Original image taken from this blog post.
Archive for the ‘digital storytelling’ Category
Slide Guy Safe at Third
Monday, June 11th, 2012Slide Guy spotted going over Niagara Falls
Monday, June 11th, 2012
You owe it to yourself to do the Slide Guy assignment.
Creeping on Alien
Monday, June 11th, 2012
I figured I would do one more visual assignment before we move into my favorite part of ds106 bar none, DESIGN!! I chose the “Creep on a movie scene” by the great Jack Mulrey because it is very much inline with my movie saturated mindset right now. I creeped on Alien using this screenshot from the film and this picture taken by Tom Woodward back in 2008. The picture of me is all wrong because there’s direct sunlight on the right side of my face—and given we are in a cafeteria in deep space that’s probably not gonna fly too well. Nonetheless, I kinda liked it. Anyway, here I am as part of the crew of the Nostromo, and given my coffee and cigarette I think I fit right in with these badass mofos.
If we don’t, remember me
Monday, June 11th, 2012
I was watching the noir cult classic Kiss Me Deadly for the first time in many years last night. It’s an amazing film, and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it. And when you consider both Kiss Me Deadly and Night of the Hunter were made the same year, one would have to assume 1955 would remain the most important year for hardcore film violence until 1967-68 when Bonnie & Clyde and The Wild Bunch are released. Kiss Me Deadly is deeply disturbing on many levels, but unlike Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch little of it happens on screen, it’s all offscreen but communicated psychically with kicking feet, ear piercing screams, and deeply disturbing instruments of torture. Kiss Me Deadly is a textbook example of how to haunt and horrify the audience by creating a simple image that forces viewers to interpolate the horror.
But I told you all that, just to tell you this. While watching the first 10 minutes of Kiss Me Deadly (one of the greatest intros of any film ever) I realized that the title for the blog that transformed the way I imagined animated GIFs, If we don’t, remember me, was from the intro to Kiss Me Deadly. You can see it at 8:25 of this clip on YouTube. I can’t say I was totally surprised since the proprietor of the IWDRM blog obviously knows and loves film, but I was struck when I went back to the IWDRM archives to find there isn’t one animated GIF from Kiss Me Deadly, so the following GIF is my meager homage to both the great Kiss Me Deadly as well as the proprietor of IWDRM, whose art has inspired me to have fun not only thinking about, but in some real way interacting with, all those scenes that have so deeply affected me over the course of my movie watching life.
And this next GIF is not so much an homage as it is a capturing of what has gotta be one of the earliest telephone message machines in cinema. When I first saw this Kiss Me Deadly in L.A. during the early 1990s I was dumbstruck by the presence of a telephone answering machine in the 1950s, how could it be? Turns out the first commercially available answering machine was available in 1949—how crazy is that? Some one should do a animated GIF homage to all answering machine in film 
Triple Troll Quote: Harrison Ford vs. John Cazale
Sunday, June 10th, 2012Just so that people don’t think I am relying entirely on animated GIFs for this week’s visual assignments, here are a couple of Triple Troll Quotes. What’s more, they are themed—both of thee triple troll quotes are centered around an actor who was in a number of amazing films in a very short period of time.
First, between 1977 and 1983 Harrison Ford was in Star Wars (1977), Apocalypse Now! (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) (all within 5 years!). What’s even more remarkable about this is he couldn’t act to save his life. Ford was an icon for me as a kid, but in the 2000s I began to like him less and less given his dismissal of Charles Bronson’s career, which I’ve already discussed on this blog. Regardless, he was in the holy trinity of films for me as a kid: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Blade Runner—what ever I may think of him now, that’s a pretty sick run.
And while Ford’s run is impressive, it doesn’t hold a candle to John Cazale’s—who actually could act!—he was only in five films over his entirely too short career, but every single one of them was a masterpiece (I’ve written about this before as well). That’s a hard act to follow. The five films are: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978). Wow! Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Michael Cimino. He died way too early, but he leaves behind him a filmography few, if any, could ever match.
Messing About with Mood in Image Composites
Saturday, June 9th, 2012Taking another stab at visual assignments, I opted for Switch up the Mood, mostly because I had a few photographs that I had taken with a colleague’s top-shelf digital SLR camera the other day. Consequently, shooting in RAW format, I … Continue reading
Slow Life Down with Photobooth
Saturday, June 9th, 2012
lazy weekends call for lazy art, right?
It’s the weekend, time for a few errands, grocery shopping, mending a bit of that landscape edging you promised your wife you’d get to a month ago, and spending some time with the kids. Truth be told, our weekends are usually all sorts of busy here in the Rimes’ household, and I’m sure any other family with younger children will agree, it’s far too easy to find yourself working harder on a Saturday than you might have during the week. We’d like to think of Saturday and Sunday as “lazy” days in which we can relax with our family and friends, and just enjoy the brief time we have before heading “back to the edu-coal mines” on Monday. Reality though, typically means that we plan more activities and structure instead of playtime on those two precious days (at least it feels that way in our house many weekends).
