In honor of Jim Groom, who can’t quite seem to keep the H.M.S. DS106 in ship-shape (it’s hard, all of us passengers are always banging on the hull and tossing vital equipment overboard). As the counselor of Bunk House 5 at Camp Magic Macguffin this summer, I thought it be best if I lead by example. For starters, I’ve invented a new camp game, called “ds106 technical difficulty art” and for this week only it’s worth 36 stars! That’s right, 36 stars, which means I’ve topped Mr. Groom’s star count for this week of Visual Assignments. I will gladly add this to the official ds106 assignment repository once it’s back up and running.
UPDATE
I’ve now added this as an official assignment in the ds106 assignment repository, which means I fully expect a whole heap of ds106 technical difficulty warnings/labels/macguffins by the end of the current incarnation of the course. I really wanted to place this assignment in a “free form” sort of category, as you could easily complete it with a wide range of media (especially given ds106radio doesn’t handle images too well last time I checked). In the end I felt a visual assignment would be best because you can create a still, or the illusion of a video with an animated gif (which is what I did above).
Visual Assignment 44—Album Cover (2 stars). This was a fun and fairly simple project that I could do on my lunch hour at work. It also gave me a good opportunity to try a few free web-based photo editors. For this project, I used FotoFlexer (www.fotoflexer.com)
In keeping with the instructions of the assignment, here’s how I ended up with a voyeuristic bird on the album cover of a curiously named band:
Followed the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article that that this link generates now becomes the name of my band. Thus, my band became “Checking Out”.
Checking Out’s debut album is now called “The First to Admit It”.
The cover art is based off a randomly generated Flickr photo. The 3rd image that shows up here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days is the foundation for “The First to Admit It” album cover.
I used FotoFlexer to assemble the random elements to create the complete album cover. Specifically, I applied a filter and adjusted it to soften the image and blur the edges to frame the birds. Then I added and manipulated the text until I found a compilation that I like and viola! Checking Out’s very first album art is ready for release…complete with a dirty bird watching the birdie couple like a green-eyed stalker!
Ok, Jim asked me to up the game, so I am going to get more particular about frame selection for my animated GIFs. We are working on the ds106 kickstarter awards for people who requested an animated GIF in their honor. I’ve got the task to do the one for Boone Gorges, who requested something “bad ass”.
My first neuron went to maybe something from Mad Max, which I might still do, or maybe Tyler Durden who was the baddest because he wasn’t…. never mind. I went to Samuel J as Jules Winfield, those mutton chop sideburns quoting Ezekiel…
I’m really happy with this one! Jules just keeps ranting, but the little hand/head motion of the scared kid in the foreground make it complete (IMHO). Plus, by doing these by hand, working with your fingers in the mud and not just using some fricking iPhone app, it comes in at 526k, almost svelte, lean, mean…
Jules: [Jules shoots the man on the couch] I’m sorry, did I break your concentration? I didn’t mean to do that. Please, continue, you were saying something about best intentions. What’s the matter? Oh, you were finished! Well, allow me to retort. What does Marsellus Wallace look like?
Brett: What?
Jules: What country are you from?
Brett: What? What? Wh – ?
Jules: “What” ain’t no country I’ve ever heard of. They speak English in What?
Brett: What?
Jules: English, motherfucker, do you speak it?
Brett: Yes! Yes!
Jules: Then you know what I’m sayin’!
Brett: Yes!
Jules: Describe what Marsellus Wallace looks like!
Brett: What?
Jules: Say ‘what’ again. Say ‘what’ again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more Goddamn time!
This was the scene I plucked from
And I tried to zero in on a part where the camer had no movement, of which there were a lot fo short cuts, but of course, waving the gun and mouthing off fit. I grabbed the clip as mp4 (I use PwnYouTube learned it from Tim Owens), and opened it in MPEG Streal Clip. I use the selectors for the in and out point of the small scene I want, clip it, and then slowly move the slider to different scenes and saved them as frames.
