Doge Meme Tennis

Layer #1 (Opening)

Ling

Motivation

As the project is named ”Meme Tennis” and one of the artifact in my lookingout assignment was Doge (whose funny facial expression is often appropriated to wherever it can be), I came up with the idea about overlaying a round Doge face to the tennis ball. 

I chose the original background picture of a tennis player hitting the ball because I find that there will be an interesting contrast between the player’s tortured face and Doge’s calm and mocking face.   

Process

First, I intended to directly overlay the Doge face to the tennis ball, yet it turned out that the original picture I downloaded was a little too small. Therefore, I enlarged the tennis ball to exaggerate the effect. 

Layer #2

Dan Saad

Impressions/Intent:

When I saw the volley I was served, my first thought was "where is the doge ball going?". After seeing the tennis player's ridiculous expression, I was reminded of Saitama's famous 'Ok' face from One Punch Man. With that as the inspiration, I decided to follow the tennis ball's path and showcase Saitama's reaction to it, maintaining the two central features of the previous serve.

Composition/Approach:

I decided to preserve the original format of the Saitama 'Ok' meme with its black background, and extended the impression of the tennis ball's movement with the whooshing smear/blur of the ball. Similarly, I used a blur tool to blend the Doge head into the tennis ball. I decided to take a more vivid approach to the colors, contrasting the two colored pieces with the black background.

Layer #3

Uday Uppal

When I saw the previous material, the doge face on the tennis ball almost looked like a shooting star due to the black background. Also, the man's clothing made him seem as though he had a cape on, which again made me think of the sky. Because of this, I decided to change the meme into something where you could clearly see the doge blur being a shooting star.

I found a suitable background for my iteration with some people and a telescope observing the night sky. I then added in the doge blur with a lighten blend to make it merge with the background and look like a shooting star. I finally added in the speech bubble that would clearly show what was going on in the meme.

Layer #4

Tian Zhao

The volley I was served was a complete scene: some people observing a shooting doge in the sky. The doge was like an asteroid, and people were very excited seeing it. I found it amusing how the doge's face of contempt contrasts with those people's serious attitude.

I put the whole scene from the previous image into a bigger starry background, the universe. And by creating 3 same doges orbiting around the earth, I intended to show that the new discovery regarded by many as exciting and unique, could actually be ubiquitous. I also reduced the size of the human figures, to show that what we have known is only a tip of the "unknown" iceberg. Therefore, what you see might only be part of the fact, and there are always more to be discovered.

Layer #5

Ling

Upon looking at Layer #4, I’m amazed by the totally different settings where Doge is currently involved in. Therefore, I go back to Layer #3 and figure out that “the Doge ball” (after being shot) has already flown to the outer space. Therefore, to continue this idea about flying Dodge ball, I served a ‘volley’ which intends to describe things happened afterwards.

The idea of my ‘volley’ is that the flying Doge ball has come to an unknown planet and founded by aliens. The aliens don’t know anything about Doge, so they ask, “Wow, what is that?” I intentionally used “Wow” instead of “Look” because “Wow” is a word that must be used in Doge memes; and the font is also chosen as Comic Sans to obey the “rules”.    

Layer #6

Dan Saad

The previous volley's alien saucer immediately made me think of the ayy lmao alien meme. Since I still wanted to preserve the central doge element, I doge-ified the ayy lmao meme for their intersection.

The mainly red martian background and color scheme is preserved, with green contrast from the super tennis doge and the alien. I added text bubbles because I wanted to make it clear that Doge, rather than the stoned martian, was speaking.

Layer #7

Uday Uppal

When I received the previous material, I realized that the doge blur had now made it into space and come into contact with aliens. Since the doge blur had been traveling so much through space, I decided it was time that it tried its hand at time travel. 

Initially, it was somewhat difficult for me to imaging what time travel could be visualized as. However, after some quick research, I decided to combine an invisible clock image with a sort of space zoom image which would give an image to represent time travel. I added the clock image with a hardlight blend and low opacity to the space zoom, lining up the centers, in order to get a suitable background. I then added the doge blur on top towards the center of the background to show that it was traveling through time. I also added a text box to clarify what was happening.

Layer #8 (Closing)

Tian Zhao

I really like the theme, time travel, from the previous material. I think time travel represents the process of how we let the doge switches among different scenes quickly. The idea of time travel also corresponds to the features of spreadable media. Doge is the time traveller, and the various social platforms are time travel machines. Therefore, I decided to animate the previous material to make time traveling as real as possible.

I used Photoshop to make a gif out of the original picture. I rotated the original clock picture 4 times, and let them appear in sequence to create a simple spinning effect. I made the space zoom more transparent to emphasize the infinite clock. I also decided to make the gif loop forever, to show that the spreading of doge is an on-going process, which will not likely to stop as long as people are still creating their own variations of doge. 

This is the final product (see link below):

https://giphy.com/gifs/l2Sq86FhSQVd6jiX6

Approach/Process

Our approach to the project included first sitting down together and deciding on a central meme that we would use and reuse as we went along. We decided on the doge image. Then, we just took turns developing a form of narrative using the doge image as the central theme. Each person created a new piece with some sort of connection to the previous material they were provided, and this eventually built to our final rotating time travel doge blur.

We worked with the material using many different tools including Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Pixlr, and Gimp depending on the preference of whoever was working on that certain iteration. We shared files and source material through Google Drive which allowed us to easily build on previous iterations. The biggest challenge was the fact that we were working in a 4-person group which meant it took longer between iterations, and it was more difficult to collaborate efficiently. Another challenge was keeping all the source material together and easily accessible between iterations which we handled through separate folders of files for each step.

Reflection

We realized as we went through all the compositions at the end, that the one constant was the doge image that we started with. We figured this was probably because doge is a very recognizable and widespread meme, so all members of the group were familiar with it, and thus able to incorporate it more easily into their own work. Additionally, each iteration does have a discernible connection or link to the one that came before that allowed it to step forward and almost become a story at the culmination.

We learned that this is probably the process by which spreadable media is reproduced and reimagined by different individuals on the internet. Some central theme stays constant as the context around it continues to evolve. This context is generally what is more specific to the creator of the piece, while the central theme allows the general audience to relate with it. Perhaps next time we would plan out the process better so that our pieces would be created more efficiently. Also, maybe we would work on a better way to distribute the material being used.

Sources

Layer #1:

Doge picture

https://twitter.com/dogethedog

Tennis 

https://www.rio2016.com/en/news/rio-2016-tennis-test-event-heralds-new-sporting-era-for-brazil

Layer #2:

Tennis Ball Picture

http://www.kdjay.co.uk/kdandjay/ebayprod/tennis.jpg

Saitama Ok Face

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/050/209/b01.png 

Layer #3:

Night sky background

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/6a0133f2e9fdbf970b019affc27d83970d.jpg 

Layer #4:

Night sky background2

http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2015/12/25/the-loneliest-galaxy-in-the-universe/#14d7ea4d2c84

earth

https://www.pexels.com/search/earth/

Layer #5:

landscape picture:

http://gizmodo.com/tag/exoplanets

UFO:

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/news/ufo_extraterrestrials/2016/07/07/10653-ufo-witnessed-over-albany-georgia.html

Layer #6:

Ayy Lmao Meme: 

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/632/652/6ca.jpg

Layer #7:

Infinite clock

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/media/images/80912000/jpg/_80912281_153781677.jpg

Space Zoom

http://r.ddmcdn.com/s_f/o_1/SCI/uploads/2013/12/132284642704413536101101197_TimeTravel.jpg

Layer #8: 

Please see Layer #7.