Now that we’re into audio week, it was hard to pass up the Mainstreamed Chipmunkd’ Audio Assignment 494. After hearing Jolie’s “You Can Call Me Al-vin” last night, I just had to try it myself. While I found the Genesis classic “Carpet Crawlers” mighty wonderful at any speed, I decided to up-chipmunk The Chipmunks’ recent version of LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem.
I spent a bit of time working around with the settings in the djay app, by algoriddim. The interface is wonderful for mixing and playing with your recordings. Somehow, I wasn’t able to get the sound effects working last night (too tired to search the documentation), but I had lots of fun with the looping effect.
jim groom posted a GIF of Henry Winkler’s infamous/iconic shark jump this morning.
I can’t imagine a world where media-saturated Bava had missed the origins of this trope. And if that’s really the case, then maybe he missed the Arrested Development sequel as well.
I’ve really been enjoying this process. Alan suggested that I detail the Photoshop steps for GIFing (simple, but often hard to find), so I tried to live record a tutorial video as I made this one.
The other voice Annika. She waved at the computer a lot.
In looking for a film to fit into the I Can Read Movies assignment, I decided would start by repurposing my initial Monkey House vector graphic and work with Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film, 12 Monkeys. Like Gilliam’s 1985 film, Brazil, the film is set in a dystopian future, but also introduces the wrinkle of time travel. Visually stunning and mind-bending, the film is worth viewing if you haven’t seen it.
I decided to work at extending my skills using Illustrator by trying to recreate the graphics template from the original book series. While that was easily doable, the further task of “aging” the book put a bit of a crimp in my timeline. I tried following the Photoshop tutorial by MOME, but struggled to get the right textures, and so, in the interests of time, I sought out some aged paper textures on the Internet, and eventually settled on Old_Scroll_Texture_II_by_Isthar_art, going back to Illustrator to get a partial effect. Unfortunately, of necessity, the layering put the effect under the text, so the text and images on the cover don’t really look aged to match the paper. However, as I was getting ready to post this, I decided to go back and try the tutorial once more, and managed to figure it out in Photoshop. Maybe I was sleepy the first time!
So here are two versions. First the Illustrator-only version, and second, the fiddled-with brushes-in-Photoshop version.
“I Can Read Movies: 12 Monkeys” by aforgrave, on Flickr
“I Can Read Movies: 12 Monkeys” by aforgrave, on Flickr
However, in doing a bit of research into the movie, I came across an amazing antecedent for the film, discovering that Gilliam’s film was actually a re-make/re-imaging of a quirky black and white still-motion sci-fi film from 1962 by Chris Marker, entitled La Jetée.
Searching online revealed a section of the film. Check it out.
Cool, eh? If there isn’t already a ds106 video assignment focusing on telling a narrative like this using using still images, there should be. This film produces a wonderful result. It’s reminiscent of the missing sections of Frank Capra’s 1937 Lost Horizon that have been replaced with existing promotion stills (to accompany the remaining audio track). It’s an eerie effect. And quite dramatic. It creates an interesting space for you to fill in some gaps on your own. Maybe I’ll aim for something like that when we get to video…
Now, as an add-in bonus, while searching for existing images for 12 Monkeys, I found this:
Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys as an animated GIF (not mine!)
I’ve been looking for a film to explore the cinematic animated GIF assignment, Say It Like Peanut Butter. Perhaps I’ll take a further look into 12 Monkeys…
And, if that weren’t sufficient monkey-related input for summer reflection, my copy of our Camp Magic MacGuffin Monkey House name inspiration arrived recently in the mail.
“Summer Reading for Monkeys” by aforgrave, on Flickr
I mentioned it yesterday and couldn’t sleep last night for thoughts of GIFing Hal Hartley’sTrust. This was easier in Schizopolis in many ways, because Hartleys films are already focused on faces and moments. But, oh… the faces, the moments. In the kitchen this morning, in between coffee and rinsing a quart of hair gel off of Annika, I watched the last 3 minutes of the film and bawled. Schizopolis was our Saturday night party film, the “OMG you have to see this!” film, even though most people passed out or lost interest before the dentist-transmigration.
Trust came on after that, and always ended in tears. My conscious (but always denied) attempt to live in the stilted Hartley language was certainly a contributor to many of friendship disintegrating fights in college. It’s an old film – almost as old now as The Conversation was when I first saw Trust in 1998.
Even as the fashion ages into comedy, there emotional core will shift and grow with you. Here’s my attempt to do some meager justice to this in a handful of frame grabs.
The lines and music under that last GIF add everything.
“Why have you done this?”
“Done what?”
“Put up wth me like this.”
“Somebody had to.”
“But why you?”
“I just happened to be here.”
That’s pop song strength – lines that can grow with you from bleak reflection on relationships into a tear-wrenching reflection on the arbitrary unconditional love of parenthood. They just happened to be there, and I needed them.
For a few years, I’ve watched the explosion of amazing film-clip GIFs take over the web. Even as the #ds106 crew churned out fantastic artifacts in class after class, I consistently viewed that as a consumer. Clearly it involves a lot of aestetic judgment and technical skill. It belongs in the “complicated with Photoshop” bucket, aka the “Not for me!” pile.
WRONG! Make art!
So while I know that my craftsmanship is weak, at least I can step it up on a curatorial level. These are all from one of my favorite films, Soderbergh’s cinematic throat clearing excerciseSchizopolis!
“I believe so strongly in mayonaise.”
That last GIF is cut from an amazing sequence where Soderbergy runs through a dozen hideous faces in a bathroom mirror, and then snaps back into normalcy in a split second when someone else walks into the restroom.
