So this week I am partaking in the 7 day challenge!! I have to do 7 (or more) daily creates back to back… then eventually sync or mash them up together! Here are some of the ones I did this week…
This was a picture of the outdoors w/out any human artifacts… which is a challenge. As I took the picture I really contemplated the fact that it might be a true photo of old for future generations. :/
This video was fun to make and simple enough… but made me realize how nerdy I probably came off lol.
I will not even describe this! Just listen and enjoy, I really had a ton of fun with this. I took sound clips offline, mixed it w/ my good old fake accent, and created one of my favorite sound clips to date.
Watching one of the “Everything is a Remix” videos really got me to think on the level of ‘originality’ we really do have. His video to start with was set up as a typical video comparing things or kind of peeling things apart… not too original lol.
As he went through some of what are considered the most influential and groundbreaking movies of our time (Star Wars, Avatar, Kill Bill, etc). I agree with what he is saying, but I think that originality is relevant. So I don’t really think “everything is a remix.” We have cultural constants, that appeal to us and carry through generations with some variations. Hence when looking at ‘the big picture’ it seems as everything is just swagger-jacking or a modernized version of past stories/movies.
For example (yes I know what many of my blog readers are thinking by now… ) I will use the movie “The Lion King”. It is majorly based on the play ‘Hamlet’, so how original is it then? I say very original, the way the story was presented is original. Same thing with the current wave of superhero movies, they are being presented and expressed in a way much different (dare I say, more powerfully) than they ever were before on film, TV, or comics.
The implication that everything that we view as entertainment though is a remix of something of the past, does not disturb me. I think it merely shows a continuity in human themes. If we look at different cultures, generations, centuries, decades… we can see that the human priorities and worries are constant, they only are tweeked or ‘remixed’ through time and cultures. All societies have stories- with good, evil, finding oneself, coming of age, etc. The themes built upon for our entertainment such as a midlife crisis, relationships, reality shows, violence, magic are all derived from things that are important to all humans such as family, identity, cultural norms and deviances.
Okay so I decided to do a Product Review, I got a little corny yes. But as I was looking through my desk trying to figure out what to do it on my eyes caught the post-it note dispenser. Call me nerdy… but it is honestly one of the most useful things I’ve come across. Better than notifications on your phone, or virtual post-its on your desktop. I use them all the time for homework, and at work as well. I have some coworkers laugh at me remarking “you know we are in the computer industry, you can type using a keyboard”.
… they just don’t get it is what I think. Nothing makes things stick or helps quite like a post-it note. The dispenser is awesome, always there and handy. Dispensing one at a time- always.
I decided on doing the Kuleshev Effect Assignment because I felt it could be very expressive. I wanted to relay a message or thought to the viewer of my video. Something that I try to live by in life is to always remain positive, even if you feel like things aren’t going your way… you have to sometimes tell yourself they are anyways.
The video was easy to make, I got my sound clip from freesound.org, and used a little bit of Windows Live Movie Maker magic to transition through scenes as if they were pages of a book.
So here is my short story, narrated using the Kuleshev Effect….
For this assignment I had to create a scene or film from a horror film. This assignment took a TON of time. By the time I got to editing, I had over 25 clips. I had a mood in mind that I wanted to create, and shooting for a scary movie… is well difficult. Lighting, sound, speed, and angle are really really crucial- moreso than in other genre’s I believe.
I think this was a great personal success though. I can feel the emotion, and hope you can too!
TUTORIAL:
1. First I shot scenes , usually only a few seconds in length. If you don’t have a light on your camera, use a small lamp to light a room (make sure it’s BEHIND the camera though). You can also light a room down the hall or next door (I did this in the hallway scene at the beginning of the video). Experiment with panting, screaming, and shaking the camera to create moods as desired. I used candles as well in a lot of my scenes.
2. The opening scene, I held the camera myself and lit a candle. I recorded myself panting and shaky, and just walked to the closet slowly.
