magicmacguffin — Camp Magic MacGuffin

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Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Original photo on Flickr by Paul Bica

If you have been following this blog lately, you know that there has been a lot of activity here ever since I joined Camp Magic McGuffin. I am a little tired, which is why I have decided to send a postcard home instead of my usual letter. I believe it is the right thing to do after a week devoted to studying design.

I would also like to share with you three of my Daily Creates.

In this Daily Create task we were asked to draw an object with our eyes closed:

I am terrible at drawing and my flower wouldn’t have looked much better if my eyes had been open, but this way at least I have an excuse.

This is a recording of street noise:

But my favourite Daily Create this week was mood inversion – reading something banal and making it sound profound. Here is my modest contribution:

See you in Week 5.

Technorati Tags: DS106, weeklyletter

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Posted in bunk4, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, weeklyletter | Comments Off on DS106 Week 4 – Wrapping Up Loose Ends

An Animated GIF-est Confession

Monday, June 18th, 2012

True confession: One of the greatest appeals of animated GIFs for me is part of a science fiction fantasy. My notebooks contain many attempts at writing a story about digital anthropology graduate students of the future whose task it is to decipher the bits and bytes of information left behind by earlier generations. I like to imagine that there is specialty field within this future discipline that looks specifically at animated GIFs for clues about a particular civilization’s whose cultural record is otherwise inscrutable.

Would these little silent moving miniatures assume the status of the cave paintings in Lascaux, Egyptian heiroglyphics, or Andean Quipus as an entry point into interrogating the earlier times for these scholars? Well certainly for the sake of the radio play I hope to write this would have to happen. And then a fun story arc to imagine is how our grad student would deal with the discovery of a dusty old hard drive full of ds106 animated GIFS? What would she make of a Slide Guy whooshing down a water slide?

I suppose my purpose in beginning this post with this true confession is to provide a bit of explanation as to what animates my interest in these little curios.

Shifting gears: When I woke up this morning I had a sudden recollection of another moment in Paths of Glory that struck me as being good for an animated GIF. This time it’s Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax as he emerges from 701st regiments bunker to lead the charge to retake the anthill from the Germans. The battlefield sequence that follows, shot with handheld camera in a documentary style, is electrifying.

It seems that what I look for in a possible clip for an animated GIF is an isolated brief motion that stands out in some way. The idea of standing out is fuzzy and too subjective. I think what has happened is that I’ve gradually developed an eye for such moments when watching moving pictures. I wonder if others have had the experience of a film scene saying “GIF me” while viewing.

Another Angle: The sequence of Colonel Dax waving his pistol in the direction of the charge lasted less than two seconds. I set the capture rate at 4 frames per second (as opposed to 8 fps for yesterday’s Tavern scene). As there were only five frames captured and too much background movement, there was no cause to use layer masking to reduce the file size. Besides the exploding shell and flying debris are essential to the scene.

The size of this five frame file is 586 kb. The final step of creating an animated GIF in GIMP is to provide the delay rate. This refers to how long each frame is delayed before going to the next one. The default setting is 100 milliseconds (ms). This usually results in a playback rate that is too fast for my liking. I used 140 ms for this one and for the tavern scene. The delay rate is an important variable in determining how realistic the motion in the animated GIF is. I believe it is in some ways affected by the original capture rate from mpeg stream clip.

Though I’ve yet to confirm it, I believe that a clip captured at 4 fps will play back at a different rate than one captured at 8 fps even when an identical delay rate. This is a hypothesis I will need to confirm. If nothing else, I hope the experiment provides interesting data for future digital anthropologists and other scholars.

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Falling short

Monday, June 18th, 2012

After last week’s excitement, I have fallen a little short of my own expectations this week. I’ve not been near minecraft, didn’t even get started on the Design Safari. I manage one Design Assignment, the creative commons one and then tried the Lyric Typography Poster.. I saw a couple of great results (and this looks like something professional) for this and though it didn’t look too hard. I cranked through iTunes until I remembered one of my favourite song Judge Not, there are a few different reggae songs with this title but the one I like is by Dennis Brown:

The phrase I like is Judge Not, for we all fall short of the glory of Jah. I’ve taken Jah out of the quote as I am not religious. I like the idea of trying and falling short more than Judge not lest you be judged (Matt. 7:1).

