Assignments — Camp Magic MacGuffin

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Monday, July 2nd, 2012

This design assignment to make a movie poster for your website appealed to me on many levels (not least of which is the many years I spent working in movie theatres and collecting movie posters).

Having titled my site a DS106 Odyssey, I started looking for sailing ships, thinking of the original tale by Homer. I realized that for the right look I needed an older photograph, something for which it was unlikely to have CC-licensed images available.

So, I turned again to the Flickr Commons, that great collections of images from archives and museums. This image of a 19th-century yacht came from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

The subtitle is a reference to my own goals in this course, to push myself out of my comfort zone.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

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Slide Guy Visits the Sphinx

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

This is another Visual Assignment. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to join in on the fun of placing the image of DTLT’s own Tim Owens in an unlikely spot.

I immediately thought of the pyramids, though I’m not sure why. But then I found this great image from Flickr User wilhemja of the pyramids and the Sphinx, and I made a slight change in plans. I used Photoshop to flip the image using the Image Rotation–>Flip Canvas command and then rotated Tim so that he could slide down the Sphinx’s face (that daredevil).

Two final comments:

1) This image is not to scale. If Tim were this tall, he wouldn’t be able to fit into DTLT’s offices…or any other building on campus.

2) Umm Tim, where’s the nose?

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Creative Commons Poster

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

I found the assignment to create a CC poster more difficult than I imagined, especially after struggling a bit with the Postcard assignment.

The assignment here was:

Use creative commons licensed images to design a poster about how groovy Creative Commons is! Use a tool like Compfight to find creative commons licensed images in flickr (be sure to select the right option on the search pane), and then use photo editing software to add your message, call to arms, rallying cry, urgent plea. Include as well a creative commons logo– look to the creative commons itself for ones to use.

Most importantly, in your poster be sure to give attribution credit to the source image.

I didn’t have an obvious direction I wanted to go on this project, so just browsing CC-licensed images didn’t get me anywhere. My sense of Creative Commons is one of easier sharing of creative efforts, but I didn’t know quite how to convey that. Then I saw an image of a mountain that struck me and I thought of the collaborative work needed for most people to climb Everest and other tall mountains. [I know there are a few solo climbers still, but that's not the norm for most climbers.] It got at the notion of creative practice being a collaborative effort, of building on the work of others, even if we don’t often think of it that way. Unfortunately the image I saw was CC-licensed, but derivative works were not permitted (an apparent weakness in the Compfight search engine, unless I just missed that option).

So then I just started using Flickr’s advanced search for CC-images that allowed derivative works of mountain climbers and found this one from Flickr user hollysuewho.

At that point, it was a matter of getting the right Creative Commons logo (hollysuewho’s photo was Attribution, Non-Commercial, and Share Alike, so my derivative work needed to be the same license), and figuring out the text. I like the top slogan, but the bottom is still to wordy for my liking. Still, it gets at both aspects of Creative Commons that worth advertising: use the CC-licensed materials that are out there AND share your own works that way.

I had some issues with using Photoshop to shading the bottom part and I’m still not happy with how it looks, but I would spent too much time fiddling with it. So, here it is. Thoughts? Recommendations?

UPDATE: After comments by John and Alan (and conversation with my spouse, @jenorr, I did a new version of the image that I’m much happier with.

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Postcards–A Legoland/Minecraft Mashup

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

So, after nearly three weeks away for a conference (and panel comment), a new talk for a Civil War Round Table, and a family trip to California, I’ve finally returned to DS106 work. These means that I’m woefully behind as the rest of the class has moved into audio assignments. I’ll catch up as I can, first by doing some of the Design Assignments from Week 4. This one is for Postcards from Magical Places.

The assignment reads (corrected for typos because I can’t help myself):

Design the front and back of a postcard that might be sent from the location of a movie or a work of fiction. Both sides of the cards must be created as graphics.

The front should use graphic design elements that provide a sense of place or use the classic motifs of old postcards (“Greetings from ______”), both pictures and text. The back of the post card should contain a stamp and postmark that fits with the theme of the movie, as well as an addressee and a message that fits the plot as well.

The modification that we had from Alan and Martha was that the image was supposed to come from the DS106 Minecraft server where there is some absolutely amazing stuff created by DS106 participants. Unfortunately, the server was down when I went to it, so I ended up taking an image from a regular Minecraft instance. But that was pretty boring, so I added an image I took on a recent trip to Legoland California. [I took the Minecraft image as the background, and then, using the Quick Selection tool in Photoshop, removed the material in the upper right of the Lego version of Mount Rushmore, allowing the Minecraft background to show. This is all after some resizing of the two images so they matched.]

I then added some text, using a phrase that should be reminiscent on one commonly seen these days to those of us in Fredericksburg, and is an approved font from that institution. The result was this:

For the second side, I created the stamp from the image of Lego Jefferson.* The expensive postcard price is an homage to the founding of UMW (as well as a tease to a relative who always scolds us when we spend more that the needed price on postcard postage). The postmark is a stylized font in Photoshop and refers to the location of Legoland, as well as UMW.

There are a few other nods, if not homages, in the letter and address.

* I think the thing next to his eye is supposed to be a Q-tip cleaning Washington’s ear, but given the past month at Mr. Jefferson’s University, I’m interpreting it as something wiping away TJ’s tears.

