R E F E R E N C E S

I M A G E S

V I D E O S

When I first began allowing my original concept to marinate in my brain, I envisioned the tone of my piece as a serious message about friendship, with the blooming ice cream flower as an obvious symbol representing beauty and friendship growing from adversity. As I continued developing and refining my idea, I realized that I had been leaning more toward a light-hearted mood all along. As evidenced from the images below, I began to draw inspiration from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as well as developing the clash of flower and ice cream to the level I wanted. I also took my own pictures of ice cream to develop a better sense of the arrangement of toppings, and I took test pictures of the cones I was going to use during my live action filming to see if I could make mashed potatoes look like ice cream.

Beginning to design my flower, I looked up a variety of different kinds with an eye toward finding the best one that I could transform into ice cream. Right in the beginning I found the iris, and it stuck with me. Not only was I fascinated by its silhouette, but also by the way it bloomed. Early on, I was very interested in incorporating spirals in my design choices. A combination of the spiral bud from a Japanese flower and the burgeoning opening of the iris seemed the perfect combination of drama and beauty for the look I was trying to accomplish. Though spirals did not become a major aspect of my design as I had supposed, and I later refined the design to incorporate some elements from tropical flowers, my vision still included irises and I adhered to a lot of my original choices.