For my final, I am tweaking the tarot card idea I had in a previous assignment. I found that using a movie as the source material for a deck was not always effective. They were also too long and certain scenes out of context left very little to interpret for the reader. Then one night as I was browsing Netflix, I saw a recommended series for me: Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting.
I've known about this series for a long time, but only as a sort of internet meme. I've never actually watched an episode of it before. So I watched an episode, and it was hypnotizing. I knew that I found the solution to my problem and the solution was Bob Ross.
How it works
The "deck" is an episode of "The Joy of Painting". I "shuffle and deal" the deck by choosing five random numbers as timestamps, and each of these numbers are assigned to one position of the spread. In this instance, I am using a Five Card Spread. When a card is selected, a clip of the video at that particular timestamp will play for a small amount of time, and loop until another card is selected.
Interpretation
As for the interpretation of these cards, there were several factors to consider:
- Bob Ross is constantly talking in his videos. And everything he says can be seen as a metaphor for life, which helps the interpretation of the reading.
- The beauty of a Bob Ross video is that you can always determine the current state of the painting. This kind of grounds the video into a very clear and discrete sense of linearity.
- And there is of course a lot of color in the video. So color is one more factor that can be used for interpretation. http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html
Bob Ross is also incredibly positive, which is what I needed now as the semester is closing and the finals are coming .
Note that any video can be used as the source as long as it's in the same folder as all the other files and it's named bobross.mp4