Remix Project: Bat-Cage!

   
     My remix was born out of a comedic love for Nicolas Cage quotes. I had originally planned to take a cartoon and a Cage movie, and have Nic and a cartoon character have a "conversation" with only lines they had spoken in the show and movie. Unfortunately, my already tight schedule didn't give me enough time to download, search through, and edit multiple different videos together, and so I had to rethink my plan. I obviously still wanted to use funny Cage quotes, but how? One day it metaphorically hit me in class: Batman/Cage memes! Partially inspired by Cage's character in the film Kick-Ass, I would take Batman comic pages, erase the words in thought or speech bubbles, and replace them with well-known Nicolas Cage lines to change the meaning of the artwork.

     The most difficult part of the process was finding short enough quotes that would fit the tiny speech bubbles, yet still carry a laugh. Many of Cage's famous lines are long, and, taken out of context, don't convey the same comedic gold, in my opinion. To get around this limitation, I often had to make the font size very small, which may be a hindrance to the project as a whole for anyone with poor eyesight. Another setback was the cohesion of each comic page. Would these bizarre and insane movie quotes possibly work together in a single plot? I think my final product assembles a plot nicely in each individual photo, but it may require a certain amount of "turn off your brain and laugh" appeal to fully enjoy the work. These Bat-Cage pages work like memes, so on one hand there has to be cohesion, but on the other hand, a certain sense of stupidity can abound in the words.
     "Bat-Cage" taught me a lot about the puzzle piece nature of creativity, and not just in the "taking someone else's work and reworking it in your own style" way. The puzzle pieces didn't always fit together for me, so while I may have thought a certain line worked best with a certain picture, I often had to sacrifice that laugh in order to make the rules I had set forth in my project work out. For instance, in the comic page with the armed robber (top-right photo at the bottom of the post), there were MANY Cage-worthy lines I wanted to use from his film, Ghost Rider. In the end, however, the lines were too long, and didn't flow well to make the punchline.There's a lot of sacrifice that goes into remixing pre-made content, sometimes meaning a change in your original idea altogether.
     I honestly wish I had even more time to continue this project. I had a blast sifting through quotes and matching them to panels, and had some pretty good laughs out of many possible combinations I toyed around with. This is definitely one project I would consider expanding upon in the coming final project.

To view a larger version of each Bat-Cage image, please click on the image.