Observing how someone listen’s, looks, moves and interact with their surroundings demonstrates a person’s true nature. Sometimes it’s not what is being said, but what is being meant. Non-verbal cues are important to understand. For this audio assignment I created a story without containing any words. I am the ultimate morning person. I love getting up early and starting my day while the world is still asleep. I decided to create a story of my morning routine. Waking up, getting out of bed, walking to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, coffee while reading the newspaper, checking my email and watching the news. I found all the sounds on freesound.org
Turned out I did yesterday’s Daily Create. Bother. I cheated with Dorothy’s house, and drew the tornado. (I cannot draw. That is why I do mashups in the first place!)
I’ve been growling and calling people out, daring them to do 7 Daily Creates in a row, and then weave together in a blog post, make something out of it, and leave a comment on my original post.
Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies. Check out an example here:
I got lax on the five seconds, but these guys are tough and they will be in your face if you get soft about this challenge:
Pay close attention to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman:
“You will not laugh, you will not cry. You will learn by the numbers, I will teach you [to be creative]” – just by doing 7 days in a row of The Daily Create
And you should know (thanks to a 6th bad ass Major), for some of you I am two seconds from being on you like white on rice in a glass of milk on a paper plate in a snowstorm…
Now I wil try and get a little (a tiny bit) serious. I see a lot in our students and open participants, sometimes to take the assignments and Daily Creates way to literal. Like today, draw a tornado. Sure you could take 115 seconds, and make a swirl on a piece of paper, and be done. Fine.
But where is the challenge to yourself in doing that? How is just doing the minimum going to make you more creative? It won’t. It is a jelly doughnut in the foot locker. It is less then #4life.
Here is what I wrote some of my Arizona colleagues when I nagged them on the CyberSalonAZ google group list:
Here’s the scoop -open your minds and do not be trapped in being so literal. Is it really a challenge to yourself to quickly make a swirl on a piece of paper?
Ok, that is the basic requirement. But it shows no imagination. No extending of the creative muscles. It is all too often what we see in students- set the bar for expectations, and they aim right for that.
The whole point of the Daily Create is to extend yourself, not just to do what it says. Frankly, I will yawn if I see a bunch of swirls.
The magic here is how you *interpret* the assignment. It does not have to look like a tornado, but represent it, or what it calls to mind. Maybe it’s the witches legs underneath a house. Maybe its a lonely view out a windshield of a storm chaser. Maybe its a drawing of a shower drain (think how the water goes down). Look up the etymology of the word and go from there. Draw something that represents the places(s) where tornados happen.
A few years ago when the Daily Shoot was active, I spent a week doing the *opposite* of every challenge. THERE ARE NO RULES, why are we so bound by rules? Make something up, and explain it or tease it out in a caption. See what Michael Branson Smith did in his by making a cat tornado in a baseball stadium. That is taking the assignment to a new (and weird) place.
Or there was someone who said yesterday’s assignment (a photo of a cloud that looks like an object) she could not do because it was overcast and rainy. LAME. Make your own clouds in the shower! Draw them on paper! Make shapes out of cotton balls.
No excuses are valid in my book, none.
You do not get to be better at stuff by doing the minimum. That keeps you at the same level.
The world needs more bending of the rules, more making end arounds, more creativity.
If you really want to see someone who gets this, listen to this talk by Helen Keegan:
You will not laugh, you will not cry. You will learn by the numbers, I will teach you.
First off… one week of TDC’s, challenge accepted CogDog.
Got a little carried away with my tornado drawing. Started by wanting to add a real background, which I took with my iPad out the window of the car dealership waiting room I was in at the time. Then I decided to add some objects… cars made sense, then a bus. Elephant? Might as well add slide guy.
Then I figured I might as well make them all move. So I threw everything in scratch as separate sprites, gave them glide paths, rotations and zooms. Its a bit sloppy at the beginning and end because I planned on recording it and transferring it to an animated gif. Recorded it with Quicktime screen capture, loaded the .mov into imageJ (yes, old school…) and converted to animated gif.
Problems: loaded into flickr, which apparently doesn’t display animated gifs. So the gif and scratch files are embedded below.
I certainly can’t have that, so I got to thinking about yesterday’s Daily Create, which was “Take a picture of a cloud and tell us what it looks like to you.”
I checked the Daily Create yesterday and then looked at the sky. It looked something like this for most of the day:
Rainy Day photo courtesy of Alexander Barreto (or Hialean on Flickr)
After a week of 100+ degree days and no rain for forever, yesterday’s showers were a welcome sight. I promptly forgot about TDC #184 and went about my day.
I forgot about it, that is, until I was reading my son stories before bed time. One of last night’s stories was A Fly Went By by Mike McClintock. Kids’ books are weird, and this one is no exception. There’s a lot of talk about guns and animals killing each other. But look what’s on the last page:
A Fly Went By by Mike McClintock
CLOUDS!
I was going to snap a picture of this page last night and upload it to Flickr (the cloud in the top left corner reminds me of a shark), but I (a) forgot (b) was lazy (c) was forgetful (d) all of the above.
So let’s talk about re-interpreting.
Shortly after I read that I had invented the lamest excuse ever (truth), my son pulled a bag of poly-fil (the filling for stuffed animals, quilts, and whatnot) off the shelf.
He takes this stuff out of the bag, puts it on his head and my head, and calls it “bubbles” since it looks like bubbles in the bathtub. Do you know what else it looks like?
CLOUDS!
“Here’s your re-interpretation,” I thought as I taped the poly-fill to one of the windows. I had a vision that this taped-up poly-fil would look like clouds in the sky. Do you know what poly-fil looks like taped to a window? Santa Claus’s pubes.