In GIMP I use the Open as Layers option, and under the Filters-Animation menu is Playback so you can see how it flips. This one worked well as I saw nothing I needed to nudge. I did convert the image to Indexed (Image-Mode-Indexed) before the saving as a GIF and enabled the dithering option).
The one thing you have to play with as an animation is the time between frames- I first did 190 milliseconds but it was too slow, so I dropped it to 120.
This one worked well as full frames; the next one I want to see if I can isolate things like eye movement. I am not sure how this goes down in GIMP- I imagine I will have to make a regular background layer, and then select just the parts I want to move and merge to copies of this layer.
I took a stab at Remix an Album Cover this morning. I’m trying to see how many of the assignments for Camp I can do on my iPad — partly because I’m curious as to how good it really is as a device for creating (not just consuming) and partly because it gives me a chance to learn some of the apps I have a bit better.
I started by looking for a Flickr image, and instead of just picking the third one from random Interesting images, I took the third one in the most recently uploaded “Attibution Only” Creative Commons images. Unfortunately, I forgot to keep track of the image’s name/creator, and the image I found has long since been buried behind the 100 most recently uploaded in this category. : (
But this is what I found (I’ll keep trying to figure out the attribution):
Then I did the random Wikipedia article and got this.
Raffaëla Paton is a Dutch/Surinamese singer who won the Dutch version of American Idol.
Then I did my quote search, and got “No One Will Believe It” as the last 4-5 words. Unfortunately, I forgot to write down the whole quote or who said it.
Oh well. The assignment is supposed to be about randomness and serendipity, right.
I used SketchBook Pro on my iPad to do the album cover. The fonts in that program are really limited, and I wanted to play around with typeface. So I used one built in font and then embellished it and wrote everything else freehand.
It took me a while to decide on the placement of the album title. I tried writing it down the arm of the left statue, but the variation in color in the background image just made it hard to read no matter what color I chose. I think the window frame works well, although I might play around with a bit to see if I can make it look more like it’s written on the frame. I did erase the last bit of the last “E” so that it looks like it’s running behind the right statue.
I also used a brush to add a bit of a border to the image — It seemed to stark with just the black border.
The newspaper poetry blackout assignment is a project I’ve wanted to do for awhile. I’m a big fan of the fridge magnets that give you a limited set of words to work and create with and I see this kind of assignment along the same lines.
I grabbed my free copy of the Free Lance-Star Weekly and started looking through the articles. I found a couple of good candidates that contained words that caught my eye. I started on one and decided I didn’t like it as I moved along. I was mostly eyeballing my way down the columns and not really circling things so I easily got lost when I went back to find the poem again. Perhaps I should circle stuff in pencil first?
The article I chose was about a local former detective building a film career so there was an abundance of really good words to use in the poem. As I went down I spotted “pursuing”, “rumored”, “alive”, “challenge” but, I ended up not using them because I wanted to keep it simple. I decided to start at “life.” and treat it as the title of my poem and also a framework for what I wanted to talk about. I found that maintaining a good sounding poem and an aesthetically pleasing image is a double challenge that can be frustrating at times.
What I ended up with was this poem: life. a little odd familiar space where bodies get to keep up this act.
I was quite pleased with the final poem (although a bit cynical) and the way the visual of the poem turned out.
I can see myself becoming addicted to this kind of art. I definitely see myself doing more of these in the future for fun.
A long time ago (almost 3 years ago) I had this life where I watched movies and read books and listened to music. Then I had a baby (now a toddler), and I don’t do any of those things anymore, because my time is spent trying to raise this child to be a decent human being.
Back when I watched movies and read books and listened to music, the husband and I would visit our friend Matt Mills (who can be seen playing drums in the video below).
Matt Mills worked/works at Video Fan on Strawberry Street in this lovely city called Richmond. Here’s a picture of Video Fan that I didn’t take:
Matt Mills was a horror/exploitation/cult movie aficionado. We spent a lot of time watching questionable movies like White Dogand Tenementand gems like Spider Baby. He talked a lot of Argento and Bava. Matt was sweet enough to lend Will and I his Bava boxed set after my son was born. Unfortunately, I was too sleep-deprived to remember any of what I saw.