3. The hallway scene was shot in a dark hall, I had a room down the hall (behind me) lit. And then used the bathroom lights to create a flickering effect by turning them on and off.
4. I simply had someone stand next to the candle out of line of sight, and blow the candle out to imply an erie presence once the closet was open.
5. The scene where the closet monster/ghost walks by, I used my younger sister in a black hoodie. She just walked past the camera creeply.
Now that you’ve shot a few clips, upload them onto your computer. You are now ready to edit them into a scene…
1. I opened Window’s Live Movie maker
2. Went to the upload videos and photos button and uploaded the scenes I wanted. You can move them around to order them as you please. Use the split button under the edit tab across the top to cut scenes up into pieces.
3. After ordering and splitting scenes as desired.. you can use the animations tab to have scenes fade in, or animate in in a certain way. That is how I got some of my scene changes to blot out.
4. Using title and credits buttons under the home tab you can ad whatever titles and credits you please, and customize them in terms of font, color, size, and even how the enter and exit the screen.
5. Finally use the add music button to add sound from a file to the video, at whatever desired location in the video. You can fade the sound in and out (I faded mine out at the end) by going to the music tools options tab. I searched and downloaded my sound clip from freesound.org , and you can edit them using audacity if you choose. I did not edit the sound clip at all for this assignment, I liked it and just simply put it into my video.
This is a screenshot of the home tab… I have the things I wrote in bold circled, it’s very easy to navigate.
Also… don’t forget to have fun, experiment with it, and share!!!
With visions of screaming drill sergeants and mean, sand-kickers going medieval all over everyone’s case, I decided the best thing to do was to play along and do my best to meet the challenge, and encourage others to do the same. Alan’s Charles Atlas comic taunt was sufficient to prompt a similar Charles Atlas response.
I was out of town during most of the intervening days, but with pretty much everything I needed in my backpack (with the exception of my USB mic, which was with me in my wheelie bag), the bits and pieces necessary to keep pace were close enough at hand. Tethering to my phone let me post from my non-internet enabled location.
I’ve already written about this one in “Tornado, Revisited,” but here again is the “drawing,” and then my subsequently animated GIF-version of the drawing process.
“Tornado” by aforgrave, on Flickr
Tornado: TDC185 (animated GIF)
Day Two: July 12th: tdc186: Make a photo of an outdoor scene free of any human artifacts.
My little holiday get-away had me hanging out on the south shore of the St. Lawrence river in Québec near Rivière-du-Loup, and walks along the beach during low tide were part of my daily practice. While collections of a variety of items, including “sea glass” and other human artifacts were of interest (a couple great stories to come over the next day or so), there were also wonderful opportunities to get images of nature, undisturbed.
“Nature’s Artifacts” by aforgrave, on Flickr
I snapped this image using my new 50mm lens, and later marvelled at the wonderful detail captured in this pic. Check it out in a larger form. On Monday, while in Ottawa (and dropping by the Rideau Centre Apple Store) I took a moment to view this image on a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Wow. Amazing.
Day Three: July 13th: tdc187: Make a video of what is playing on channel 106 on your cable? (or make it up).
This one was a natural “make it yourself” opportunity, since there was neither Internet nor Cable (and thus no Channel 106) where I was staying during the week. Although I sorted out an idea (based on a photograph I took on the beach), plotted an outline, gathered the footage, wrote a narration, and started to translate it, there wasn’t time on Friday to complete everything (a short film, entitled “Sur la plage”), and so what I edited together (while on the bus to Montreal on Saturday), wound up being a channel-surfing excerpt entitled “Les Escaliers” — a portion (and actually, only the final paragraph of the thirteen-paragraph narration) of the concept. Good thing my time was limited. The short film would have been waaaaaaaaaaay to much for The Daily Create. As it was, this took hours.
