The Making of a Meme

The other day I got inspired to make a meme. It started out as a comment on a post by @diggndeeper, where he introduced his Meme Monday competition. The great thing about memes is that you can sum up a complex idea in a compact visual image with a great impact. On the downside, memes tend to get old rather quickly. The second time you see the same meme, you're usually way past it, and by the fifth time it may actually start to get annoying.

So what's the solution? Repacking the same message in new visuals, again and again. Great for those who are skillful at making memes. I haven't made too many in my life, but it can't be that hard, right? (Okay, I've made precisely one meme so far. In my opinion, not much better, for whatever it's worth.) So I decided to make one specifically for this Meme Monday. Looking back at it... Although I believe the idea was good, I still need practice on the technical bit. But this is how I did it:

The Idea: Governed by What?

Since the meme @diggndeeper shared has to do with government, I thought I'd stick to the topic. Particularly, since I had already come up with a little text in his comments:

Governed by what?
By the setting and rising sun? - Sure.
By the changing of the seasons? - For certain.
By the natural movement of the herds? - Clearly.
But by one dude climbing up on the cucumber tree, yelling "Everyone follow me!" at the top of his lungs? - You gotta be kidding me!

This sort of offered itself as a six-picture sequence, I just needed to find the right images.

Hunting for Stock Images

Pixabay is a popular place to find pictures that are free to be used in... well, in memes, what else? So I set out to find the right ones. The first and the last one had to be the person explaining the things they agree to be governed by. And since the examples are closely related to nature, I wanted to find someone who was quite obviously a hunter-gatherer. In the end I settled on a San man from southern Africa, though in fact this wisdom could be applied to the ancestors of every one of us.

Picking a a campfire to illustrate the changing of day into night, and a thunderstorm to show the changing seasons, was quite self explanatory. The roaming herds were also quite easy to find pictures for. But the dude up on the cucumber tree... Okay, admittedly I didn't even try!

Anyway, it's good practice to mention your sources, even if it's Pixabay, so here is a list of the links to the images I used:

https://pixabay.com/de/photos/botswana-buschmann-naturvolk-2219372/
https://pixabay.com/de/photos/botswana-buschmann-naturvolk-2219374/
https://pixabay.com/de/photos/blitz-wolken-gewitter-donner-regen-4713379/
https://pixabay.com/de/photos/lagerfeuer-feuer-strand-w%C3%A4rme-840542/
https://pixabay.com/de/photos/antilopen-safari-afrika-tier-3816813/
https://pixabay.com/de/illustrations/f%C3%BChrung-beispiel-f%C3%BChrer-manager-913043/

A Twisted Image from a Misused Proverb, Lost in Translation

As we should know, cucumbers don't grow on trees! They grow on vines that may hook onto other plants, but most typically just stays close to the ground. So to picture someone climbing up on the cucumber tree, they would have to be tiny, to say the least. More than that, they need to be a bit dense, making them apply their own perspective on the plant, calling it a tree.

In my native language of Hungarian, we use this particular expression to talk about a small and insignificant person believing that they are much greater than they are. So I decided to translate this weird expression, and apply it to those very people who think they should govern us: politicians and government leaders! And what better symbolizes one as the suit and tie, together with the words Follow me!

The Hardest Part: Piecing it all Together

Once I've gotten this far, all I had to do was put everything together. Obviously, the six pictures had to be about the same size, the text needed to be clear and legible, and whatever could not be filled in had to stay black. HA! Easier said than done. I know, some of you are probably really skilled in the technical part of editing images. For me it took a good amount of time, and still it's not looking as good as I'd like.

But: I managed to make a meme, from conceiving the idea to executing the actual image. This makes me quite proud. Now, I'll enter the Meme Monday contest, and see the results. The winner is the image with the most interaction. Let's see...