in each cell depended almost completely on visuals alone. For example, If I wanted to position the viewer as viewing the main character via their own distanced / outsider perspective, I utilized a picture of the main character himself. However, if I wanted to position the viewer as viewing the textual world through the main character's perspective, I utilized a picture that affords a sort of first person view of the textual world (e.g., the photos of the bow of the kayak as if the viewer themselves are actually sitting in the cockpit!). In short, achieving this sort of perspective via text alone would be much more cumbersome, and much more time consuming. Whereas it could potentially take several paragraphs, or even pages, to write the viewer "into" the seat of the kayak's cockpit, one adequately utilized image can accomplish this task in an instant!

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TEACHING IDEAS

I honestly can't wait to incorporate programs like Comic Life into my teaching. Like Professor Beach talked about in class, I feel as though this tool would work as a wonderful pre-writing tool to story board movie productions. For example, if students wanted to create a video ethnography of some part of town, they could first visit the location(s) with a still shot camera and take detailed photos. Then, students could load them into Comic Life, annotate them, and begin to build dialogue and movement instructions for later filming.

Also, I think it would be very interesting to have students select text-based characters and create comic strips starring said characters. For example, while reading Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, students could create comic strips starring ward members and their battle with mental disorders. While doing this, students could play with perspective, illustrating the textual world via the often unique, warped mental perspectives of various ward members as based on textual ques. For example, after mining the text for evidence, students could represent Chief Bromden as perceiving the ward as the sort of mechanized "combine" that he describes from his mentally unstable perspective. Similarly, after mining the text for evidence, students could represent Billy Bibit as perceiving other patients on the ward as the bunny rabbits he "sees" from his mentally unstable perspective.

IMAGES USED

http://assets.knowyourmeme.com/i/1504/original/bear_grylls.jpg

http://novelinks.byu.edu/uploads/Novels/OneFlewOverTheCuckoosNest/CoverImage.jpg