Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Road Rager: A Senior Humor or Satire Art Project by Kiran Kothuri (2014)

For my humor piece, I intended for a general situation that was easy for everybody to relate to. To accomplish this, I ended up focusing my piece on the oh-so-common, yet oh-so-hilarious road rage. My goal was to portray an incident so outrageous yet vaguely plausible that the ensuing road rage would be comical yet extremely relatable to. I decided to create a illustrated styled triptych to portray the scene of road rage. However, instead of having one driver mad at another, I made the passenger of the vehicle be angry at the driver. I decided on making the first image of the triptych be an image of the speedometer of a car, going annoyingly slow, such as around 5mph. For the second image in my piece, I wanted to get a shot of a person in the passenger seat exasperated and slightly angry at the driver for going so slow. Finally for the third image in my piece, I wanted to take an average speed limit sign, like around 25mph to provide the contrast between the actual speedometer and the speed limit. I thought that the side by side comparison of these three images in my triptych would most effectively tell the common story of being annoyed when in a car with another person who drives way too slow.

To turn my vision into a reality, I started with photographing a friend in his car of him driving extremely slow, getting another shot of him in the passenger seat looking as exasperatedly irritated as possible, and finally getting a third shot of a regular residential speed limit sign. I then imported these photos into Adobe Illustrator, where using smart paths I converted the realistic image into an illustrated image by modifying the bit-depth of color. After testing multiple different depth settings, I settled on a 16-bit depth setting, meaning, only 16 colors are used per photo. This was able to transform the regular realistic-looking photo into an illustrated-type feel. I decided to make it look like an illustration to give a comic book sort of relaxed, comedic feel to the piece.
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