Degraded Image

The Degraded Image An Internal MonologueBy Sarah StankusBefore and After

(SPOILERS!)

Step 1:Weird picture of an ironically vague sign, I CHOOSE YOU! Lets print it out and do stuff to it!

Step 2:Words are fun. Cut out the words and ignore the rest of the picture, you English major.

Step 3:Thats not good enough; these words are so 20 seconds ago. Now cut out all the letters and make cooler words!

Step 3 Contd:Keep doing that, I guess. Go ahead. Spend an entire afternoon making weird anagrams.

Step 4:Good job. Now make your friends draw pictures of your dumb sentences so you dont have to! I mean so you can have unique interpretations on your project.Make sure you draw one yourself so they dont think theyre doing your work for you. Also, it gives you an even number, which is obviously very important to the success of this project!

Step 5:

Now cut some stuff up, put it back together with a dried up glue stick, and kick yourself when you realize how much easier this would have been in Photoshop.

Observe your creation: Theres a guy standing on a tower of sheep feeding rum to another sheep while Peter Pan and the Lost Boys observe what looks like a broshade-wearing Edgar Allan Poe riding an orange comet with a trident thats set to spear an innocent girl playing guitar on an orange slice floating in a depressed ocean. While a fish swims in a cloud. Unsettling. Get rid of that.Step 6:Hey, look! It snowed! Do something with that before you start having nightmares about Edgar Allan Bro! You also have a pizza pan, so um put your picture facedown on a pizza pan filled with snow? Sure.

Now take a hair dryer to it because melting takes too long Oh look, it made colors! YAY!Step 7:While blow drying the snow, you knocked over a salt shaker. Nice. Throw some over your shoulder and Also on the multicolored snow? Why not?And now you know what it sounds like when you put salt on snow. Congrats, I guess.

Play videoStep 8:Oops. That salt made it melt even faster and now the entire project is reduced to a couple glasses of unhealthy-looking water. What do you do with water? Um. We could make some tea?

Step 9:Is printer ink poisonous? Maybe that should not be drinken Drank? Dranken? Drunk? Drunk. Are you drunk, Sarah? Oh look, steam is pretty.

Step 10:Wow, filming steam is hard. Color-correct that disaster. Just do it in Final Cut though, since Photoshopping .mov files confuses you. Wait, can you even do that?

Step 11:Face your fear of Photoshop animating and (struggle to) create a looped .gif of the color-corrected steaming tea, because, really, is there anything better than tea that never gets cold? Obviously not.Well, good. This seems like an adequately natural ending, especially given that you spilled the tea all over the rug before you could think of more to do to it. The POINT is, You magically transformed a funny sign into an Everlasting Cup of Tea! It cant get any better! Now, if only you could drink pixelsOne dayFin.