So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by capturing a silly moment, and completing a ds106 assignment (yes, even ds106 can feel like one of those weekend chores if you’re trying to “play good” and complete the right number of assignments).
But that’s beside the point! How in the world is this applicable to the classroom? Quite often I see teachers in my district using Photobooth for one of two projects; either photos of everyone at the beginning of the year to go up on walls or special bulletin boards, or “special effects” photos for big projects. It’s a shame that they don’t have access to the Macbooks more often (each elementary only has 2 MacBook carts, the MS and HS 3 carts apiece), because Photobooth would make an excellent visual journaling tool for capturing daily learning experiences, moods, and just the general well-being of learning going on in a classroom. Photobooth does stills and video, so you could switch it up from day to day, maybe even taking subsequent shots to stitch together as an animated gif, or create a series of video reflections from a bunch of students after a rather large project.
Today, I just used it to capture the kids and me being silly around the breakfast table. The “Warhol Effect” was appropriate, and rather than print it out, post it on a nice bulletin board to make the hallways or classroom walls “more presentable” like I see at school, I’m just going to post it here in a quick “this is what’s going through my head right now” manner. No doubt the kids and I will stumble across it in a few years time (I’ve dumped it into my iPhoto album as well) and have a nice memory of this morning.
Famous Monsters of Filmland Animated Magazine Cover
Friday, June 8th, 2012
It’s a big file, but big is beautiful in this case. Feast your eyes on this animated magazine cover which is a more literal interpretation of the June 1975 issue of the classic Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (more of a fanzine, really) featuring the scene from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) that is famous for the first of Ray Harryhausen’s legendary animated skeletons. You can see the original cover below, which interestingly has a few things wrong if you want to get literal. Namely, the color of Sinbad’s pants, the orientation of the fight, and the fact that the skeleton hadn’t lost its sheild just yet. This was a total blast to do, and I am working on a fullblown tutorial, but I must have spent four or five hours on it already, so I will simply leave it here to animate into eternity.
The Art of Shit Talking
Friday, June 8th, 2012There are far more definitions of shit talking than I ever dreamed of in my philosophy, but the one I am referring to is the act of “saying things to amuse people and playfully mock them.” For me the web has many faces, but one of its most appealing is that it provides a uniquely playful space to banter with people. Spaces like blog comments and twitter provide remarkable opportunities for talking shit. For example, this afternoon I had joked with Tom Woodward (who is awesome at taking such things to the next level) and in turn he created an animated GIF to let me know I was skating on thin ice with my earlier remarks. Here is that GIF:
I wasn’t sure what the hell it was, I just knew it was nutty. Turns out it is a scene from this music video of that crazy South African Zef band Die Antwoord. I had mistaken it for an Alabama house party Funny thing is, this started a bit of a back and forth on Twitter with me talking a little shit about how I could out exercise Tom, how I made ds106, etc., etc., run-of-the-mill stuff for me, getting under people’s skin is too easy on twitter, but it is also kinda fun. Sometimes there is a thin line, but within the right community a little friendly banter and back and forth can lead to great things. For example, after a fun back and forth with Tom he went on to create six more Die Antwoord GIfs that are all both disturbing and amazing. See for yourself.
I would venture if we weren’t going back and forth on Twitter they might not have gotten made. Would that be the end of the world? Maybe not, but he did make them, it was fun, we did connect, they are awesome, and as usual they are generated out of a sense of fun, play and shit talking. One thing is for sure, ds106 as a community is the better for it. Why? Well, two more of ds106′s finest artists, Giulia Forsythe and Michael Branson Smith, started to play along as a way of using the animated GIF to talk shit on me. Giulia oh so subtely suggests I might have had too much coffee with her bava attacks shark GIF:
And then pulls out another GIF to ask the question “what are you really made of?”
And then there was some allusions in the twitter banter about me being the ds106 overlord, kind of “the man with no eyes” prisoner guard in Cool Hand Luke, so Michael Branson Smith provided the visual—a little trigger happy Groom.
And what you start to realize pretty quickly is we are jamming, people are making stuff on the fly, having fun, talking smack through all kinds of media, and then the moment passes. And that’s that. It happens all the time in #ds106, these are the interstitial moments that are impossible to reproduce in your course systems—the hallway spaces that have little to do with the course and everything to do with the people in it. You shouldn’t look too hard for these events because they’re always there balled up in the potentiality that are the awesome people all around you—it just sometimes takes a little shit talking to activate them. As my good friend Todd Conaway knows all too well:
Make some art dammit, and talk some shit.
The Shape of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet
Friday, June 8th, 2012In the last couple of days I have been wrapping up a Shakespeare experience of Romeo & Juliet with my ninth grade students. In an effort to keep things light and entertaining when introducing students to Shakespeare, I use a … Continue reading