I started thinking about this, googling King James font, I saw a reference to calson, so decided to go with Big Calson which seems to be on my mac. I was hoping to get a sort of old looking text and spent a couple of hours failing to get anything like my imagination. I did consider the old english type of font. I was also thinking for some reason about flags and decided on a flag background; red gold and green seemed obvious. Many tutorials and tests later I ended up with this:

This falls very short of the target: Choose one of your favorite lines from a song and illustrate it using only typography. Consider how the font, color, sizes and placement of the typography can reflect or emphasize the meaning of the words.

Nevertheless I have now spent a deal of time playing with photoshop and trying out various tutorials, hopefully this will help.
Here are a few of the tutorials I read through:

So I had another go:

Again using a tutorial: how to make gradient text in photoshop – Photoshop Tutorials – CreateBlog

I do not think I have much natural design sense. I have enjoyed and learned from other ds10ers design assignments this week.

My week 4 flickr daily creates:

And a soundcloud one:

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I Believe So Strongly in #ds106

Monday, June 18th, 2012

For a few years, I’ve watched the explosion of amazing film-clip GIFs take over the web. Even as the #ds106 crew churned out fantastic artifacts in class after class, I consistently viewed that as a consumer. Clearly it involves a lot of aestetic judgment and technical skill. It belongs in the “complicated with Photoshop” bucket, aka the “Not for me!” pile.

WRONG! Make art!

So while I know that my craftsmanship is weak, at least I can step it up on a curatorial level. These are all from one of my favorite films, Soderbergh’s cinematic throat clearing excercise Schizopolis!

“I believe so strongly in mayonaise.”

That last GIF is cut from an amazing sequence where Soderbergy runs through a dozen hideous faces in a bathroom mirror, and then snaps back into normalcy in a split second when someone else walks into the restroom.

The other cult gem of my DVD/VHS collection is John Greyson’s Zero Patience. Sadly, most of my immediate thoughts for GIFs involve incidental or pupet nudity. I’m living with a holistic public identity, but I recognize the benefits of keeping the bathouse barbershop trio out of my google results.

Oh, and while I’m at it, have a little Fred Rogers.

Posted in bunk1, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, GIF, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments2 | Comments Off on I Believe So Strongly in #ds106

Things Get Stranger During Week Four!!

Monday, June 18th, 2012

Dear Beloved Family,

Well, week four has drawn to a strange close here at Camp.

The camp theme for this week was “design” and we asked all of our campers to go on Design Safaris, as they searched the world around them for examples of different elements of design. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete my design safari due to another incident that I was embroiled in.

About a week ago, I borrowed a camp camera to document some events here. To my surprise, the person who had last used it had been a bad digital citizen and had NOT cleared his old photos off of the device. I couldn’t help but look at what was there, and I found a set of strange, inscrutable shots of a grown man gleefully going down a small child’s slide. Who was this man? Why was he so joyful about sliding? Was there some hidden agenda at play? WERE THESE PICTURES LEFT HERE FOR A REASON FOR ME TO FIND THEM?!?!

In order to better understand the situation, I tried to reconstruct the original incident:

I wish I could say the exercice helped, but it really just left me with more questions about this mysterious character. I nicknamed him Slide Guy! and decided I needed to do more to understand him.

I created a new assignment in the DS106 assignment repository (did you know anyone could do that!!??), and asked others to help me spot this man and solve the mystery of his affection for sliding. So far, over 23 other Slide Guy! incidents have been identified. And, let me tell you, Slide Guy! has gotten around. Jim Groom spotted him going over a huge waterfall! Andy Rush discovered that he once starred in a movie! Mike Berta saw him in a bunch of places, including a jar of fermenting yogurt!

