I always liked the idea of someone being at the very edge of things and sending back a postcard. I’m never sure if it is because they want others to join them, wish they were back home, or just excited to see how the world barrels over the edge into a pool of oblivion.
None the less, one of the design challenges this week was to create a postcard from a magical place. Specific to Camp Magic MacGuffin style, it needed to be from our Minecraft camp. So, I ventured over to Bunk House X. BH X is the fabled, mysterious and cantankerous island of veteran DS106er’s. Not unlike the Island of Misfit Toys and certainly with more curmudgeony goodness.
So, I find this dragon which is probably the coolest little piece of Minecraft art going (no dig on the others) and grab a screenshot. The hardest part was trying to find the dang screenshot from Minecraft. The instructions from class were spot on but the navigation needed to be entered into a browser window. Then BLAMMO!
So, here is 2 stars of this week’s 10-star design assignment challenge.
With activity ramping up for me at the Northern Voice conference this week, my window for MADI (Making Art Damn It) is closing, hence here I sit working an hour on a faux book cover for the I Can Read Movies assiognment:
I’d seen people do this one before, but was a first for me. I tried recalling movies I was drawn to as a kid, and the original Andromeda Strain was one I watched a few times, maybe it was the sci-fi escape the suburbs thing, maybe it was the allure of the southwest as a foreign land for a kid on the east coast, maybe it was the mad science angle.
The one thing that I did recall, and could not find too many elements was the notion that there were these five levels of the underground Wildfire facility, and things got worse as you went down (was this a precursor to War Games use of DEFCON levels?).
And the Wildfire logo (though this looks like from the more recent one but it harkens back to some of the book covers
I used as a base the spacesic image for The Labrything, filling the cover in with black, and in GIMP using the noise filters to .. make noise, and mushed things around with the smudge tool.
For the images, a=I frankly lost track of what I did! I used some layer modes, and I think the cartoon filter on the model. I wavered on just o=using one of the images, but could not decide, so I layered them and made the wildfire logo faded.
Whats it mean? We ought to be careful of things that fall from space and how the government handles them… especially if we live in Piedmont New Mexico.
I thought I would write since it has been like forever since I last communicated (literally), but who would understand me better than the dog pal who followed me across the country and then some. You might noy be aware, but I have been away for three works helping run a summer camp called Camp Magic Macguffin – the magic meaning that nothing bad happens here and the people who come just want to create, create, create art and funny animations all day long.
In a way I wish I was a camper, because then you get to play. But I also have to work .My colleague Martha and I have much to do with orienting our UMW students to things like WordPress, creating course materials and videos, running live camp fire sessions, clearing timber, planning activities, etc. And we have to make sure we review and give feedback all the time.
It’s a good thing we have the grooviest bunch of counselors to help us out, especially people like Ol Hatchet Jack, who sounds threatening, but has been super helpful, Cheryl Colan that fun do Wop Girl, Giulia Forsythe, our drawer and mentor extraordinaire, Sergeant Pepperstorm who has been building like crazy in Minecraft (along with Ben Rimes). Tripper Harrison has been running live music over the PA system, and Zazzy, who seems to be questioning me all the time, has been a champ at commenting and doing innovated creative work herself.
And then the open online aprticipants! Woah, I would break my hand trying to cite them all, but we have about 50 whoa re active- you can see all the camper blogs here http://magicmacguffin.info/subscribed/
But yeah, last week, besides running all the camp, I managed to get some work done.
We saw a string of folks give the Album Cover assignment; mine was the first disc from Sid Hammerback’s “Let the Rest Go By” do you remember all of those Orhestral Funk raves we went to? Man those guys were up and down the chromatic scales.
I spent a lot of time taking the play list story assignment I did last year and adding images to make it a slideshow, but the outcome was really worth it, check out What The Tax Man Doth Do, taking the original Taxman playlist, tossing in creative commons images, and publishing via PhotoPeach:
Also this week, since we gave the UMW students a mandate to do 5 daily creates, I aimed to make that my minimum:
plus an audio!
