Game of Thrones, only anime

I haven’t shared a student’s RIP project in a while, so I feel I should remind you of what they are:

The final assignment of my visual rhetoric course is called Rhetoric in Practice (or RIP). It has two components. To paraphrase the rubric: the students create their own rhetorical performance, explore questions of how to target an audience, follow the conventions of a genre, choose the medium for their message, and all the while, use the critical tools they’ve been learning all quarter to develop their ideas. They then perform a rhetorical analysis of their own work via a detailed writer’s memo.

The pedagogical theory behind this is sound: by forcing them to do something fun at the end of the quarter, I get better evaluations the tools I taught them over the course of it become more solidly ensconced in their brain-space. Only this time, instead of deducing the rhetorical intent behind someone else’s decisions, they must decide how to communicate their message to their target audience most effectively.

One of the highlights of this quarter was a remake of the Game of Thrones opening credit sequence, only intended for an audience of the sort one finds at the University of California, Irvine:

I hope that, as a student project completed in a little under two weeks, this doesn’t violate Fair Use and won’t be taken down, but I can’t be sure. Also, I’ll credit the student when I hear back from her about whether she wants credit for it. Given that I’ve already had a Disney animator think it worthy of praise, though, I’m fairly comfortable sharing it with the world.