I was close to just snapping the picture and being done with it, but I wanted to make it work. I wanted something that would kind-of-sort-of match up to the image I had in my head.
Maybe taping the poly-fil to blue construction paper with a yellow sun would make things look less pube-ish.
Less obscene, yes. But still lame.
I give up. Jobot and I play with his cars. Jobot drives his cars into the bubbles/clouds/fog.
YES, JOBOT! That’s it! Hand me those planes!
And here’s what we do:
That was fun.
So I got that TDC #184 (even if it was a day late), but do you know what I loved most about the whole thing? The fact that my kid was involved and the process of failing, failing, failing, and then finally getting it. True, these were small fails on what some would consider an insignificant task, but it felt good nonetheless.
One video assignment I am very excited about doing is Make a Scene from a Horror Film. I already have been taking notes, brainstorming, and messing with the camera for it.
- I plan to create a scene not from an existing film, but a made up one
- Title Ideas: Attack of the Nerd Zombies, The PC Haunting (yes I know, I know… lol)
- I will need some dramatic background music.. I’ve looked up some sound clips on freesounds.org and can even take sounds from youtube clip if neccesary
I just blogged about the animated GIF I made while showing the Breakfast Club edition of ds106 how to make animated GIFs. What struck me after writing that post was that it’s the first since teaching this class that I actually taught any group of people how to make an animated GIF. There are a few reasons for that: 1) we have a few tutorials for this kind of thing, 2) I’ve never before taught ds106 in a classroom full of computers with Photoshop, and 3) I’m usually much lazier.
All that said, I had my chance today and I didn’t want to squander it. So I spent some time this morning consulting video guru Andy Rush so I could be sure I had a workflow that would make creating animated GIFs seamless even on lab computers that can be locked down and hostile to new programs. I think we came up with a pretty good formula, and I’ll sketch that out below for good measure.
We didn’t want the overhead of DVD ripping or any of that, so we decided to make them get the clips they want to work on from YouTube using pwnyoutube.com, in particular the File2HD option, and be sure to select the mp4 version of the YouTube clip (click the get files button, the big, honking Download buttons above and below are bad ads).
Once they had the clips with the scene they want to use I had them open MPEG Streamclip (which I installed on the lab computers beforehand, and it didn’t seem to need any special admin permissions in this lab). MPEG Streamclip allows them to select the precise in and out points of the short scene they want to animate and trim away the rest. Once they have done this they need to export it as an mp4 file (this is where these directions for PhotoShop diverge for GIMP which would require them to export the video as individual image files).
Finally, they import the video to Photoshop (we are using CS 5.5 on the PC) and it is Import–>Video to layers. After that they simply go to Window–>Animation and animate the GIF and save for the web.
It was amazing, I showed them how to do this process in about 15 minutes, and they spent the next hour and 15 minutes making GIFs, and I have to say I was very impressed. Their files were a bit bloated, and we talked about that, but over all there work so far has been amazing. I am blown away. Here are a few samples!
I love that this student figured out adding text to animated GIFs. #4life!
This one is a bit long and bloated for its own good, but I love it.
Game on college students, you need to bring your A-game to catch up with these Breakfast Club all-star ds106ers who are 4life in only 2 weeks!
If some of you guys haven’t already noticed, I LOVE The Lion King. I think it is an amazing movie! Animation, soundtrack, storyline, the morals and lessons being portrayed and taught, and its appeal to all ages. I think it is truly a work of art.
The first scene I picked was the one where Scar is first introduced, and he has a chit chat with his older brother Mufasa.
The scene opens up immediately showing Mufasa on higher ground, head up, and in light. While scar is hunched over, and in the dark shadows of his cave dwelling.
As the scene continues and Mufasa’s dominance and goodness is shown over Scar, The scene concludes with him getting a bit angry at Scar and asking if he was challenging him. Mufasa races in front of scar growling “is that a challenge?!”… Mufasa is on the right, in light, and the POV is at his eye level showing how much more powerful and dominant he is to Scar. Even Scar verbalizes this, all while cowering back and below Mufasa’s eye-level. Even throughout the scene Zazu takes refuge beneath, between, and behind Mufasa’s paws. This shows his position as a protector and unshakable figure in the movie in a sense.
The second clip I picked is that of Mufasa being murdered while struggling to get out of the stampede in the gorge. Mufasa is on the left in this scene, and below scar – helpless. Scar is dominant over him in this situation, and in a portion of the clip just as Scar claws over Mufasa’s paws they are diagonal from each other. This tilt (w/ Mufasa on the lower end) shows opposing forces and a shifting of direction. And finally as Scar lets go of Mufasa, music climaxes, and it screen blackens out. Indicating the defeat/death/demise/defeat of Mufasa. Everything just fades into nothing. This scene in its culmination I feel is more moving and powerful than most live-action scenes.
SN: I used Windows Movie Maker to edit and clip these scenes to keep em short and sweet.
I did the above GIF on the fly while showing the Breakfast Club edition of ds106 how to make animated GIFs using MPEG Streamclip and Photoshop. Today was a thoroughly enjoyable class—and the students seemed to have a blast and did some fun stuff themselves. Many of them are already done with there 10 visual stars, a couple did closer to 20! What’s more, we are on our way to the design assignments, and after spending the last hour of today’s class talking about the design assignments, I know it’s gonna be a ball. I love ds106 design!
I never chose Dare in Truth or Dare, so I can’t promise I’m rising to Alan Levine’s dare, but here’s a cloud. Literalism doesn’t suit me today, so instead I present my cloud as an image of the ephemeral. It has no real solidity (I even had to mess with contrast and sharpness for it to show well on screen). You cannot build your castles or dreams upon it, and soon it won’t exist at all. All things pass away. A philosophical cloud, it is unreliable and defiantly transient.
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.....
