ScrapBook with Yoshi and Toad!

My project is taking characters out of the strict guidelines of the games they are made for and putting them into a real life vacation setting. The vacation setting that I am talking about is all the activities that go along with being on a vacation, such as miniature golf, bumper boats, go karts and so on.When I recall memories from my childhood as early as preschool I think of playing outside on the play ground with my friends pretending to be batman and cat woman. Thinking back on it now we played our characters much like characters are played in video games; whoever is holding the figurine is that character in the game. I remember very clearly as a child that if someone wanted to play the game and they didn’t have a little toy character from the show or movie we were playing from then they were not allowed to play at all. This is similar to unlocking characters in games but the way to get the characters was to take them from other children or beg a parent to buy it for you. After preschool I remember playing Nintendo while waiting my turn in the dentist office. The only game that I remember playing at the dentist office is Super Mario Brothers. There were only two controllers and if both of them were being used, waiting my turn to play was not something that I enjoyed, especially if they were kids who had gotten there way before their own appointments and I never got a chance to play. All in all that video game made a terrifying dentist appointment something that I looked forward to. I remember the day that my sister got the Nintendo 64 for Christmas and I think that I was almost as excited as she was. The biggest past time suddenly changed from watching pointless television shows with Barbie commercials to nonstop Mario Kart and a competitive nature. After several sisterly fighting over the N64 I got a PlayStation for Christmas and along with that came a new spectrum of games. As a young child I played a lot of Mario Kart and it was my all time favorite N64 game. Every time my sister and I would play our two characters of choice were Toad and Yoshi. I don’t know exactly why we liked those characters over the others, most people would assume that girls would want to choose the princess as their character but not us. I believe that is the reason that I chose the characters Yoshi and Toad from N64 Mario Kart as the subjects of my project.

 The way I decided to present my project was through scrap-booking photos of me with wood cut outs that I painted to look like those characters. These characters were chosen to represent family members that are still present in my life but live too far away for me to be around often. Ever since I have been in college and my sister has graduated college our family has had a difficult time organizing a vacation for all of us; even if its is just my mother, sister and myself. I decided to make up a vacation that I took with my replacement family, Yoshi and Toad. Planning this vacation for just me and two cut outs was difficult enough to do, it surprises me that family vacations are even possible after children graduate high school. As I previously stated these two characters are representations of two family members, my sister and mother. They are stand-ins for them in a bittersweet kind of way. The characters are cheerful and happy looking but are replacing the two people that I wish I could see more often. Pretending that the memories I am making with the cut outs is pathetic in the since that I want to go on a vacation with my own family so badly that I make one up and replace my family. The scrapbook part of this was a throwback for me because I remember when my mother and I use to scrapbook things all the time when I was younger. Making remarks on the pages that are similar to comments that any of us would say at a given time while being around one another. I wanted it to look childlike but not so much that it through off the main reason behind doing this project. The whole reason to create a fake vacation with a fake family is because the price of growing up is separation from ones own real family.

Association between things that connect me to happy times with my family when I was younger seemed to be the least complicated way to go about this project. These characters remind me of my time with my family as a young child in a way that no other characters can. This is because I don’t have any memory of any other game that I played with my sister and mother. I guess the easiest way to explain this is that I, being the decision maker, act like my mother here, while Toad represents me as a young child, and Yoshi represents my sister. I feel like this is a better way to set up the characters because when I was carrying them around Pigeon Forge I felt like I was carrying around two small children. I felt like I was making sure they were posing for the camera correctly, and everything else. Working with wood cut outs however was probably a lot easier than dealing with actual children. The going from one place to another and through all the different attractions was pretty exhausting. Vacation pictures are more candid and I told the person taking the pictures to just take the pictures and only tell me when they were taking a few of them so that when it came time to put all the pictures together there were plenty of good candid photos to choose from. I think that it turned out well and I managed to get my initial idea across to the audience with little questions asked about it.