Kudos to Spencer (@robertssw87) for the channel surf inspiration. I switched it up with a bit of a rationalization behind the meaning of the “ds” for Channel ds106 on cable. And waiting for the “static” file to download over my tethered connection while on the bus heading towards Montréal was worth it in the end.
Day Four: July 14th: tdc188: Make an annoying 30 second pre-recorded telemarketing call.
While many of my TDC items early in the week were influenced by my visit to the beach, this one wasn’t. This attempts to include some of the more annoying aspects of recorded messages which I get — most notably a continually received message that always starts in the middle of the message loop. I’ve also incorporated the content from a regular spam text/email notification that my Android phone number (don’t have one, likely never will), was randomly selected as a winner for a free MacBook Air w/2 TB drive (out of stock). I know you can’t get 2 TB notebook HDs yet, and pretty certain you can’t get 2 TB SSDs yet either.
Day Five: July 15th: tdc189: Philosophy series; Tell us about “Technology You Can’t Live Without.”
By the time the prompt for this Create had been posted, I had arrived in Montreal. My initial inclination was to choose from between the iPhone (likely contender), iPad, MacBook, or Sony NEX-5 camera, technologies I enjoy using on a daily basis. But that’s not what I wound up choosing, as Karen (@KarenJan ) was quick to notice:
I’d been spending some time working on learning to make my first cinematic animated GIFs (still working, but a post coming soon), and had been thinking a lot about my once-most-favourite movie, Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner (it lasted as the fav for almost 20 years, and is likely now my second most favourite, supplanted in the early 2000s by Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) When I first saw Blade Runner, I was living in Toronto (now the most populous city in Canada, fifth-most in North America). At the time, the incessant rain in the film, together with the ongoing images of decaying buildings, made me ponder the question, “Where would I (along with the millions of other folks in Toronto) go to get water,” if suddenly one day I turned the tap, and nothing came out? And this was before the modern commoditization of (un-sparkled) bottled water. It wasn’t too many minutes after reading the prompt that I had my “technology I can’t live without.”
Walking around the city of Montréal that day, in an incredible heat, and climbing all the way up the switchback paths to the summit of Mount Royale served to provide wonderful grist for my iPhone video camera. As it turned out, the heat the next day in Ottawa only served up additional images, and so this little Daily Create turned into a bit of a mega project. The spoken commentary at 2:00 minutes was done in one take — I edited it a bit with Audacity to remove a couple “ums” and some slightly-too-long “thinking gaps,” and then layered it back over the original video for that segment back in iMovie.
Having this TDC lens in front of my eyes for the day was a prime example of how The Daily Create can really jump start your creativity. Despite the time spent on this one, I really enjoyed putting this together. The free water handed out by the Vitamin Water folks was pure serendipity (wonderful shirt!), and the contrast provided by the vending machines at the summit of Mount Royale — and that long red hose watering the flowers, presumably pumped all the way up from the river level in the city far below — were moments of pure “found example” joy. The non-functioning “dry” fountain at the end was a great closer to punctuate the message. And the title of ‘s song from Jamendo is just another wonderful little bit to make this work.
Day Six: July 16th: tdc190: Flip the decibels. Make a loud sound soft, or a soft sound loud.
By the time this one arrived, I was back home. And a bit tired. And certainly hot. So it wasn’t much of a stretch to join up Brahms’ Lullaby (I went with an anonymous MIDI version to avoid the potential of hurting anyone’s feelings with the manglement) and the fan, duking it out for the loudest influence on the pending sleeper. Clearly, the sleeper (me) won out in the end.
Day Seven: July 17th: tdc191: Illustrate attraction in a photograph today.
