It almost doesn’t seem fair to be able to have as much fun as I did in assembling this episode. Those who are curious about my current work flow might be interested to hear an extended discussion of my current podcasting process. The three audio applications referred are Hindenburg, Audio Finder and VC Audio Pro.
Speaking of process, I also tried to describe how yesterday’s animated GIF of Bing and Ray was put together. It will probably only make sense to those who’ve had some experience doing layer masking in the GIMP.
Ray Bolger is the dancer featured in the animated GIF and mp3 cover art for this episode. A full explanation for my recent interest in this actor who was also a singing comedic dancer who played the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz is provided in the recording as well.
There’s much more in this nearly 50 minute episode. I continue to prefer to leave things to be discovered by the listener unencumbered by a blog post full of ‘show notes.’
I am quite satisfied with the manner in which this project is unfolding. I’m even beginning to think about how to take it to the next level. I just hope that doesn’t prove to jinx things. Time will tell.
Bonus Link: While doing research for this episode I came across the most amazing conversation between Mr. Bolger and his co-star in the Wizard of Oz. I highly recommend watching it.
I know you were expecting an audio letter this week, but I don’t feel comfortable talking. They’re listening. They’re all listening, and I’m afraid something will happen if they hear what I have to say. The camp counselors have Lost. Their. Minds. I’m not sure it’s just the counselors either. There’s some real House of Leaves s**t going on around here. There are whispers of tainted sloppy joes, aliens posing as Canadians, cats and dogs living together.
If you don’t hear from me again, please contact the authorities.
I totally ripped you off by co-opting a short clip from a well-known movie and turning it into my DS106 Radio bumper. I’m sorry. I was desperate. Attempts at other audio assignments failed. Miserably.
I’ve listened to DS106 Radio a few times, and I’m enamored with the set up and what I’ve been hearing. When DS106 Radio was first mentioned, I thought about that 1990 Christian Slater classic, Pump Up the Volume. God I loved that movie.
Over the weekend, I watched Awesome: I Fucking Shot That, a Beastie Boys concert film shot by 50 members of the audience. After this viewing, I got it in my mind to do the “Forced Collabo” audio assignment. Who wouldn’t really? Skip to about 3:30 in this video and tell me that Mixmaster Mike’s job doesn’t look totally easy. Right? Right?
Yeah. Not so much. After many attempts to find the perfect songs to mash-up, I gave up with the realization that (1) I have a crappy music collection and (2) I have been blindly consuming music rather than listening. Sad.
Here’s another clip from Awesome just for fun. It’s “Intergalactic.” Look how happy everyone in the crowd looks.
The last few days have been busy. A good busy though. ISTE is off and rolling. I started Saturday with SocialEdCon, one of my favorite events. When things slow down a bit I’ll get my thoughts and reflections for that organized. Yesterday was the official kick off for ISTE12. During that event the award winners were announced and I got to be up on the big stage. Pictures were taken but they are on the laptop which won’t stay connected to the internet here so they’ll come later. Today I’ve been hanging in the Bloggers’s Cafe talking with teachers from around the country. These conversations are thought-provoking and fascinating, but they also frequently serve to remind me that I have a great job in a fabulous school. That’s a good reminder to receive. I feel lucky to be here, learning with and from these brilliant folks.
In a few different broadcasts over the past year, I’ve messed around with some of the various filters and effects available with the free version of Nicecast and found its dials and visual interface both a lot of fun and helpful in the makeshift studios I’ve set up in my classrooms and house.
Not generally in my “wheelhouse of sound,” I was going after a certain, heavy, atmospheric texture that seemed appropriate for my randomly generated band name and album cover. “Goth soul,” Alan Levine calls it, which GNA Garcia clarifies as “rhythmic Emo-noise,” which is what I think I managed to create.
Every once in a while, while writing a blog post, all of the text disappears. It happened to a student during one of my classes this week. The same thing seems to have just happened here. For both the student and me, it happened while typing the undo keystroke sequence.
As I was six or seven paragraphs into a rather detailed explanation of the process to assemble the GIF above and I’ve already spent more time than I should have in masking several layers to isolate the action in the scene, I’ll save that discussion of that process for later.
The reason for making the GIF in the first place is that I mentioned the 1975 episode of the Tonight Show from which this dance scene between Ray Bolger and Bing Crosby took place while recording a segment the latest Totally Fun and Good podcast. As there is still more recording to be done for that episode, maybe I’ll try to describe the process used on this GIF there.
One of the craziest and most memorable films of the 80s is the ultra-camp, TV alien invasion film TerrorVision (1986). I kind of think of it as the b-film alter ego of Videodrome. I wrote about TerrorVision back in 2008 when I had dreams of doing a series of posts about b-movies in the 80s and the rise of VCR culture—I never got around to it, surprise, surprise, and the post still stands as a monument to my blogging whimsy.
Anyway, I’ve been reading more and more Tumblr blogs because it seems like most of the interesting animated GIFs and assorted design work is happening in that space, for whatever reason.One of the sites I ran across that I really enjoy is the “read comics till your eyes bleed” blog that is a constant stream of images, animated gifs, etc. Given tumblr’s design it’s hard to know what’s original to the blog and what’s not (one of the immediate visual limitations of tumblr as an admitted newbie) but whether original or not it is a pretty interesting collection of media artifacts, it comes recommended. What pushed me to write this post, however, was the fact that there was actually an animated GIF from TerrorVision, which throughout the 90s and 200s has gained a pretty loyal cult fanbase with good reason—so bad it’s so good.
Since Week 5 in Camp MacGuffin is all about audio, we are sending audio messages home instead of letters:
This is not so different from leaving a message on an answering machine and I felt it was OK to improvise rather than read from a paper.
As I have said in the recording, Week 5 was about stepping out of comfort zone. For one of my Daily Creates I had to sing. I mean, I didn’t have to do it, but I did. I don’t want to repeat what I said in the recording, but the atmosphere in the Camp is such that singing felt quite OK. I will even go so far as to embed the recording right here:
The Daily Create 165 – Share a campfire song on audio. Sing of bang drums.
Two days later we had to draw. I am terrible at drawing and I said so:
The Daily Create 167 – Draw a person using only geometrical shapes
Today’s Daily Create wasn’t difficult. We took a closer look at where we spend a lot of free time and photographed something we had never noticed before.
The Daily Create 168
It is not that I don’t notice Leonardo, it is just that I don’t notice him enough. Placed behind my back while I work at my desktop, he has kept me company through all my web adventures.
The Daily Crete 166 – Take a picture of something that makes you sick
I connected one of my Daily Creates with an audio assignment here. Partly to save time, but mostly because I had a hard time remembering something that makes me sick. Because I was working on Audio Assignment 351, I thought I could take a screenshot of the spam I was reading and post it as a photo. A good idea, except that the screenshot didn’t look very nice, so I decided to edit it using Pic Monkey. Then I got carried away a little.
And here is the recording:
Bonus track – Reverend Connor Strikes Again
I couldn’t resist this. It only came yesterday, otherwise I would have used that one. It somehow tricked my Spam Guard. Maybe Google now thinks I love spam?
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.....
It almost doesn’t seem fair to be able to have as much fun as I did in assembling this episode. Those who are curious about my current work flow might be interested to hear an extended discussion of my current podcasting process. The three audio applications referred are Hindenburg, Audio Finder and VC Audio Pro.