The other cult gem of my DVD/VHS collection is John Greyson’s Zero Patience. Sadly, most of my immediate thoughts for GIFs involve incidental or pupet nudity. I’m living with a holistic public identity, but I recognize the benefits of keeping the bathouse barbershop trio out of my google results.
Oh, and while I’m at it, have a little Fred Rogers.
Wow. The design assignment opportunity this week at Camp Magic MacGuffin has offered a gazillion ideas — I have a major list I could chip away at — and making the time to get to get to them has been a fun challenge. The Postcards from Magical Places Design Assigment 363 was a blast!
I’ve had this shot of the camp centre for a while now, and liked the idea of riffing on the ds106 “Make Some Art!” battle-cry by substituting the word “Craft” — both as a nod to the creativity evoked by Minecraft, and also the care that the word “craft” seems to embody. So as an invitation to non-campers who might receive the postcard from CMM, that seemed to be a good caption for the card.
“Postcard from Camp Magic MacGuffin (Front)” by aforgrave, on Flickr
Having spent all that time returning transparency (pixel by pixel) to the two block images so that I could use them to “build a tree” for the Monkey Social invitation, I repurposed them to create the two main words in the postcard title. The 3D nature of the lettering suits the Minecraft theme. While I’m not as happy with the text for “some” as I might be, in some ways it is reminiscent of some post card text I’ve seen that really doesn’t mesh with the image beneath. So on that note, it’s staying. All the bits on the front were assembled in Fireworks in a .PNG, and then flattened to .JPG to post to the web.
“Postcard from Camp Magic Maguffin (Back)” by aforgrave, on Flickr
I had a lot of fun working on the back of the card, which had me editing the CMM logo in Photoshop to remove the colours to produce the postmark outline, creating the border of the stamp, and editing the scanned handwriting (again, more removing pixels to get a nice transparency over the existing postcard back). It seems like every time I need to make something transparent, I need to google how to do it. There must be better ways.
The stamp was especially fun to do. I’m going to do a series of stamps — I have a good number of screen captures of CMM in Minecraft, and a stamp series seems like a nice way to collect them. Given the designation bestowed to the “camp pet” in the week four assignment video, I figured it was best to start the series with that image. Gotta keep him happy.
“CMM Stamp#1 ‘Nobody Bava Head’ “by aforgrave, on Flickr
Were there more space on the postcard, it would be nice for a weekly letter home. As it was, so much has happened this past week, there really isn’t room to even begin.
So the Slide Guy took a bit of a visit to the MineCraft incarnation of Camp Magic MacGuffin this week, looking for appropriate places to practice his sliding skills.
He was captured trying out the stairs at the Bunk Five Archery Range …
“SlideGuy at CMM Archery Stairs” by aforgrave, on Flickr
… checking out the Bava lava at the camp centre, …
“SlideGuy at CMM Bava Lava” by aforgrave, on Flickr
and giving a good ol’ head-first go at the Fall Out The World Fun Ride.
“SlideGuy at CMM Fall Out The World Fun Ride by aforgrave, on Flickr
As it would turn out, however, he seemed to spend the most time at the Waterslide over at CampX. Here is Slide Guy enjoying the waterside. Over and over!
SlideGuy at CMM Camp X Waterslide
UPDATE: I took a close look at all of the Slide Guy images to see if anyone had done the waterslide — and somehow missed Martha’s. When I saw the work of Noise Professor Maybe Next Time D’Arcy and Tim Wins, I decided to go with an animated GIF. So clearly Slide Guy was on that waterside during the day, AND still at sunset. Or maybe at sunset, and STILL the next day. At any rate, he must love sliding.
This week I chose to do the splash the color assignment. The reason I chose to do this one, is because I feel that this type of art is very cool. I actually did this assignment on my iPhone. I downloaded a color editor app and swiped my finger across the area that I wanted to be in color.
"Rift in the Space-Time Continuum … Convenient". by aforgrave, on Flickr
“Making night time work,
A convenient answer,
Bending the space-time.” FlickrHaiku, TwHaiku, InstagramHaiku
I came across this solution, while seeking answers.
While still not the long-promised DayDoubler**, it’s nonetheless a start. – At the Petro-Can, 10:10 pm. June 11th, 2012. ______________________________________________
I would have seen a mock ad for **DayDoubler sometime in the mid-90s, posted on a bulletin board outside the technicians’ work room at our DSB. (The room later served as our training lab, our PD library, and the home to our original web and email servers.) At the time, Connectrix marketed a variety of software solutions that served to attempt to extend memory (RAM Doubler) and storage (Disk Doubler) so that the computers of the day could do more with less than they actually needed.
The fictional Day Doubler never materialized. LOL.
Searching the web this evening discovered this text:
DayDoubler is a new product from Connectrix that gives you those extra hours in each day that we’ve been asking for. Using sophisticated time mapping and compression techniques to double the number of hours in the day, DayDoubler gives you access to 48 hours each day. With the shareware hack MaxDay, you can easily stretch your day to 60, 72, or even 96 hours! Connectrix warns that at the higher numbers DayDoubler becomes less stable and that you run the risk of a temporal crash in which everything from the beginning of time to the present would come crashing down around you, sucking you into a black hole.
Should this occur, be sure to reboot with the shift key down.
A few years later, a colleague would regularly compliment me by wishing he had two of me. At one particularly important juncture, he wished he had three.
Over the years, I have also tried to find the companion product Clone Yourself, to no avail.
I have learned a lot more this week than I let onto in the first letter, we have been focusing a lot of photography and what it means to be a good photographer. I learned that you don’t necessarily need to put that much thought into but to just let it happen. Also, that you can’t be afraid. Sometimes you just have to go for the shot, whether you are upside down or laying on the ground. What we perceive to be the simplest thing can be the most beautiful piece of art work.
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.....