But then things got REALLY weird, when Slide Guy! was spotted IN CAMP. I don’t know how to feel about this. I mean, we try to be very open and welcoming at CMM, but we do have rules, you know?! No one fitting Slide Guy!’s description has officially registered here at Camp. Is he crashing? Does he have some underhanded intentions? Will he end up threatening us all with power tools and locking us in hidey holes underground?!?!

ANY WHO, in other news, we had our first campfire meeting around the actual camp fire this week. I took some shots of the event so that you could see just how magical this place is (and how strange some of our campers look). We were joined at this delightful event by the one-and-only Cheryl Colan (aka Doo Wop Girl), who is a designer herself. She gave lots of good advice and we had a fun and free-ranging conversation about design, in general.

Over the course of the week, I really tried to keep up with my own design assignments, and I’m quite pleased with my work. I think the one I’m most proud of is my reimagining of the cover of The Girl Who Played with Fire:

I think it turned out well, and it captures a certain VIBE that we have going at Camp this week.

But, really, the biggest turn-of-events was what happened on Saturday! I was all set to sit down and spend the weekend continuing to build duPont Hall at the camp site. (It’s coming along very nicely, as you can see below):

But then I received an unexpected memo from the head of CVI (Camp Magic MacGuffin’s holding company), telling me they had three new campers that were going to be arriving that evening, whom I needed to devote special time and attention to.

I was okay with that, of course! After all, welcoming people to Camp is my job! And I love nothing more than orienting newcomers to the magic and light that is MacGuffin. But the three campers that arrived at my doorstep, were NOT what I expected. The oldest is only eight years old! The youngest is three!

I think this is a bit young for MacGuffin campers, don’t you? Does this symbolize some new business venture of CVI? Why are they recruiting such young members?

As you can imagine, my hands were full entertaining, feeding, bathing, and tending to these three new arrivals. Right now, I just put a film on to keep them occupied so that I could get this letter written! I’m not even sure how I’m going to record the weekly video with Alan later today (he, by the way, has gone MISSING AGAIN!!! On Twitter he just tells me his sharing his “voice” up “north.” Whatever THAT means.)

Anyway, here’s a picture of our newcomers entranced by Peter Pan. I’m taking them off campgrounds later this afternoon for chicken nuggets and french fries (not sure how CVI will feel about that, but I’m all out of PB&J in the cabin). But after that, I’m going to make them start creating animated gifs. Nobody gets a pass at Camp Magic MacGuffin. NOBODY.

Til next week,

Your Beloved Martha

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Campfire, a set on Flickr.Photos from Week Four Campfire

Monday, June 18th, 2012

Campfire, a set on Flickr.

Photos from Week Four Campfire

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Postcard from Camp Magic MacGuffin

Monday, June 18th, 2012

Wow. The design assignment opportunity this week at Camp Magic MacGuffin has offered a gazillion ideas — I have a major list I could chip away at — and making the time to get to get to them has been a fun challenge. The Postcards from Magical Places Design Assigment 363 was a blast!

I’ve had this shot of the camp centre for a while now, and liked the idea of riffing on the ds106 “Make Some Art!” battle-cry by substituting the word “Craft” — both as a nod to the creativity evoked by Minecraft, and also the care that the word “craft” seems to embody. So as an invitation to non-campers who might receive the postcard from CMM, that seemed to be a good caption for the card.

“Postcard from Camp Magic MacGuffin (Front)” by aforgrave, on Flickr

Having spent all that time returning transparency (pixel by pixel) to the two block images so that I could use them to “build a tree” for the Monkey Social invitation, I repurposed them to create the two main words in the postcard title. The 3D nature of the lettering suits the Minecraft theme. While I’m not as happy with the text for “some” as I might be, in some ways it is reminiscent of some post card text I’ve seen that really doesn’t mesh with the image beneath. So on that note, it’s staying. All the bits on the front were assembled in Fireworks in a .PNG, and then flattened to .JPG to post to the web.

