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!!!
This week we are doing a lot of remixes. When I got my Remix assignment, I was a little afraid. I didn’t know how exactly to remix a “5 seconds of fame” video. After thinking and thinking a thinking, I finally came up with a remix assignment. This assignment is called “IDENTIFY THIS SOUND” The steps to creating this video are as followed.
1. Take a short video clip (preferably 5 seconds)
2. Take the audio from the video.
3. Play ONLY the audio portion of the video.
5. Ask the viewer, “Can you Identify this sound”
6. Give the viewer at least 3 answer choices of what the sound could be
7. Give the viewer some time to think and then reveal the answer
8. Show the video clip, and see if you viewer guessed it right.
My video people, is a Remix of Jasmine’s 5 Sec of fame
Creating this assignment took a lot of time, but it wasn’t too hard. The steps to creating this were
So I used the remix generator and it gave me a remix of the 9 Lives assignment and the twist was to use an aspect of a Dr.Seuss character. I chose to use the Grinch as my character and I found different pictures of the character online and labeled them like they were pictures from different Christmases. I think this is a fun twist to the assignment and I thought it was fun.
For this I chose to combine two of my favorite scenes from both movies, I used the sound of the last scene from the movie “300″ and the visual from Lord of The Rings Return of the King. Both of these scenes are similar because they are Pre battle inspirational speeches so that why I think it works. I used real player to get the two separate clips into VideoPad then I muted the audio for the LOTR clip and added the 300 clip to the audio only level. I then clipped it to mesh better with the visual clip. I think this is a fun assignment it really lets you choose what ever you want I had a couple different ideas but most of them had already been used so it seems that I have a similar mind to past ds106ers.
For my music mapped video I chose to do the George Strait “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” I chose this songs because I really like George Straits music and this song. For me I found it difficult to get the google maps into Video pad, the way I was able to do it was I saved the maps into a pdf then copy and pasted them into paint and then cropped them to what I wanted. This took a while to figure out but eventually worked out. getting the song was much easier because I already had it in my iTunes so I was able to just drag it over into VideoPad and use it. I thought this was fun mapping out the places he mentions where his Ex’s are its almost a map of places for him to avoid when in Texas.
Demonstrate that “a picture is worth a thousand words” by superimposing a famous quotation over a “Creative Commons” licensed image.
remixed via the Bootcamp It card:
Whatever the assignment is, it can be made tougher if it is under the tutelage of a tough drill sergeant. Redo this assignment with a military kick to it, as if it was sent to boot camp. Drop down you worthless piece of flab and gimme twenty!
I had the option to maybe use the same image, or quote. I opted for the latter, but changed up what it said to habe more “ten hut”. On Compfight, I found this cc licensed image:
Perfect!
For the bottom text, in Photoshop I used the layer effects for Stroke and Outer Glow to make the text really pop out.
But I was intrigued by the second Japanese quote added by Jay, and ended up on the WikiQuote page for Japanese proverbs, and liked the sound of this one:
?????????????? Koketsu ni irazunba koji wo ezu. or Literally: If you do not enter the tiger’s cave, you will not catch its cub.
That fits with the drill sergeant theme, so I added it at the top. I like that I can cut and paste Japanese text directly.
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!
These two chapters focus on Identity and Agency. It doesn’t surprise me that language can impact both of these things, but the extent to which the most basic phrases can make a difference is astounding.
Johnston makes a brief reference in chapter three to the importance of the relationship between student and teacher on language (page 24). He writes of it regarding language about behavior but it seems to me that the relationship is a factor in how everything a teacher says is heard.
My take-away from chapter three on identity is nothing major (although there is plenty of major stuff to get from this chapter). Speaking to students and labeling them as readers, writers, researchers, thinkers, however we want them see themselves does make a difference. That’s small and huge at the same time.
In my copy of Choice Words, chapter four, on agency, has a ridiculous number of post-it note flags. The first is on page 30, marking this passage:
To understand children’s development of a sense of agency, then, we need to look at the kinds of stories we arrange for children to tell themselves. For example, I expect that a child who has a history of telling himself stories about being a failure in writing is unlikely to face a new writing challenge with, “Yes, I imagine I can do this.” Similarly, just as we can put ourselves into stories in which we are the protagonists, the ones with agency, we can plot ourselves in the same story and attribute the agency to another, as in, “The reason my poem was good is that the teacher helped me.” Telling such stories in which we relegate ourselves to a passive role is the inverse of agency.
