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Thursday, July 12th, 2012

I totally got schooled today. Totes. Schooled.

I certainly can’t have that, so I got to thinking about yesterday’s Daily Create, which was “Take a picture of a cloud and tell us what it looks like to you.”

I checked the Daily Create yesterday and then looked at the sky. It looked something like this for most of the day:

Rainy Day photo courtesy of Alexander Barreto (or Hialean on Flickr)

After a week of 100+ degree days and no rain for forever, yesterday’s showers were a welcome sight. I promptly forgot about TDC #184 and went about my day.

I forgot about it, that is, until I was reading my son stories before bed time. One of last night’s stories was A Fly Went By by Mike McClintock. Kids’ books are weird, and this one is no exception. There’s a lot of talk about guns and animals killing each other. But look what’s on the last page:

A Fly Went By by Mike McClintock

CLOUDS!

I was going to snap a picture of this page last night and upload it to Flickr (the cloud in the top left corner reminds me of a shark), but I (a) forgot (b) was lazy (c) was forgetful (d) all of the above.

So let’s talk about re-interpreting.

Shortly after I read that I had invented the lamest excuse ever (truth), my son pulled a bag of poly-fil (the filling for stuffed animals, quilts, and whatnot) off the shelf.

He takes this stuff out of the bag, puts it on his head and my head, and calls it “bubbles” since it looks like bubbles in the bathtub. Do you know what else it looks like?

CLOUDS!

“Here’s your re-interpretation,” I thought as I taped the poly-fill to one of the windows. I had a vision that this taped-up poly-fil would look like clouds in the sky. Do you know what poly-fil looks like taped to a window? Santa Claus’s pubes.

I was close to just snapping the picture and being done with it, but I wanted to make it work. I wanted something that would kind-of-sort-of match up to the image I had in my head.

Maybe taping the poly-fil to blue construction paper with a yellow sun would make things look less pube-ish.

Less obscene, yes. But still lame.

I give up. Jobot and I play with his cars. Jobot drives his cars into the bubbles/clouds/fog.

YES, JOBOT! That’s it! Hand me those planes!

And here’s what we do:

That was fun.

So I got that TDC #184 (even if it was a day late), but do you know what I loved most about the whole thing? The fact that my kid was involved and the process of failing, failing, failing, and then finally getting it. True, these were small fails on what some would consider an insignificant task, but it felt good nonetheless.

So there. #4life. I win. Maybe… there’s still that seven day Daily Create challenge.

Posted in #4life, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, Daily Creates, ds106, failing, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Re-interpreting the Daily Create

It’s a bird… It’s a plane…

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

You’re right, CogDog… How hard is it to take a photo of a cloud on a beautiful summer day?

Today’s Daily Create reads:

Take a picture of a cloud and tell us what it looks like to you

Here’s my original cloud photo:

clouds

It looked a little like a horse to me so I found a drawing of one and downloaded a copy.

from animacat.nata’s flickr photostream

I put both photos in Pages and “instant alpha-ed” away the background for the horse.

How to layer images in Pages

Then I reduced it’s opacity to that you could still see the clouds and here’s the final version:

What do the clouds look like to you?

Posted in bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, dailycreate, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on It’s a bird… It’s a plane…

Kill Bill as Silent Movie

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

One of the current ds106 video assignments challenges us to return to the silent era:

The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form of the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track.

Backstory

To complete this, I looked at several clips that could be used. I started by looking at trailers, as suggested in the assignment. I considered Jaws, Forrest Gump and Pirates of the Caribbean but I found that the trailers either contained too much talking and not enough action or jumped from one scene to the next too quickly to provide enough context. So, I decided to look for a purely action sequence. Since my previous assignment featured Quentin Tarantino, I figured that I might as well return to his work. I found a clip from Kill Bill Vol. 1 that someone posted to YouTube that already contained two fight scenes. I liked the idea of combining this modern, dark, samurai-type of film with some dixieland music. This incongruous combination appealed to me!

Process

I have worked with iMovie quite frequently to document school events but rarely played with many of the features. I was able to easily convert the clip to black and white and sped up the film to produce what I hoped would look like a silent movie but the image still felt too crisp. I decided to Google some advice and found iCreatemagazine.com which I immediately added to my Flipboard! It offered easy to follow tips for making a silent movie look and, I’m hoping, will have a decent feed to follow. One tip that I found there suggested that I should not accept the default of 30 frames per second but instead reduce that to 24 to achieve a jerkier motion. It also explained that the Aged Film effect would add those vertical lines one sees on old films. However, since I had sped the film up, these lines were not visible. I decided that I should speed up the film and make it black and white and then export it. I could then re-import it and add the Aged Film effect. Worked like a charm!

Best:

My original clip was 10 minutes in length. I doubled the speed to seem more like an old movie but, at 5 minutes, it still felt too long. I am hoping that the further two minutes that I edited out are not too obvious. This is where I impressed myself most: I was surprised how seamless the final version appeared! I took out a good chunk of the first fight scene (more obvious) and several sections (mostly amputations) in the second. This allowed me to keep the video to just 3 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised with how the scenes still flowed from one another.