“Postcard from Camp Magic Maguffin (Back)” by aforgrave, on Flickr

I had a lot of fun working on the back of the card, which had me editing the CMM logo in Photoshop to remove the colours to produce the postmark outline, creating the border of the stamp, and editing the scanned handwriting (again, more removing pixels to get a nice transparency over the existing postcard back). It seems like every time I need to make something transparent, I need to google how to do it. There must be better ways.

The stamp was especially fun to do. I’m going to do a series of stamps — I have a good number of screen captures of CMM in Minecraft, and a stamp series seems like a nice way to collect them. Given the designation bestowed to the “camp pet” in the week four assignment video, I figured it was best to start the series with that image. Gotta keep him happy.

“CMM Stamp#1 ‘Nobody Bava Head’ “by aforgrave, on Flickr

Were there more space on the postcard, it would be nice for a weekly letter home. As it was, so much has happened this past week, there really isn’t room to even begin.

Posted in BavaHead, bunk1, Camp Magic MacGuffin, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments363, ds106, imaginages, magicmacguffin, openonline, postcard, Postmark, stamp | Comments Off on Postcard from Camp Magic MacGuffin

Fallout in Fredericksburg

Monday, June 18th, 2012

Metaphors and Symbols in design are a simplistic way to communicate in a “universal” language. When using symbolism, it is not always necessary to use words. For instance, with street signs, one is not required to know how to READ words on the signs, but rather to know what the shapes, colors, and symbols or icons mean. Same applies the other public informational or directional signage, like the photo of the old Fallout Shelter sign I found bolted to the side of a building in historic downtown Fredericksburg, Va.

I have no idea how long that sign has been there, except it looks like it’s aged awhile! I find it interesting that the capacity is cited as 210! Fallout Shelters are designed to protect inhabitants from radioactive debris from a nuclear event. Thus, the sign incorporates the radiation symbol large and bold to identify its location. Maybe that should be my destination during the Zombie Apocalypse!

Posted in bunk2, Design Safari, designblitz, ds106, ds106 Reflections, magicmacguffin, umwsum12 | Comments Off on Fallout in Fredericksburg

Slide Guy at Camp Magic MacGuffin

Monday, June 18th, 2012

So the Slide Guy took a bit of a visit to the MineCraft incarnation of Camp Magic MacGuffin this week, looking for appropriate places to practice his sliding skills.

He was captured trying out the stairs at the Bunk Five Archery Range …

“SlideGuy at CMM Archery Stairs” by aforgrave, on Flickr

… checking out the Bava lava at the camp centre, …

“SlideGuy at CMM Bava Lava” by aforgrave, on Flickr

and giving a good ol’ head-first go at the Fall Out The World Fun Ride.

“SlideGuy at CMM Fall Out The World Fun Ride by aforgrave, on Flickr

As it would turn out, however, he seemed to spend the most time at the Waterslide over at CampX. Here is Slide Guy enjoying the waterside. Over and over!

SlideGuy at CMM Camp X Waterslide

UPDATE: I took a close look at all of the Slide Guy images to see if anyone had done the waterslide — and somehow missed Martha’s. When I saw the work of Noise Professor Maybe Next Time D’Arcy and Tim Wins, I decided to go with an animated GIF. So clearly Slide Guy was on that waterside during the day, AND still at sunset. Or maybe at sunset, and STILL the next day. At any rate, he must love sliding.

Slide on, Slide Guy. Slide on!

ds106 Visual Assignments 595

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Week 4 at camp!

Monday, June 18th, 2012

I learned so much this week! We really go into design and I found some tips on how to make my art really pop and say what I want it to say. We learned how the different contrasts and hues work with creating complimenting color pallets. How to properly use typography, words, in your art or in writing in general. I was also got to adventure on a Safari! Do not fear I am safe. We had to try and find different objects or pictures that represented different aspects of design.

Camp was a little more strict this week in letting us pick our “assignments,” but I still had fun. Oh and good news I am no longer getting attacked my zombies, I am free to be “creative” at camp now.

Until next week,

Ciara

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