The first exercise for this unit gave me space to practice how to distil an image down to something simple, but still effective at communicating. I was asked to play a game of charades where I communicated the name of an existing media (TV show, film, book, etc) using only drawing. I was not allowed to write and had to use pictures only.
When I read this exercise I was reminded of the emoji riddles that were very popular a few years ago. Each one had a series of clues written in emojis that depicted the title of films, books, TV shows, and more obscure and niche things like the dog breed one below. I had a lot of fun with them at the time and loved seeing how people had figured out how to depict more difficult things – especially with something limited like emojis. Some were more straightforwards – like number 9 of the dog breed image below ‘German Pointer’ – and some were more abstract, like number 2 of the book image, ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
I didn’t have anyone around to play a more ‘Pictionary’ type version of this game, where I drew whilst being watched and changed what I was doing in response to real-time feedback, so I took a similar approach to the emoji riddles and then sent the images to my friends online. I used a charades generator to suggest media to depict as when faced with all media ever to pick from, I got a bit stuck. I also didn’t always have ideas for things to draw in order to depict the media and wasn’t always certain my friends would have heard of it.
Here are all of the images I drew – can you guess what they are?
My friends largely understood what was being drawn and didn’t have much feedback on what should be changed. I did have it suggested that I should state how many words were in the title of each thing – and whether it’s a TV show, film, book, etc. I started doing this and from there almost all my images were correctly guessed. I really enjoyed figuring out ways to simplify the drawings and get across what I wanted to. It was a good, fun exercise to get started with, as it got me thinking about shape and expression again, and helped loosen me up a bit. I also think it’s just a fun party game, and I’d like to repeat it!
The images above depict (from left to right):
– Never Gonna Give You Up (song)
– The Lion King (film)
– Howl’s Moving Castle (film)
– Futurama (TV show)
– School of Rock (film)
– Game of Thrones (TV show)
– The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (book)
– Cat in the Hat (book)
– Under the Sea (song)
– Bee movie (film)
– Don’t Worry, Be Happy (song)
– Video Killed the Radio Star (song)
Learning Log 