Research

When starting this project, we had a group brainstorming session and the song “On Top of Spaghetti” came into conversation. I decided to run with it. It’s a song from my childhood, and I thought it would be a fun story to run through each page. The song can be found here:

I made a few changes to the original story to fit the infinite narrative. The song goes “It rolled in the garden and under a bush, and then my poor meatball was nothing but mush.” In my version, I have the meatball roll around Columbus and in the end, it finds its way back onto the man’s plate and the whole story starts again. I decided to do a few quick storyboards to find the direction of the piece.

Ideations

I started trying to figure out the style I wanted to use and mocked up the style of my flipper. I decided to go digital style with realistic and hand-drawn mixed together to create a semi-realistic kid’s story. To create a sense of unity I applied a sticker style to each object that I think goes well with the folds and paper component of the project. I had trouble finding good images of people, so that went into me deciding to draw them. I used a Shutterstock model on which to base my main character, so I could have multiple poses to use throughout the story.

After I figured out a style I wanted to use I mocked up each slide. I used a grid to simulate where the cut and fold lines would be to place all the images.

Links to pictures can be found here:

Process

The next part is the construction which I found to be the most difficult, I was originally using the wrong type of glue, and it was taking too long to dry. I also messed up and thought the images had to be glued on before folding them together. I made around five iterations before realizing my mistake.