The goal of the “Consumer Mashup” was to take a store that you shop at often and incorporate the good you usually buy with the logo of that store. I am feign for smoothies and always go to Tropical Smoothie or Robecks. Lately however I have been choosing Tropical Smoothie. Not entirely sure why…maybe because of price or maybe because I feel cool drinking a “tropical” smoothie.
Regardless I decided to make my own logo for Tropical Smoothie instead of using theirs. I replaced the “i” in tropical and smoothie with an image of a smoothie drink from this establishment. Then I used PowerPoint to get a tropical/island themed background. I made the entire logo on PowerPoint. I made each letter a different color to make it vibrant and fun.
After I was finished I took a screen shot of the logo and uploaded it to FLICKR.
First off I would like to state, yes I am one of those people that actually enjoy watching the Twilight Saga… judge all you want.
For those of you who aren’t informed about the wonders of the Twilight Saga, there are four books. The last book (like Harry Potter) is made into two different movies, therefore there are five movies. I took a clipping from each movie trailer and edited them together. I used www.keepvid.com to download the YouTube trailers. I decided I wanted to make a story of the Twilight Saga through the trailer, but still leave some mystery at the end. For those of who are diehard fans like me there is no mystery. However for those of you who are interested in Twilight and learning about its ”fantasticness” this trailer will be a great introduction into the saga!
I used iMovie to merge together all the trailers. Since the trailers are already edited with music, all I had to do was put pieces together and hoped it would make sense. I faded in and out with sound to make a better transition.
Dj’s tend to remix different songs to make a fun and entertaining soundtrack to listen to. It may seem easy to merge together multiple songs, but after working on this assignment, I found it very challenging.
The goal was to take clips from different songs and merge them together to make one single song. I used Garage Band for this assignment. The songs included (in order):
One More Time -Daft Punk
La Vie – The Deans List ( The Deans List produces their own music but incorporates usually one or two other songs into their work)
Dancing in the Dark – Dev
Love on Top – Beyonce
Garage Band offers free sound clips to use in songs, or looping songs together. I used “Club Beats” and “Jingles” as transitional sounds. I wanted to do a remix based on a music genre of pop/dance/club something fun to listen to. In my opinion it takes a certain skill to mash music together and actually make it sound nice.
I imported each song and layered them on top of each other by a second or two. Once the segment of the song I wanted was over, I clipped it (or cropped) out.
I started by reviewing the TDC archives for July 11-17, 2012. Two of these were video so I decided to start with those and fit the others in like puzzle pieces! Starting with Martha’s mysterious The Most Amazing Technology video (tdc189), I downloaded it and imported it into VideoPad. I think this is when I decided to go with an ominous, mystery compilation, building on the mood of her video. Moving along, I assessed the other tdcs and proceeded to fit them together. I turned TDC 185 – tornado by Malyn Mawby into a video by applying the film effect to make it move and shimmy like a real tornado. Importing it back into VideoPad, I positioned it at the beginning of the track and overlayed Tdc190 boilingwater by Malyn Mawby as a soundtrack over the tornado for additional effect.
For the next segment, I used No TV. Just static (tdc187) by Audrey Watters. Overlayed on this segment of track is the Morse code sound bits from the NCH Sound Effects Library, included in VideoPad, and a short piece of TDC188 Telemarketing Call by mrswanson. I trimmed this soundclip down to fit the video piece and keep the overall project to a shorter time. I added two more Morse code sound bits on the end to transition into Martha’s technology video segment.
To wind down the entire project and include a few more tdc projects, I inserted a blank slide after her video to showcase My strongest attraction #tdc191 by Martha and emphasize her statement of being the most amazing thing she’s ever experienced. After that clip, I merged two photos, by inserting Jacques Cartier, Over the St. Lawrence by aforgrave (tdc184) into the video track and overlaying it with a cropped version of Rainbows by robertss (tdc186). To wrap it all up, I inserted scrolling credits to the contributor’s projects that helped create this compilation.
In the end, I used 8 tdcs instead of the required 7. This was a fun project to do, even though, yet again the final product is not exactly as fluid as I envisioned it to be.
I hope I’ve done cogdog and ds106 proud with this new Mashup Assignment!
Recap of all the bits and pieces that made this assignment special:
In June 2012, I went to Vancouver, B.C. to speak on Digital Storytelling at the Northern Voice Social Media and Blogging Conference. I gathered quite a bit of multimedia in my basket and put it together as a little “this is my professional development” digital story.
My sister Cheryl R. Long asked me about the same time to speak at her artists retreat on “Digital Storytelling as an Art Form.” I ended up talking about something else, but she had gotten it into my head that I needed to start thinking about how to be more artistic in my digital storytelling. This is my first answer to that question.
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!
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?
Alas, our crew has dwindled to 15, do you seek more abuse? I will skip. Coming up in a next post will be the challenge wrap up, which is to make some new art out of the pieces we have collected.
Here are some I really enjoyed, just a scroll down past the blog fold…
Lisa Lane makes a clever metaphorical attraction by dance shoes (leading me to have fun imagining the dancers we cannot see) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogroo
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.....
