What I Chose
The Story
Seventeenth-century author Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote has been immortalised by one small scene from the book:
Don Quixote’s persistence that a set of windmills is actually a group of giants that he needed to fight.
That scene is what I’ve chosen to remix.
The Project
Specifically, I plan to make an inverted parody of the scene, reversing the opinions of both Don Quixote and Sancho, as well as the passage’s end result.
From a media standpoint, though, I’m not fully sure how I plan to tackle the project. I know I want to do some sort of an animation with a vocal overlay, but I have no artistic blood in my veins and don’t know how to make an animation. For that matter, I really don’t know how to create any kind of original visuals that could tell a compelling story.
I’m sure I’ll come up with something, but for now, I’m stuck.
Why I Chose It
The Story
I chose the windmill scene for a relatively simple reason: I’ve always been fascinated by it. Don Quixote, for one or another, intrigues me. I’m culturally drawn to the Spanish conquistador era, and though the book takes place in Spain and not in the Americas, the characters’ personalities and motivations are largely the same.
Also, the windmill scene is easily the most relatable feature of the novel. Its pop culture references range from idioms (“tilting at windmills”) to paintings (artist of note: Picasso, a copy of which my parents own).
The scene itself, taken out of context, is rather humorous on its own, though it has much darker implications within the overlying story. The comedic value is still there, though, and parodying it would exaggerate those comic themes.
The Project
A story like this—rooted in visual confusion—can benefit heavily from images and pictorial representations of the standard text. My initial thought was a faux-dramatic film scene, but I don’t have the location, the props, or the actors to accomplish that. A way to avoid needed real-world resources is to create the entire scene yourself: hence, an animation. But as I previously mentioned, I haven’t the first idea where to start with making an animation.
I may ultimately fall on generic comic-strip style drawings of the scene overdubbed with vocals.
I guess we’ll see.