The reality of the pending Seven-Day-Challenge Mashup hit this morning, and I toyed with the idea of returning to the tdc189 “Technology I Can’t Live Without” iPhone “attraction” as a means of tying the week’s work together, as a chunk of it was facilitated by the phone. I also spent some time grabbing some video from Minecraft — scenes of how the critters there are attracted to wheat (it’s fun to run in circles and have a mass of chickens chase you), and how pairs of animals will be suddenly attracted to one another (and make a little baby animal) when you feed each of them a sheaf of wheat. But then I found myself shooting pics of coins attached to the magnets in my pdo iPhone case. And as I moved around the room seeking some better light, I suddenly found the inspiration in shadows and location to create something more than just a photo of some coins stuck to my phone.
“Creative Attraction” by aforgrave, on Flickr
Still, the photo alone seemed like a bit too little effort for the seventh day of the challenge, and I was inspired with @cogdog‘s enthusiasm to generate interest in The Daily Create, and so I spent some time turning the image into a poster, and then a new ds106 Design Assignment, #611: “‘Celebrate The Daily Create’ poster”.
“Celebrate ‘The Daily Create’ poster” by aforgrave, on Flickr
If you’re not yet following The Daily Create, the assignments are posted daily at 10 AM Eastern Time. Check out The Daily Create online and follow @DS106TDC on Twitter.
Seven-Day-Challenge Wrap Up (and beyond)
Given that these items represent the individual The Daily Create elements for Alan’s Seven-Day-Challenge — the next task will be to complete a mash-up of items from the past seven days into some form of narrative, the final stage in completing the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge (and Mashup Thereof).
That, and continuing towards my self-challenged #21daychallenge. As of tdc191, I’m on the 11th consecutive TDC.
Who else is looking to extend their Seven-Day-Challenge towards a consistent daily habit? It’s fun! Unleash your creativity!
For this mission I had to create a 30 second documentary that showed, rather than told.
I decided to document something I’m amazing it… making sandwiches. I’m good in the kitchen (but no baking, can’t bake to save my life), the only thing I’m probably better at is eating and enjoying food (I have to soul of a 300lb chef).
I decided to make it a bit amusing by speeding up the process (I did so manually- as in a made my sandwich extremely quickly lol) and by taking myself VERY seriously. The sandwich is sauted chicken breast and a eggplant based paste called “Baba Ghanooj” (its like humus, except with eggplants… its amazing). Nothing fancy, but a masterpiece nonetheless because … well it was made by me.
As funny as it is, I think it has a deeper meaning. That sometimes the attitude is what makes it a feast, not the food. A slice of pizza and a soda can be turned into a feast if the approach is proper. This is a huge part of me. I’m big on sharing meals, and really appreciate good food; I think it is a universal that brings people together.
After watching Everything is a Remix: by Kirby Ferguson, I agree. There are many movies that I have seen and songs that I have heard that I swear I have seen/heard before, even if that is the first time that I have seen/heard that movie or song. It is true that everything is a remix, everything is inspired or made of something else. The one movie that I have seen that I believe is original is the Lion King. The movie with the lions with that plot seem familiar to me. Oh wait, brother killing brother for throne and then son prevailing. Okay so maybe is wasn’t so much original, but the fact that they used lions makes it slightly original. However since then there has been many movies made based off of that movie. After watching Everything’s a remix I have come to understand that even situations aren’t necessarily original, because the phrase, “Listen to the knowledge, that the elders have” would be pointless. Everything comes from something, it just might be a slight remix.
Hey, OMG this week was soooo intense, but at the same time it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed working on videos despite the amount of time it took, it was a ton of fun. In my video I included a clips of videos that I have worked on. I hope it speaks for itself… Enjoy
For this Video Assignment (http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/how-to-tutorial/) we had to make a How-to video. For this assignment I decided to do make-up application. The reason I chose make-up is because I love make-up, I did ballet for 20 years, so it was something I always ended up being around. I chose to do a simple every-day application. I first tell the user to prime the face with a foundation primer. After that you take the foundation and cover the face blending up into the hair line and down through the jaw bone area. After that you take a nude eyeshadow and cover your eyelid from your lash line to your crease. After that you apply mascara. Once that is complete you apply the nude lipstick and you are ready to go!
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.....
