Snapchat – Memphis Flyer

Watch out for a blue dragon on Mud Island. Kathryn Hicks put it there.

Hicks is a certified Snapchat augmented reality (AR) creator. She was recently hired by Snapchat in partnership with HBO’s hit series House of the Dragon for a global project to land virtual dragons “in some of the most beloved destinations around the world,” Snapchat said. Hicks said she was “super excited” to get the call.

“As a child, I was obsessed with dragons,” Hicks said. “My mother made the joke, like she’s not going to be drawing dragons all the time. You’re never going to make money drawing dragons.”

You’re never going to make money drawing dragons.
Kathryn Hicks

Now, her mother is “absolutely stoked” about it, Hicks said.

To see Hicks’ work, walk to the Memphis sign on Mud Island, open Snapchat, and face the city skyline. She suggests searching for it on Snapchat. A House of the Dragon icon can be found on the Snapchat map but it doesn’t always work, she said. With the filter open, walk to the middle of the Memphis sign and get close. Back slowly away and a blue dragon will appear in the sky. Hicks made a button to land the dragon, which “might be a little buggy” but when it works the dragon lands, roars, and flies back into the sky.

Dragons like Hicks’ fly in digital skies all over the world. Look for them around landmarks like London’s Tower Bridge, Gas Works Park in Seattle, Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, the Hickson Road Reserve in Sydney, Australia, the Bab Agnaou gate in Marrakesh, Morocco, and many more.

Creators were selected for the Snapchat filter campaign after three rounds of vetting. Hicks said they were given the choice of several dragon colors: red, blue, green, bronze, and charcoal .

“I chose blue, of course, because of the Memphis Tigers and the Memphis Grizzlies, and the Mississippi River, “ she said. “Blue is very Memphis. So, I went with blue for that reason.”

She also carefully chose Mud Island’s Memphis sign as a location for her dragon. She considered the Stax Museum, but worried Snapchat users might interrupt traffic on McLemore Avenue or even get hit by cars. Traffic was also a concern about landing her dragon around the sign for Beale Street, as was the street’s pedestrian congestion.

“I also chose the Memphis sign because I feel like a dragon would live [on Mud Island],” she said. “It’s on an island. It’s a good walk to get there. So, you get your steps in while heading towards this filter. It’s kind of like a little adventure. But it’s kind of a perfect area for a dragon to kind of chill and hang out in.”

To get here, Hicks studied art in grad school at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) after her undergrad degree at the University of Memphis. At SCAD, a friend worked on a virtual reality project that got her interested in the field.

From there, she applied for and won a space in the Oculus Launchpad program in Palo Alto, California. Her graduate thesis was a virtual reality project about a Sasquatch creature roaming the hills of California.

Form there, Hicks took a job as a 3D modeler with a company called Digital Precept. In 2020, she got into AR filter creation and won a slot in Snapchat’s Storyteller Residency.

The sky, it seems, is the limit for Hicks. For now, though, head to Mud Island and watch the skies for her work in Memphis.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after. — Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

While many of you were at Beale Street Music Fest or at the movies or drinking yourselves silly with craft beer last Saturday night, I spent the evening watching “Nerd Prom,” otherwise known as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Yes, I know, I need to get out more.

The WHCD is an incestuous affair, one in which the Beltway elite dress up and endure polite jabs from the president, and then, after the the leader of the free world’s remarks, get skewered more forcefully by a comedian. This year’s dinner went pretty much true to form, except that comedian Larry Wilmore of The Nightly Show had the bad fortune to follow a president who had funnier material and a better stage presence.

Obama took shots at Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Reince Priebus, Ted Cruz, and, of course, Donald Trump. He was in rare form, obviously feeling some relief that this would be the last such dinner he would ever have to attend. “Next year at this time,” he said, “someone else will be standing here in this very spot, and it’s anyone’s guess who she will be.” Ow.

The president even poked fun at himself in a video in which he received “advice” on retirement from former Speaker John Boehner, who offered Obama a cigarette and suggested that having a beer in the morning wasn’t the worst idea ever. Which is true.

At the end of his speech, when Obama literally dropped the mic, I thought about how much I’ll miss having a president with a sense of humor and an ability to be self-deferential, a national leader who can be joyful and use Snapchat and charm children and shoot hoops with Stephen Curry — and bear with grace and humor the most vitriolic and coordinated attacks on a president’s character in my memory.

I can’t imagine Donald Trump, for instance, ever making fun of himself. To do so requires genuine self-confidence, not the insecure macho bluster that is Trump’s stock in trade. As we trundle toward what now appears inevitable — a presidential contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton — I cannot help but feel the country is taking a step backward, with two candidates in their late 60s, neither of whom seems in touch with the nation’s current zeitgeist.

Even so, the choice between Trump and Clinton will be not a difficult one for me, nor will it be for the majority of Americans, if current polling is to be believed. In 2012, Obama beat Mitt Romney in an Electoral College landslide, and it’s unlikely many Democratic voters will switch to Trump in 2016. There simply aren’t enough angry, xenophobic white people to swing a national election to the GOP. Nor are there enough Democratic voters who “feel the Bern” of Sanders’ efforts to tackle the country’s increasingly troubling income disparity.

But there is an overlap there between Trump’s frustrated blue-collar followers and Sanders’ underpaid and over-leveraged young folks. The candidate who can reach both groups and show them their common interests — and their common enemies — will have a shot at creating genuine change. It’s not happening this year, but I get the sense that we are only waiting for this moment to arrive.