I do, however, remember the shadows in those Bava films. After reading the prompt for “Creep on a movie scene,” I thought about those Bava movies and I thought about this great picture I have of myself mopping up someone’s spilled drink at a party. The picture is a shadowy, dark, and creepy:
The original photo is in color, so I just did a quick edit in iPhoto and changed it to black and white. I then open the photo in Photoshop. I found the still from Black Sunday through a Google Image search. I downloaded that photo to my desk top and opened it in Photoshop too.
There was a lot of fumbling around in Photoshop, which I’ve never used before. I created two layers–one with the mopping photo, the other with the Bava still. The background from the mopping picture was deleted. I experimented with the brightness and contrast. Then I dragged the altered image into the Bava still. I looked like a giant compared to the characters in the Bava movie, so I sized myself down a little.
I’d like to repeat it all just to make sure I have the hang of it.
Evil truly does lurk in the shadows. Here’s the proof:
I’m so missing having a copy of Photoshop to work on; my limits now for doing animated GIFs are assembling images– Saving frames from MPEG Stream clip or a series of images form my DSLR, loading as layers into GIMP, and trying to make them flip as needed, I really miss how PhotoShop can try and line things up. These are alll kind of junk, too much jerking and not aligned cleanly. Lazy.
First of all, it’s the nervous cop a young punk Robert Blake plays in Electra Glide in Blue:
Next, I noticed one night out my window that the horizontal lights on the Vancouver City Hall were flashing on and off to make it look like a ripple moving up and down (?) – it happened right at 10pm so maybe it is like a chime. I grabbed a few seconds of video and made this one in Cinemagram.
This one weighs in at a hefty 2.5 Mb, something you just have to face if you are going to GIF on the iThing.
Also, it seems that Johnny Cash is not a big fan of the flipped classroom:
And an old one that has a date of October 2011, but I do not recall blogging it, but here goes the ds106 rock band lead by Buddy Holly
UPDATE (June 7, 2011): My apologies for taking claim (and calling poor quality) tyhe Buddy GiF animation; as noted below and me filling the bitch slap in twitter, that was created by Otto Paertz. My own confusion was why I had a PSD version of the GIF, and I can only guess I had opened it in Photoshop in an effort to see about modifying it.
And finally, the never ending motion of tourists on Granville Island
For my first Visual Assignment I chose the “Make An Album Cover“. I’ve done this before on some other blog of mine but, I enjoy the random elements to this assingment.
Gathering the pieces
The first step is picking the band name via the random page function in wikipedia. I landed on a page about the Carex nudata, which is apparently a species of true sedge.
Lastly, the hardest part, finding an image on the Explore Page of Flickr that had a creative commons license on it. By the third roll I lucked out with this one:
Credit to Michael Lamberty for the original photo
Also does anyone know what good practice in when remixing someones photo when they put their name at the bottom of the photo? Is it ok to delete that? Or should I maintain that as a way to connect back to the original source? Deleting is probably ok as long as I give credit somewhere, right?
The Creation
So the first thing I notice is the nice open space at the top of the image. A good spot to put some sort of text, right? I chose to place the band name there and stick with the kind of italics I associate with scientific naming of things.
I also noticed the brightness of the flowers might be a good place to drop some text. So after typing it in and playing with a bit of transformation in Gimp I got it to look mostly the way I wanted it to. I liked the combination of the word “closed” and the strike-through at first. I’m still not sure if I love it but, I think it works.
Once the text was placed I wondered what would happen if not only the far background was blurred but all the image surrounding the flower. As I began playing I noticed it made the flower pop and seem almost surreal. It lost a bit of its flower look when it became disconnected from the rest of the image but, I think I like the fact that it became this lone, weirdly shaped object. If I was a bit more daring I think I would have blurred the background even further to really isolate the flower.
Overall, I like the way this one came out. I imagine this band would be some kind of folksy, alt-rock kind of band. You know, a hipster kind of group that would think a scientific name was clever for a band.
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.....