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Summer Time Bumper = )

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER TIME!!! Time for some summer fun.. RELAX, FORGET ABOUT SCHOOL AND WORK, AND HAVE FUN!!!!!!!!!

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Open Letter to Chanda

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

Dear Chanda,

I totally ripped you off by co-opting a short clip from a well-known movie and turning it into my DS106 Radio bumper. I’m sorry. I was desperate. Attempts at other audio assignments failed. Miserably.

Sincerely,

You can listen to my bumper here:

You can find Chanda’s bumper here.

I’ve listened to DS106 Radio a few times, and I’m enamored with the set up and what I’ve been hearing. When DS106 Radio was first mentioned, I thought about that 1990 Christian Slater classic, Pump Up the Volume. God I loved that movie.

Over the weekend, I watched Awesome: I Fucking Shot That, a Beastie Boys concert film shot by 50 members of the audience. After this viewing, I got it in my mind to do the “Forced Collabo” audio assignment. Who wouldn’t really? Skip to about 3:30 in this video and tell me that Mixmaster Mike’s job doesn’t look totally easy. Right? Right?

Yeah. Not so much. After many attempts to find the perfect songs to mash-up, I gave up with the realization that (1) I have a crappy music collection and (2) I have been blindly consuming music rather than listening. Sad.

Here’s another clip from Awesome just for fun. It’s “Intergalactic.” Look how happy everyone in the crowd looks.

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Fishing Trip with Sounds

Sunday, June 24th, 2012

Here is my Story with only sounds I did mine about a fishing trip I used http://www.findsounds.com/ to get the sounds and then used Audacity to put them together. This is the first time using any sort of sounds editing software and I am excited about learning more about it and figuring out more advanced ways to edit music and sounds.

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Animated Giff’n

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012

Finally. I got around to making a few animated Gifs. I chose Ghost World. I love Thora Birch’s interpretation of Enid. Birch’s expressions are priceless, and kind of capture what I feel at least a few times a week. Is it healthy to possess so much teenage angst at 36? I’m not so sure.

I decided to use the first day of summer school since the expressions in this scene sum up how Enid feels about a lot of the bullsh**ery that exists in the adult world. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie or read the comic, Enid has just graduated from high school with the provision that she take and pass a summer art class since she failed the class during the school year. Enid happens to be a talented artist. I wonder how Enid would have done if she were in a class structured more like an independent study…

Here are those Gifs…

There’s too much dead time at the beginning of this first clip, but it was the first attempt.

Thora Birch in Ghost World

This one didn’t turn out quite as I had imagined either. I also screwed up on the resizing. But these things happen.

More Enid in art class

This one is my favorite:

Yup. Enid in art class

I followed Jim Groom’s tutorial. Very helpful stuff there.

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Typical High School Story

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012

“Tell a story using nothing but sound effects.”

I used sound effects from Freesound.org to make this story. In Audacity, I complied them together into a recognizable pattern that would tell a story. I trimmed up sound effects where I thought it was needed and overlapped sounds to make a more effective story.

I listened to other sound effect stories to find inspiration and found a lot of suspenseful stories. I was then reminded of what Ira Glass said about story telling, “the power of the anecdote is so great that no matter how boring the material is…there’s suspense in it.” That idea struck a chord with me, the sound effect story does not have to be blatantly suspenseful to be a successful story. Why not use boring material to create story? This question made me brainstorm of boring situations. Where is the feeling of being bored the strongest? The last minutes of a class, obviously. The sequence of actions is completely boring, a person watches a clock, feels bored, sighs, and then finally the bell rings. Simple story but there is a underlying suspense that is just a strong as running from an unknown attacker.

There is a sense of anxiousness in the story, we all now that everyone is waiting for the bell to ring. You remember the feeling of being antsy waiting for that bell. That leads us to the question, why? Why are they impatient? What is happening that they just cannot wait for? The possibilities are endless, a date, a vacation, or simply freedom from school. Where is this person headed next? I left the end of the story to you.

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DS106: I’ll Have What She’s Having!

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012

One of this week’s require assignment is Audio Assignments 36—Create a ds106 radio bumper (2 stars). I confess that I have not yet tuned into ds106 radio. To get a sense of some of the other bumpers that have been created I started trolling my way through other campers blogs, noting what I liked or didn’t about each piece.

Ultimately, I wanted to do something that would stand out and be attention getting. I don’t like the sound of my recorded voice so I wanted to minimize my vocal participation. I started thinking through song lyrics and tunes that might be cool to smash together, but my technical skills are inhibiting me.

Then I remembered a classic scene from the movie “When Harry Met Sally”. You know the one…in the restaurant, Meg Ryan’s character Sally shows Harry her version of a fake orgasm. It was a great scene that makes many people giggle and blush. When Sally is done, an older woman at another table tells the waitress “I’ll have what she’s having.”

I thought that sounds effects of the fake orgasm and the older woman’s line would be a great way to peak curiosity about ds106.

DS106 I’ll Have What She’s Having… by Chanda Sorrell Cowger

Once I had my idea, I went in search of the sound clip from the movie. Finding it on JoBlo.com, I downloaded the mp3 file to my laptop so that I import it into Audacity. Once in the program, I listened to it a few times, trimming it and looking for where to incorporate the DS106 plug. I was about to shortened the pause in the clip, when I decide to just use that break in the sound to insert the words DS106 there. I like the way it turned out. Simple to do and effective, I think.

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