Individual work
Backdrop
The Solitaire Mystery was a birthday present I received in junior high school. It is a philosophical novel about a father and son who travel across Europe to find the boy’s mother, who ran away from home in a search to find herself many years ago. The complex narrative structure of the novel and the cross between the real world and the fictional world make the novel a veritable ‘meta-novel’.
When I was in junior high school, I was attracted by the rich and interesting unreal world in it, and the text of the book turned into solid images in my mind. Visualising the text narrative in the book planted a seed in my heart from then on.
Content outline
The Solitaire Mystery is a novel by Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder, it tells the story of a young boy, Hans Thomas, and his father, who travel from Arendal, Norway, across the European continent to Greece, the birthplace of philosophy, in search of the boy's mother who had run away.
During the trip, the father and the son often discussed abstract philosophical questions, questioning the existence of life. In the village of Dorf, Hans obtains a small book in a bun, which records the story of Rainbow soda and the Magic Island.
The Solitaire Mystery uses a two-line narrative, telling Hans and his father's search for his mother on the one hand, and telling the fantastic story of the bun book on the other.
Design idea
The design takes the journey of the father and son as the clue, extracts the elements of the real world and the magic island respectively through the text description in the book, and integrates them into the design of the magic island.
Combined with the narrative style of alternating reality and magic in the book, lowpoly is chosen to perform the art style which is different from reality but not divorced from reality.
In the design of Magic Island, I integrated three kinds of place spirits identified by Norwegian phenomenologist Norberg Schulz according to the different relations between the three forces of heaven, man and earth: divine landscape, romantic landscape and classical landscape.
The divine landscape is the underground karst cave in the lower part of the Magic Island. This part of the landscape is dominated by ‘heaven’, that is, nature, without artificial intervention, showing the insignificance of man between heaven and earth.
The romantic landscape is the ground part of the Magic Island, where the territories of the four card families are distributed. This part of the landscape is dominated by the ‘earth’, with mountains, rivers, rocks and other landscapes changing everywhere, and rich land cover such as forests and shrubs appearing on different landforms and landforms. The landscape in a small scale has the characteristics of unpredictable, human-land symbiosis.
The classic landscape is the sky town rising above the ground on the island and the floating clown temple, and this part is the ‘people’ in the dominant landscape, everything is branded by the master. From the bottom to the top, from the divine landscape to the romantic landscape to the classic landscape, people’s will play an increasingly important role in the landscape. This is also consistent with the book's idea of encouraging people to search for themselves and find the truth.