The Minion Mermaid

Partner name: Jiayue Gou - vase body

Partner name: Mang Kigpen - fish tail

Design Process/ BG Stories

My figure is Stuart the minion, and my partners figures are a fish named Margaret and a personified vase. The backstory of the fish is that it is a 35 year- old school teacher who loves painting, fishing and short walks on the beach. The background story of the vase is an anthropomorphized version of the potted flowers sitting on Jiayue’s desk, she imagines each of the flowers to have different personalities and moods. The new background story that I created based on the collectively assembled information is with the main character of the minion mermaid. Stuart’s eyes are half-close - indicating that he is sleepy as he always does. One day when the vase and Stuart the minion walked past the beach, they were chatting about how much they want to swim in the ocean, but their wish cannot come true because they don’t have swimming skills. This conversation was overheard by Margaret the fish who was also taking a short walk on the beach. Margaret was a warm-hearted fish so she offered a “ride”(swim) in the ocean. She is good at swimming because she is a fish, and her tails are flexible so it helps her to move in the water. In order to carry both the minion and the vase more easily, the minion has to be packed into the vase, and in this process, the body color of the minion dyed the vase into yellow. After the ride/swim, the vase wanted to thank Margaret the fish for this kind action, so she asked Margaret what she likes to do. Margaret loves painting so she asked whether she could paint on the vase. The vase agreed because she would like some decorations on her body. So Margaret the fish painted some pink triangles on the vase as a memory of this trip. When they were combined together as a whole, they looked like a mermaid with the minion’s head, yellow vase body and a pink fish tail.

Reflection

It is fun to combine all the background stories and create a new imaginative story. In terms of coding, it took me a while to figure out the location points for bezier curves. And I did not know a quicker way to mirror the curve for a symmetric shape. I was also trying to rotate the eye lid of the minion, but it seems like I cannot rotate it in the way that I want. When combining different body parts, I was first thinking to put the tail on the minion’s head - so that it looks like the minion would be wearing a “crown”. And the whole figure would look like a tumbler/tilting doll because it has a round bottom without feet. But in the end, I put the fish tail on the bottom, which makes the figure into a mermaid - it resonates with the new background story. In the story, they went swimming in the ocean, so I used blue as the background color to represent the water, I also added some moving white lines to represent the reflected light of the water. Now it feels like the minion mermaid is flowing on the ocean.