I wonder if I'm supposed to be Diddy since I did the remix?!?
Caitlyn posted what she called a "Cap Failure" where she had a caption layout all worked out, but didn't seem to be able to get a grip on a story line to go with it .. then asked if anyone wanted to take a shot at it for themselves, perhaps as a collaborative effort.
Beyond the little bit of a prisoner breaking out of prison, I didn't have anything. I didn't have an idea of how he changed (finding a spell book in the library?, having another con change him?) I didn't have an idea on how he used his new body to escape, nor did I have any idea why he was at a train station. I normally don't have all the details when I start writing a story, but I almost always have some direction to go. Not having that this time I just saved the image back and figured I'd work it out later.Well, I enjoy challenges, and figured that once I got home I'd give it a shot. I wrote up my post first though as I had the whole idea for The Great Equalizer and since Caitlyn had also posted a new caption from Petra, I thought those two thing would go well together. Afterwards I pulled up the caption framework that Caitlyn had designed and said, "if you can't whip something up in 10-15 minutes, then just give up!" When I got the work in progress, I pasted in a text box, figuring it would help me along creatively to just make it a Dee caption and worked in a gradient into it ... if I wrote something good enough, it wouldn't be too hard to create a border as well to complete my style.
Well... I've looked at this template about a dozen times and still have no idea for it. So I'm calling it done and posting what I have here. If you have an idea of a story that would fit the image, go ahead and post it here. I'll gladly put it into the layout and post it as a collaborative cap!
One thing I noticed is that Caitlyn REALLY used a very thin text box, but she also uses much smaller font sizes. In a way, that worked out for me because (1) the text had to be sparse yet still tell a story, and (2) I felt like I was writing an e e cummings prose piece. I still had to shrink the font down a size to 24 though, as I couldn't fit in everything that I wanted to put in it. Its also why Ryan and Kyoko were chosen, as they are short names, and then are linked by the letter Y being the 2nd letter.
I'm not usually a fan of body swaps, but I thought it would be the best way to convey the story with the given picture. I thought back to Folsom Prison Blues and how Johnny Cash describes the despair he feels when the train whistle blows. He'd do anything to get out of that place, and so, ummm, its my fractured TG take of how that character would've escaped going to the big house. I wonder if Caitlyn knew of the back story, she'd have changed the title to "Folsom Prison Pinks" and made her dress pink and white striped?!?
The hard part was getting someone that WANTED to be in the jail. I fudged a bit by having Kyoko long for the protection and twisted feelings she had for her pimp. If you had been kidnapped and forced into prostitution, there would probably still be some sort of attachment to your pimp, especially if you knew of nothing else in a foreign country and were now going to have to exist without his guidance. Since I wanted it to be a "happy ending" as much as there could be where a convicted felon that was going to jail is now free, her pimp is now going to be getting some of the same sort of care he gave to her but on the receiving end now! From e e cummings to O. Henry!
When I was done, I sent Caitlyn both my caption and the text so she could put what I wrote into her framework. I didn't ask for her PSD file, but I wanted to see what my text would look like in her graphic design work. Here is the post where she talks about my caption and what she had to do to get my stuff to fit into her caption, the final work is right up above this paragraph. Of course, I hadn't written that many words, so it looked odd ... so Caitlyn tweaked the title, and fleshed out my verbiage a bit, without making it too overblown or watering the impact at all.
It was a fun little experiment that actually worked out well for both of us. We've also learned that if I need to ever expand any of my captions into stories, I'll hire Caitlyn to be my freelance story stretcher outer! That could be something to put on the resume!
DISCUSSION QUESTION: Soooooooo, how did we do?
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Thought this was cool. Read about the first mainstream TG character from DC Comics!
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