Disappointments/ Ideas for Next Time:

Only the Organic Main template seemed appropriate for a silent movie but the iMovie Titles are a dead give-away to the fact that one has used that software. I wish that there was an easy way to create your own. I suppose that I could have created my own and saved them as jpegs and then inserted them as photos. Maybe next assignment…

Music was a challenge. I really need to do some more audio work. I started to fool around in Garageband but didn’t find the sounds that I wanted to easily create some dixieland music so I opted for the built-in iLife jingles (Gelato, Vino and Tigris). I added these three themes to my movie and left it at that.

Take-Away:

I may have taken some liberties with this task but I did learn more about iMovie than I knew before… if nothing else, the quick keys for splitting a clip (shift-command-s) will come in very useful in the future!

I need to remember to take some in-progress screenshots to add to these posts. In the meantime, enjoy Silent Bill.

Posted in bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, video, VideoAssignments, VideoTutorials376 | Comments Off on Kill Bill as Silent Movie

Analysing the Basterds [sic]

Monday, July 9th, 2012

I really didn’t want to believe it. Wouldn’t films that follow rules just seem formulaic? How could following the “rules” still produce a good film after over 100 years of cinematography? I hoped it wouldn’t work but as I completed this ds06 assignment, I realized it was more true than I thought!

Week 7′s assignment encouraged us to

Write a blog post that explains your selection by identifying key scenes that use some of the elements described by Roger Ebert in his article “How to Read a Movie” essay

As I started to think about movies I liked, I came up with just about everything by Quentin Tarantino. Yes, there tends to be a lot of violence in his films and, as someone who doesn’t generally condone gratuitous violence, I find it amazing how much I enjoy his movies. I am always really impressed with how he can often make me laugh at what should be the most inappropriate times (i.e. often in the midst of a very violent act).

I decided to see what clips I could find of Inglourious Basterds. Since I was really impressed with Christoph Waltz in this film, I watched one of his opening scenes and couldn’t believe that it followed Ebert’s rules to a T! Maybe that’s the genius of Tarantino – combining very familiar camera work with an complex character, setting and/or plot.

Following the Rules

In the movie, Colonel Landa is both charming and evil. In this early scene that dichotomy is set up according to Ebert et al’s rules:

I neglected to mention that Colonel Landa is constantly moving in and out of the light. This is confusing as the audience isn’t completely certain if he is a good or evil character.

Although I couldn’t find a version of this scene with English subtitles, maybe it’s better that way – you can see the full effect of the visuals and the music regardless of the dialogue.

Great opening sequence!

Breaking the Rules

Part of this assignment was to also determine and justify the genre. Is this possible with a Tarantino movie?! My best attempt would be to go with “Alternate History”. This is a Tarantino re-visioning of World War 2 that, thankfully, allows for some complex characters that are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. The world is rarely black and white; it is usually many shades of grey.

Posted in analyzethis, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, video | Comments Off on Analysing the Basterds [sic]

Not Reading a Movie

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

Good Plan

So my intention was to sit down and “read a movie” for this week’s ds106 assignment. I read Roger Ebert’s article on How to Read a Movie, I looked over the chapter on Moving Images in a new book I have called Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom by Frank W Baker and the I hit the list of TIFF Essential 100 to pick a movie to analyse.

Poor Execution

As I was looking over the list, I came across the film Amelie and thought that might be a good one to “read”. I really enjoyed the movie when I saw it but it was so many years ago that I would have to find it and watch it again before completing this assignment. Instead I started looking at the other visual assignments that I could do and I recalled a mash-up I had seen quite a while back that combined the Toy Story 3 and Inception trailers. I started to wonder if Inception would be a good movie to read – I had also really enjoyed that one when I saw it. Of course, that made me want to try my own mash-up of Amelie and Inception. So, I found the trailers for both, downloaded the sound and video from YouTube with my Firefox add-on and combined them in iMovie.

Fun

I think it worked pretty well! I like the combination of whimsical Amelie and ominous Inception trailers.

This might fit video assignment #463 – Watching Movies with the Stereo On: Like when you have a movie playing on TV without the sound and you’ve got the stereo on at the same time. Take a clip from a movie, remove the audio, and add audio from a song or radio show that, somehow, kind of fits.

I’ll tackle a “proper” video assignment later this week with more original content…

Posted in bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments463 | Comments Off on Not Reading a Movie

105 degrees

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

It’s hot. It’s been hot all week, and I’ve been thinking about The Twilight Zone episode called “The Midnight Sun.”

The word that Mrs. Bronson is unable to put into the hot, still, sodden air is ‘doomed,’ because the people you’ve just seen have been handed a death sentence.

Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel.

If you’d like to view the episode in its entirety, do it:

Last night I started working on video assignment #539. I generated the random words and found some of the pictures through Google Images. I had some idea of where the story was going to go. I went to bed. I sat down with it again tonight, and the tale veered in a different direction.

