I’m a huge fan of going to the movies, and have been toying with the idea of doing some sort of movie review and tying it to cartoons for some time.
Seeing as I recently watched the film ‘Ford v Ferrari, staring Matt Damon and Christian Bale, I thought I’d take the plunge and start writing about film
The film is about The Ford Motor Company’s attempt to beat Ferrari at the Le Mans 24 hours race. Matt Damon plays Carrol Shelby, who was given the job to road the race team, and Christian Bale plays Ken Miles, race engineer and driver.
After watching the film, I started pondering if I could generate any ideas for cartoons from it.
Here are a few idea generating techniques I came up with.
Borrow an idea
What if an animal was in the scene?
Think bizarre
Don’t worry if you’re not a huge fan of cars, I go somewhat off the beaten track, or Rae track in this case, when it comes to to coming up with ideas.
Borrow an idea
Is there an idea from the film that you could use in a different situation or setting?
So in this case, what other situations could you create race scenes?
What if an animal was in the scene?
Captions are welcomed for this cartoons! - Drop me a mail with your idea.
I’m a huge fan of dropping animals into scenes to generate ideas for cartoons. I guess that this might stem from the fact that I’ve always been a huge fan of ‘The Far Side’.
Although the era of motor racing portrayed in the film was basically pre-sponsorship, I started to think about possible wacky sponsors cars might have.
Think Bizarre
Some of the ideas generated already have been pretty bizarre, but let’s press on regardless!
Watching this film made me think back to an article I read last year about a guy in Monaco who managed to get a race car registered for the road. I was struck by the incongruity of the sleek racing machine on the same road as everyday traffic.
Here’s the cartoon that I came up with.
Movies about cars ? How boring…
We’re not all petrolheads. However, some of the ideas in this article you can apply to your own favourite movies, regardless of their theme or genre.
Hmm..interesting, but it would take me too long to draw cars like those…
You don’t have to. A cartoon is all about the idea, rather than great artwork. A car could be presented by something more detailed like the above examples, or something a whole lot simpler like the following:
So here’s what we looked at:
Borrow an idea from a film and use it in a completely different situation.
Add an animal to a scene from a film.
Think bizarre - it’s a cartoon, so you’ve got a license to stretch things a bit.
One extra one that came up was to play around with advertising logos and slogans, in the above example it was the penguin’s car and the Acme fish company.
What’s next?
I put out a Cartoon Newsletter with a wide range of themes and characters, along with some occasional cartooning tips. Add your name and mail to the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.