I really need to carve out some more time to explore in Minecraft- there is a ton of stuff happening, and it looks like this week we will have our weekly campfire there. I have more updates on the side of my job as co-director at my Magic Macguffin blog, mostly the videos I am posting when I get a chance
The one that got under my skin was the Yoda Ven diagram, which outlines the possible intersections of “Green”, “Small”, and “Poor Grammar”, and when you run intersections of these you get:
I knew I wanted to make this a new design assignment, so I did- Venn Pop Culture:
In the vein of Stephen WIldish’s “Yoda Venn” (see http://stephenwildish.co.uk/ for all of of his designs), design a Venn diagram of three circles, each representing an attribute, where each overlap defines a figure from popular culture.
I had a harder time coming up with three that worked, and gave my all the combinations. I then aimed to define the intersection of all three characteristics to get them all to describe Gandalf, and that broke down into “Old” “Long Hair”, and “Powerful”. Here is what I got:
I tossed out about 10 other starts that failed. This is not easy! Making the graphic was simple in GIMP, a gradient background, and three overlapping circle selections with fill and “multiply” for layer effect.
And what does this mean? Well everyone likes Gandalf, they want an old powerful wizard on their side. The hair? Works for me. The more fun relationships are the 2 sided cross overs.
NASA SCIENTISTS IDENTIFY SOURCE OF MARTIAN LANDSLIDES
In a press announcement today, NASA scientist Marvin M. Artian released startling photographic evidence of the cause of the mysterious recent landslide deposits spotted in the Burns Hill region of the Endurance crater. Using a pirated copy of Photoshop 4 and unreleased photos found in the deleted files director of the Opportunity rover, we know have a cause for this recent geologic event:
Slide Guy loves to slide down things! Find a photo of something to slide down and make your own Slide Guy! (You can find Slide Guy! to download and use at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22064153/SlideGuy.png)
At first I was looking for the perfect picture of a tacky dinosaur statue but then remembered my trips recently to Niagra Falls, a perfect slide for Tim:
Getting something with the right angle was key, and the horseshoe rim of the falls fit well. I imported both into GIMP using Import as Layers, and just had to resize Tim and scott him around to make it fit. The falls are big, but Timmmmmy is bigger.
Martha and I are adding a new element to the ds106 syllabus area on design, we want students to get practice understanding creative commons by seeking licensed media and then doing a design assignment using it- make a creative commons poster
Use creative commons licensed images to design a poster about how groovy Creative Commons is! Use a tool like Compfight to find creative commons licensed images in flickr (be sure to select the right option on the search pane), and then use photo editing software to add your message, call to arms, rallying cry, urgent plea. INclude as well a creative commons logo– look to the creative commons itself for ones to use.
Most importantly, in your poster be sure to give attribution credit to the source image.
Lest you think we want blind allegiance, if you do not like creative commons or want to have fun with it, do the opposite; create a poster that makes a case that creative commons is a commie pink plot of subversion. This is the thing about ds106- you never should take the assignments literally- mess with ‘em.
To get this going, I quickly put together some posters in GIMP (I miss Photoshop, I miss Photoshop, I miss Photoshop, I miss Photoshop, I miss Photoshop, I miss Photoshop…) doing some simple layering, using fills with background to make text more readable, some transparency fudging. I had trouble getting my attribution to paste into the text editor box, so I resorted to putting it in a text file, and opening it from the file.
I promise, I was not slacking this week. It was just that…well, no excuses, I was slacking at DS106/Magic MacGuffin this week, entirely. The week, though, was very productive in non-DS106 ways.
This week I managed to get two of the assigned five Daily Creates finished. I am holding out hope but with a Brinner Party to get ready for Saturday night, I can make no promises other than I’ll have DS106 Radio to keep me company.
Daily Create #1 – Make a monochrome photo.
I took this picture of my daughter’s bathroom sculpture and I’ve been trying to find ways to use her inspiration to jumpstart my week of storytelling.
The toothbrush in front is the “introducer” who announces you as you enter the comb/toothpaste/toothbrush tower.
Daily Create #2 – Tell a story about your most random job.
This was a ripper of a job and this is only part of the story. Oh the things I could tell you. Like the time when one of my crew tried out the invisible fence and almost passed out or the time when I slipped on an muddy incline during a rain storm and fell only to find out from my boss that was my fault. None the less, here’s the story.
So, those are my two of five creates. I’ll try to slip in one or two more this weekend. The brinner party might provide some storytelling materials.
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
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.....
