Ah, GIMP, we meet again. For my first visual assignment, i wanted to parallels because that was one of the things we discussed in the live tweeting which i blogged about here. The visual assignment was created by the man himself, Groom. The basic idea of this assignment was the find parallels between movies, shows, etc. It would be easy to find them between various episodes in The Wire so i wanted to make this hard on myself. I decided to look for parallels in  Episode 6 of Season 2 because that is the first assigned episode this week. So let’s begin!

The Scenes:

When we were doing the live tweet, Groom said that in the beginning of the episode when the unit meets it parallels a scene with D. Well, since i watched the episode before hand, i knew it was the scene where they’re discussing The Great Gatsby. So of course i chose this scene for the assignment. Obviously the two scenes are different in many ways. First: There is a group of policeman vs. a group of felons. But, they’re all human, right? Right. This leads me to the idea that the police unit and criminals are linked by the law. The unit is meeting to discuss the case while the criminals are meeting to expand their minds. Yes, they’re criminals but like Groom mentioned in his tweet, they’re more than criminals. They’re slowly becoming deeper people, especially D. Before D went to jail, he said he wanted a new life, for Wallace. In jail, he shows this by becoming involved in the library and group discussions like this. Here’s my picture!

For my second scene, i had a lot more trouble finding a parallel. I was stuck on the whole idea of D dying because that blew my mind. I wasn’t surprised, to be honest. D had it coming since the minute he got caught up in all the drama with his family. Beside his death in the episode, there was another scene that tugged at my heart. When Mrs.Barksdale came to visit him and talk him out of his rebellious stage, the real D came out. He told her exactly what was going to happen with him, in the sense that he won’t be playing by their rules. D never belonged as one of the Barksdales and i feel this scene convinced me so. I’m not really sure if this is a parallel or not but this scene where D and his mom touch hands relates to the scene where D dies in 2 ways. 1. D is saying some sort of final goodbye to his mom. The moment is very sentimental. 2. The guy next to him overhears his conversation about Avon messing with the dope and that’s why he dies. Whether this is a parallel or not, they’re link for sure. I also noticed that his hands are in his pockets when he dies. That’s kind of cool too. Bam!

The Process:

My past experiences with GIMP haven’t been the best, to be honest. But this was a fairly simple task. I first had to screenshot the desired scene with my laptop. All i had to do was press (command+shift+4) and select what i wanted. I did that with all my pictures. When i wanted to combine them, i opened my first screenshot and expanded the canvas size. To do this, i just went to “image” then “scale canvas size” and scaled it appropriately. After that, i went to “file” and chose “open as layer” and picked the second scene for the picture. I moved the layer over and mashed the two scenes into one. For my first set of pictures, i added the text to tell you what time each picture was taken from. I didn’t do this for the second one because i made the second set a lot smaller but every time i attempted to resize the font, it wouldn’t work. I kind of got frustrated and just left it since all my pictures came from the same episode. Anyways, there it is!