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Monday, June 18th, 2012

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 excercise Schizopolis!

“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.

Posted in bunk1, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, GIF, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments2 | Comments Off on I Believe So Strongly in #ds106

Postcard from Camp Magic MacGuffin

Monday, June 18th, 2012

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.

Posted in BavaHead, bunk1, Camp Magic MacGuffin, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments363, ds106, imaginages, magicmacguffin, openonline, postcard, Postmark, stamp | Comments Off on Postcard from Camp Magic MacGuffin

Slide Guy at Camp Magic MacGuffin

Monday, June 18th, 2012

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.

Slide on, Slide Guy. Slide on!

ds106 Visual Assignments 595

Posted in bunk1, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, imaginages, magicmacguffin, openonline, slide guy, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on Slide Guy at Camp Magic MacGuffin

Zazzy Does Minecraft

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Don’t go in the sky.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Posted in bunk4, Camp Magic MacGuffin, counselor, ds106, magicmacguffin, minecraft, openonline | Comments Off on Zazzy Does Minecraft

Come join the Youth and Beauty Brigade

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

The Decemberists are unparalleled storytellers and the best band that ever lived, so selecting one of their songs to use for a DS106 class project seemed appropriate. For this assignment I decided to use a lyric from “California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade,” which appears on Castaways and Cutouts.

Here they are performing the song:

Castaways and Cutouts was released in 2002. It went undiscovered by me until the winter of 2004. I had just started making friends with some folks in Richmond. One of them was a young hipster who had better taste in music than I did.

“California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade” remains on my list of favorite Decemberists songs for a few reasons. The first half of the song is about driving route 1, which runs along the California coastline, and drinking wine. Who doesn’t like a road trips and wine? And look at these lyrics: “Take a long drive with me on California One” and “Take a long dram with me on California wine.” Clever, Colin Meloy. Effing Clever.

It’s “Youth and Beauty Brigade” that I really adore. I’m neither youthful nor beautiful, but boy oh boy do I relate to the misanthropes and misfits that populate The Decemberists’ Youth and Beauty Brigade: bed-wetters*, ambulance chasers, bored bench warmers, castaways, cutouts, irresponsible library users. Yes! And that brings me to this:

Lyric Typography Poster featuring The Decemberists

Jaysus. I’m looking at the image now, and thinking that I really built that up with the back story.

I also worked in Photoshop too. Photoshop is still a challenge for me. Layers and working within said layers is counterintuitive. I’m thinking it may have something to do with the fact that I’ve spent decades in word processing software built for the “everyman.” I’ll figure it out though. Here’s the Photoshop version:

Photoshopped version

There’s not enough space at the top, and the font type isn’t all that adventurous or exciting (especially after seeing the stuff at Music Philosophy) or uniform, but screw it. It’s a draft.

The police car photo is from Robert Kuykendall’s Flickr stream. I found the image by doing an advanced search in Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed images.

* I am not a bed-wetter, by the way. I don’t chase ambulances either. I’m not much for warming benches, because I don’t play sports. I am notorious for not getting my library books back on time.

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, DesignAssignments, designassignments529, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Come join the Youth and Beauty Brigade

Media Mediate Relationships

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Classes are done and reports are written so I finally have some time to do some ds106 work. Yeah!

A few weeks ago, we were asked to watch a video of Michael Wesch speaking at UMW Faculty Academy. After some difficulties (see previous post) I was able to see the whole thing. In listening to him I garnered a few ideas that I would like to include in an upcoming workshop that I am planning for teachers.

I had already planned to start the day with participants reflecting on their personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning by determining how much they agree with some educational theorists (or not!) Our IB programme is decidedly constructivist and inquiry-based so I thought that I would define constructivism and then engage the participants in the type of inquiry that I am hoping they will at some point facilitate for their students. Inspired by Lane Clark, at the moment, I am planning to base the remainder of the day’s activities on:

exploring resources about inquiry
determining what they could do with this information to make a difference for themselves or others
determining what they still need to learn/ find out
reflecting on the skills they used in the process
sharing their ideas with others
selecting their communication tool
creating their product
celebrating their work

As a teacher, teaching in this way is incredibly challenging and I want to acknowledge that with my participants. The rewards are numerous but it is not easy because, according to Michael Wesch:

kids don’t believe this is what school should be
as a teacher you need to start over every year
Tip: “just love your audience and they’ll love you back” – this allows you to you focus on what they need

I thought that I would illustrate one of the video’s messages using a meme. I know that it’s not funny but the picture seemed appropriate for the text – even though I believe the text can also be purely positive and not necessarily negative.

