This evening I was able to sit around the fire and plan a bit with other counselors and the administrators. Usually I do not like administrators, but these two are cool. One is an angel and the other looks like an FBI guy. No matter, they are likable and seem friendly. Below is the angel addressing the group.
We spoke about some of the camp logistics and got acquainted with one another. It is going to be all roses and unicorns from here on out. They even noted that we can’t say, “&^% &^%$$@” (Jim Groom) ever. Not ever not once. And the FBI guy really really emphasized that point.
Today I did my first daily create for the summer. I sort of cheated and left a bit of the original in the background just for effect. Hatchet Jack uses Photoshop because he can. What he can’t do is draw for shit with his mouse. So here is my first TDC.
If you laugh, I’ll chop yer fricking hand off with my hatchet. Because I am Hatchet Jack.
Today’s Daily Create is a cool one from Darren Kuropatwa who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at this year’s Educon. The assignment was to take a photo of yourself and trace over it to create a line drawing of your face. Since I don’t have a lightbox I went the iPad route. I’ve never used many of the drawing programs I have on my iPad and I had the fun idea of thinking I could also generate a video of the drawing by using the Brushes app which records all your brush strokes. Unfortunately the video it created has the background image flipped sideways for some reason. Regardless it’s still fun to watch the drawing come together so I figured I’d add it here in addition to the final image I uploaded to Flickr.
The fun of the summer in ds106 has just begun and camp counselor Zazzy has a fun little project for folks that won’t take too much of your time. She’s putting together a remix of Under Pressure, the classic by Queen, and needs your vocals. More details about the whole project on her blog so head over there, get yourself a Soundcloud account and dive in!
As for me I’ve at least recorded the vocals and have them embedded below but you should check out the Soundcloud group for all the latest tracks. I might even add in some finger snaps, doo wops, etc. Let’s make some art!
It’s going to take me at least a week to unpack my fantastic trip to Virginia but I thought I’d start with a little reflection on the screening room at the Library of Congress Packard Campus where I was treated to 35mm reels of Shaft and the French Connection in their amazing 205 seat screening room.
The Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is where the Library of Congress acquires, preserves and provides access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of films, television programs, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings.
The Campus has globally unprecedented capacity for the preservation reformatting of all audiovisual media formats (including obsolete formats dating back 100 years) and their long-term safekeeping in a massive digital storage archives.
At 415,000 square feet, it has more than 90 miles of shelving for collections storage, 35 climate controlled vaults for sound recording, safety film, and videotape, and 124 vaults of flammable nitrate film.
This campus is an incredible resource featuring ongoing programs and screenings that are free to the public. If I was a betting man, I would put my money on the sure bet that you can expect to hear more great things coming out of this campus in the coming months.
I was lucky enough to catch 2 films at the Packard Campus with Giulia Forsythe, Alan Levine, and Jim Groom. Although Shaft was great fun (with the soundtrack sounding particularly fantastic in the screening room) I got a huge charge out of pristine 35mm copy of The French Connection. I saw this gritty, fast-paced detective flick for the first time in the 90′s and revisiting it reminded me of just how much I love this film. My long standing all-time favorite car chase has been supplanted by Popeye’s Grand Theft Auto style, police emergency vehicle confiscation, one-way street race with a runaway Brooklyn subway. In tribute to this brilliant piece of cinema I submit a couple of my favorite scenes in animated gifs.
I recorded this just before hitting the bunk bed in my cabin at Camp Magic MacGuffin, a family legend about my dad. I saw him pick up a handful of dirt and crush it into a rock. I have the rock to this day. You might say that makes this Doo Wop Girl gullible, but I say I have a life enriched by my imagination and an incredible family story.
I am hoping to keep up with the Daily Create this class. As part of Camp MagicMacMuffin the task is:
Introduce Yourselves via this Wednesday’s Daily Create. Each week, you will be asked to complete a few of our daily assignment challenges at http://tdc.ds106.us/. We will ask that you do the video one on Wednesday (5/23); use it as an introduction and a chance to tell a story. How you do video is up to you; it can be done from your mobile device, or directly into the web cam using a site like YouTube.
I think that daily creates should not be posted to blogs to stop choking up the main ds106feed, but as this is an intro and a new blog that I’ve set up especially for DS106 I am going to post it here anyway.
In the quest to bring animated GIFs into Second Life, I decided to turn a clip from my recent machinima into a GIF with the hope of being able to bring it back in to Second Life as a texture file.
Earlier I mentioned an idea to create a gallery or museum devoted to the animated GIF. The idea was to use Peregrine’s nifty web-based texture creator to generate the files and scripts. But I quickly realized that it would reject most GIF files for being too large (though I don’t know if that is based on file size or image proportions). So I wanted to try to find the sweet spot for creating a GIF file with a small file size footprint that will also work in Peregrine’s texture generator.
I intend to say more about the process of generating these texture files in a subsequent post after I take this animated version of the Scorphonic Radio Selector back in to Second Life. For now, I’d just like to leave a few notes and links for myself so I don’t have to reanimate the reel the next time I want to do one of these.
Once again, I used MPEG Streamclip to grab a short portion of the video file. For the sake of smoothness in the animation, I wanted to the excerpt have the reels in roughly the same position in the first and final frame. As you’ll note, there are four little circles on each real so that would require a one-quarter rotation to serve my purpose. This accounted for a roughly 6 second clip.
I used the recommended 8 frames per second capture when saving the frames as individual PNG files. That meant roughly 48 files to be imported as layers in the GIMP. I knew the sucker would be way to big but I wanted to work through the entire process before tweaking things. I cropped the image to the dimensions you see in the animation (197×343) as the entire scene wasn’t required.
48 frames and 1.5 mb
The GIF file was saved and weighed in at 1.5 mb. This is way to big.
From there it was a question of deleting frames. Checking frame by frame, I noticed that frame 6 and frame 48 matched up perfectly. Counting by six, I kept frames 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, and 42 and deleted the rest. When these 8 frames were exported as a GIF, the file size was 254 kb. The playback was good but there was a repeated jitter. It turns out this is because when 6 and 48 played in sequence the result was a brief pause. So I deleted 6 and was almost satisfied with the result.
256 kb – jumping clouds
I wasn’t too keen on the clouds jumping round with time through the six frames. So I decided I needed to use layer masking. The only problem is that I couldn’t remember how to do it. Fortunately, another tutorial from Jim quickly reminded me how to do it.
As the end of the tl;dr post approaches, I must confess that this whole project seems a bit daft to me. But I think I have an obtainable objective in mind. I appreciate the chance to share the little steps and bits of learning that occur along the way. Up next, I need to see how the texture and script work in SL.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
