Dreaming up Metaphors

So, as you might have gathered, we were in metaphor mode yesterday. Our new Pastor, Steve, is preaching this weekend on "what does it take to be a fully devoted follower?", and we needed some way to represent that in a visual metaphor.

So today's post as part of Creative Chaos is a small insight into how we came up with the idea of famous heroes and their sidekicks as a way of pictorially representing the message.

We started with thinking about the word "follower", and brainstorming about that.

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Ants follow tracks to food, gulls follow sailing ships or fishing trawlers, pilgrims follow the road to a shrine, marathon runners follow the course to the finish. All good images. But how do we bring in the idea of "devotion" or "loyalty"?

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What could be a more devoted follower than our shadows?
How about something that is connected such as a motorbike and sidecar, car and trailer? No question of loyalty there.

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Dogs are loyal and devoted to their owners - and this is where we got to the idea of sidekicks. Who is the most devoted dog? Gromit. Not only does he play the role of faithful friend, he actually is the brains behind the whole operation, but no-one realises. He saves the day most of the time and is the unsung hero.

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So that thought led us on to the whole idea of hero and sidekick as a visual metaphor for the message, and we decided to change the actual title of the message from "Fully Devoted Follower" to "Fully Devoted Sidekick" just to get away from that churchy language and use a word that will hopefully make people do a double-take.


This post is part of Creative Chaos over at my blogfather's place - Ragamuffin Soul.