I created this using quickmeme.com Just click on “make a meme“, select a photo and replace the captions. For those of you making animated gifs, you can also upload those.

Posted in bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, inquiry, magicmacguffin, openonline, teaching, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments386, workshops | Comments Off on Media Mediate Relationships

Visual Assignment: A Debut Album

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

An Album Cover: Create an album cover to a fictional band.

Following the assignment’s directions, I generated the following:
Band Name: Philipine Legislative Election, 1946
Album Title: “Save what you choose to impose” (Which comes from Alan Moore’s Watchmen. The full quote is, “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.”)
Album Image: “nightways” by Flickr user brian hefele

Here’s what I came up with after several hours of trial and error:

Preparing to go platinum

Click here to see this image on Flickr.

It’s got a real grunge or rap feel to it, which wasn’t intentional. It just kind of went that way. I wanted to stretch myself in both Photoshop and graphic design, so I tried mixing texture and colors, messed around with filters and just about everything I could think of. Oh, and also the colors. I’m terrible at picking out matching/appropriate colors. Thank goodness for my trusty color wheel. I didn’t go into the project with a plan in mind, and it resulted in a hefty amount of work. Next time, I’d like to have a picture or end result in my head before I get to it.

I visited dafont.com, where I picked out some Horror fonts.

The most difficult part of this was finding a place for the band name, and the right font. It needed to match the grunge of the album title, but it couldn’t be too similar or it would all look the same. Photoshop doesn’t do much in the way of grunge and dirty fonts, but I finally settled on the one you see now.

Maybe I’ll make a little video showing you all the layers and the settings I worked with to create this thing.

I’m not completely happy with it the way it looks, but I’m not repelled by it, either.

Posted in adobe photoshop, album art, bunk3, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, Visual Assignments, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments44 | Comments Off on Visual Assignment: A Debut Album

Slide Guy in the Sunshine State

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Thought I’d take a crack at another visual assignment before the focus shifts to Design. Given the recent avalanche of excitement generated by the slide guy assignment, I could resist the urge to try a doing a couple with some vintage postcards.

The postcards were found via Google image search. The minimal bit of editing was done in GIMP and the Slide Guy image came from the dropbox.

As Slide Guy’s head partially obscured the word “Keys,” I used the clone tool to cover it with the surrounding blue. The use of the definite article with Florida might make some cringe. Fortunately, there isn’t yet a grammar component to the grading of these ds106 assignments.

Posted in Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on Slide Guy in the Sunshine State

Venn? Now!

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I got this thing for information graphics. It’s a Zazzy thing — can’t explain it. At any rate, Alan’s assignment was just what I was looking for to express my lifelong fascination with old movies, aging TV series, and the inscrutable weirdness of the bible. Dig it:

Posted in bunk4, Camp Magic MacGuffin, counselor, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments596, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Venn? Now!

Slide Guy Meets Carly Rae Jepsen

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

A few months ago a students started playing “Call Me Maybe” in the library. He played it over and over and over again. I thought I was going to kill myself, and I told him as much. His response, “It really grows on you.” And so it does. I went home that night and instead of putting my head in the oven, I pulled up the video on Youtube and listened. Over and over and over again.

It looks like Slide Guy likes Carly Rae Jepsen just as much as the rest of ~~the~~ ~~world~~ teenage America.

There’s nothing better for sliding than a soapy windshield!

I started working on this assignment in Photoshop, but I find it too overwhelming at the moment. I saw GIMP mentioned a few times, so I decided to download and use that. I downloaded “Slide Guy” from the visual assignments page. I downloaded the “Call Me Maybe” video from Youtube. I then imported the video into VLC and found the scene I wanted. I went through the scene frame by frame until I reached the one you see above. To capture the still image, I used the “snapshot” option under “video.” Once I had the two images, I opened them both as layers in GIMP. It took me some time to familiarize myself with GIMP, but it was definitely manageable. I still hope to master Photoshop… or at least become competent in Photoshop… before the summer is over.