The language around agency should push students to reflect on how they have been successful and plans to continue that way. Not to say that there should never be discussions of things that didn’t go well because that is necessary as well. In addition, students should be pushed to think about problems they faced and how they can tackle problems in the future.
My last post-it note flag in this chapter is on page 39:
Drawing their attention to their effort (“You worked really hard at that”) or their intellect (“You are so smart”) will not generate sufficiently useful narratives.
I have been fascinated by Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, and this pushes it farther. For some time now I have been conscious of my language in the hopes of using phrases that emphasize effort over intelligence. Now I am going to have to work harder to use language that is more specific about their effort to build agency.
I took liberties with today’s Daily Create (tdc192):
No rules, right? Also, I misread (or didn’t read) the DC directions.
Also, I haven’t sorted out my .gif/Wordpress issues, so you have to click on the image to see it move. Sorry. Maybe that’s a project for tomorrow.
Representing the concept of flight through cartoons… So I found this old Superman cartoon at archive.org. I selected a small section and turned it into an animated .gif. Only I can’t really tell that it’s an animated .gif. Probably should’ve just trimmed the 10 seconds or so of the cartoon I used and uploaded that for the daily create. Dumb, Barker. Dumb. Oh well.
Okay, you creative wanna be privates! Many of you got down and followed the drill for a week of doing Daily Create assignments every day. THAT IS AMAZING. I did not think you had it in you. BUT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DONE??
YOU ARE NOT DONE YET! NOW YOU HAVE TO MAKE A STORY.
Hang on second Sarge, let’s do a little recap. Over the last seven days, we saw 174 total Daily Creates done (an average of 25 per day) and an influx of new participants (see my summaries, doing that every day was a drill!). The previous week, we had only 71 (average of 10 per day). I think you can do the math on the analytics (which reminds me of something I am hoping to work on is to do this tracking within our site, its tricky, because the content exists elsewhere, so we need to use API calls to get totalas from flickr, YoutTube, and SoundCloud. But it;s doable)
Here is a breakdown of the Seven Challenges. As usual, the photography/drawing ones typically draw bigger response than audio video, but we had a strong showing for the video of the cable tv clip and the audio of the telemarketing call.
So here is the challenge. Are you warmed up? Have you done a few jumping jacks and pushups?
Originally my idea was to ask everyone to weave a digital story out of their own contributions, but had a more interesting idea given that this week at Camp Magic Macguffin (the 2012 location of ds106) our students are doing remix assignments.
Then, and here is where it gets interesting, my friends, is that you are to make a mashup of content that other people created for each of the seven days, and to make an interesting story out of it. How you do it is up to you, but you should use the media (and link back, give ‘em credit) to 7 different pieces of media submitted for the Daily Create on the days you did yours.
Ok, what you need to do is go back to the Daily Create’s for each day, and choose one person’s media (not your own), and somehow weave it together into a mashup, something that tells a story. It need not go in any order (it does not have to start with a tornado) (but that is a good starting place).
How you do this is up to you (ahem, alert the creativity neurons). And be sure to give credit to the original creators of the media (that feels good when you get it, right?)
Now something that will help others is to make it easier for people to use your media (set flickr to creative commons), and especially on SoundCLoud, make sure your options on your tracks are set to “Allow Downloads” (it is not the default).
What you should do then is write up a blog post that includes your story (and some reflection on your process, what is th story behind the story?), kind of like we ask our students to do. If your blog is already syndicated to ds106, just use the tags listed on the assignment page so your shows up. If you are not part of ds106 (oh no), just wait a few days, I am trying to add some code to the site that will allow you to add your example directly. At a minimum, leave a comment here with a link to your story.
But that comes later. Your task is to do this, like our students, before midnight, Sunday, July 22 (2012).
“But I did not start til Sunday?” “What if I did not do 7 (or any)?”
That’s the beauty of this challenge- anyone can do it, not people who submitted 7, or 5, or 1 Daily Create this week.
But its even better than that. You can do this at any time! You don’t need me yelling at you.
Pick a week. Do 7 Daily Creates in a row, all on your own. Then go back, and make the mashups based on the work of others.
Damn, I feel so clever.
But now, I have to start thinking of the story I will tell.
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, PRIVATE? DO I HAVE TO COME WIPE YOUR ASS FOR YOU TOO? MAKE A *@#% MASHUP WILL YA?
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.....