In “Midnight Sun,” civilization faces its last days. The story below focuses on a doomed relationship. What has happened? Has the couple fallen into different rotations? Has the affinity for a crappy band taken its toll? Maybe the constant tallying of mistakes has worn thin. Or maybe it’s just the damn heat.

The opening of the project was stolen from this tweet which appeared in my stream this afternoon:

Truth "@RandallDoetzer: I used to live in Richmond, now I just live on the sun."—
Russell (@FarmerRussell) July 07, 2012

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments539 | Comments Off on 105 degrees

A little metal for #457

Saturday, July 7th, 2012

Not only is this a bastardization of video assignment 457, but it’s also kind of a cheat since I did this video a handful of years ago. But I’m not a student, and I’m not working for a grade, so I get to do what I want to do.

The ~~rules~~ guidelines for video assignment #457 read like this:

Take a favorite cartoon or anime like show, take some clips, mash them together and add music to it. Try to pick out a specific theme in your clips that follow the theme of the music. Keep an eye out for changes in the music and plan your clips accordingly.

Here’s my interpretation:

~~Take a favorite cartoon or anime like show,~~ take some clips, mash them together and add music to it. Try to pick out a specific theme in your clips that follow the theme of the music. Keep an eye out for changes in the music and plan your clips accordingly.

I met some of the criteria.

Anyways… Battlemaster is a Richmond black metal band. They are wonderful. Some of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet. Back in 2007 they put out Warthirsting & Winterbound, which included the song, “This Mead Is Making Me Warlike.” When played live, this song really rallied the audience. It was met with singing, the raising of PBR cans in the air, and sometimes the tossing of said PBR cans.

I took the song and mixed it with public domain footage from Archive.org. I haven’t looked at this video in years. The assortment of clips is truly, truly bizarre. So here we go:

Thanks, DS106, for making me pull this project off the shelf.

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments457 | Comments Off on A little metal for #457

Librarian archetypes in 5 movies and 18 seconds

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

I’m a librarian. You probably guessed that. We librarians are a dedicated bunch and tend to be defensive about what we do. You would be too if you were constantly asked, “Why do I need a librarian when there’s Google.” Yeah. Screw you, buddy.

So here’s my take on the One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds video assignment.

The librarians are from Ghostbusters, Party Girl (Parker Posey), The Matrix (Marcus Chong), Desk Set (Katharine Hepburn and Joan Blondell), and The Station Agent (Michelle Williams). The music is “Marian the Librarian” from The Music Man.

I’ve heard it argued that though Tank is not actually called a librarian in The Matrix, but he does a lot of librarian-ish work. So there you go. I also think the scene is representative of the high-tech world in which librarians work (and dominate thank you very much).

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments448 | Comments Off on Librarian archetypes in 5 movies and 18 seconds

Can you hear me now?: Audio and DS106

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Most of my time was spent working on the radio show.

This is what I ended up with. I recorded the two interviews with my iPod Touch using the FiRe app. I thought the audio turned out really well, though the interview with Brooke is at a lower volume. I’m not sure if that had to do with the fact that we were in a restaurant or because I imported the audio file into Audacity as a .WAV and then exported the file from Audacity to Aviary’s Myna as a .MP3. I need to learn more about the file types. Will moving an audio file from one place to the other (and one file type to another) degrade quality? Questions to research. I was going to use Audacity for this project, but I chickened out because of time constraints. I opted to use Myna since I was more familiar with it.

The interview with Brooke was a good 40+ minutes long, and half the time I had no idea what he was talking about. That made editing difficult and time-consuming. The interview with Kate was about 3 minutes long, and she was pretty straight-forward with her post-apocalyptic vision. Better planning could’ve made this project a littler easier, but I guess that can be said for a lot of things.

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Can you hear me now?: Audio and DS106

Edu-Apocalypse

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

“This is the week for your major audio storytelling collaborative project – a group radio show. This is not something you should leave for the end of the week!”

Oh how I should have heeded those words! Since I was busy attending the ISTE 2012 conference last week, I didn’t do a thing about this audio assignment until July 1. I decided that I would follow the suggestion and do something about the morning after the edu-apocalypse.

If I had more time, I would have added a movie announcer voice intro and autotuned some of the speeches. The fact that my radio show about creativity was not very creative was not lost on me! Maybe another day…This was my first real audio assignment and I really enjoyed it. On the plus side, maybe I can use this as the introduction to my workshop on Teaching and Learning later this week!

How I Created This

It took me forever to figure out how to get the audio from a You Tube video onto my computer. After trying numerous applications that didn’t really work, I realized that there was a Firefox Add-on that would do just the trick!

I added the Easy YouTube Video Downloader Add-on to my Firefox browser. So every time I go to YouTube, the downloader button is present.

This Add-on allows you to determine one of several different file types for your download:

As long as my internet connection was good (i.e. when no one was streaming the Euro2012 soccer final!) then the download was smooth and relatively quick.

I downloaded the audio from two of the ISTE 2012 keynote presentations as well as another Ken Robinson Ted Talk about creativity. I then downloaded the theme music from a 70′s science fiction movie.

I then used Audacity to select sections of the speeches and music to piece them together into one 5 minute presentation.