Sexy Casper joins the ranks of the pokemon. By far my favorite DS 106 assignment.
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Sexy Casper joins the ranks of the pokemon. By far my favorite…
Thursday, June 21st, 2012Radio DS 106 where will you be? Part of my design assignments…
Thursday, June 21st, 2012
Radio DS 106 where will you be? Part of my design assignments from DS 107
DS 106 gave me a chance to create my own meme, seeing as how…
Thursday, June 21st, 2012
DS 106 gave me a chance to create my own meme, seeing as how “Bad Luck Brian” is one of my favorites I took the opportunity to make my own.
Blog reformed to suit my needs for DS106
Thursday, June 21st, 2012Blog reformed to suit my needs for DS106
The Foo Fighters, Chipmonkd’
Thursday, June 21st, 2012If Dave Grohl ever hears this he is going to find me and kick my ass…
I’m a big fan of the Foo. On a scale of “1″ being very chipmonkable (Think Beyonce’s “Put a Ring on It”) to “10 being very un-chipmonkable (pretty much anything by Black Sabbath), I figure they are in the 8-9 range. Of course, I had to do it.
I used VirtualDJ Home on my Mac to play with the beats per minute and pitch until it was just a little faster, and way higher pitched. Easy, fun… now thinking about recording some fellow teachers and ‘monking them.
Reading A Monkey Movie
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012In looking for a film to fit into the I Can Read Movies assignment, I decided would start by repurposing my initial Monkey House vector graphic and work with Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film, 12 Monkeys. Like Gilliam’s 1985 film, Brazil, the film is set in a dystopian future, but also introduces the wrinkle of time travel. Visually stunning and mind-bending, the film is worth viewing if you haven’t seen it.
I decided to work at extending my skills using Illustrator by trying to recreate the graphics template from the original book series. While that was easily doable, the further task of “aging” the book put a bit of a crimp in my timeline. I tried following the Photoshop tutorial by MOME, but struggled to get the right textures, and so, in the interests of time, I sought out some aged paper textures on the Internet, and eventually settled on Old_Scroll_Texture_II_by_Isthar_art, going back to Illustrator to get a partial effect. Unfortunately, of necessity, the layering put the effect under the text, so the text and images on the cover don’t really look aged to match the paper. However, as I was getting ready to post this, I decided to go back and try the tutorial once more, and managed to figure it out in Photoshop. Maybe I was sleepy the first time!
So here are two versions. First the Illustrator-only version, and second, the fiddled-with brushes-in-Photoshop version.
“I Can Read Movies: 12 Monkeys” by aforgrave, on Flickr
“I Can Read Movies: 12 Monkeys” by aforgrave, on Flickr
However, in doing a bit of research into the movie, I came across an amazing antecedent for the film, discovering that Gilliam’s film was actually a re-make/re-imaging of a quirky black and white still-motion sci-fi film from 1962 by Chris Marker, entitled La Jetée.
Searching online revealed a section of the film. Check it out.
Cool, eh? If there isn’t already a ds106 video assignment focusing on telling a narrative like this using using still images, there should be. This film produces a wonderful result. It’s reminiscent of the missing sections of Frank Capra’s 1937 Lost Horizon that have been replaced with existing promotion stills (to accompany the remaining audio track). It’s an eerie effect. And quite dramatic. It creates an interesting space for you to fill in some gaps on your own. Maybe I’ll aim for something like that when we get to video…
Now, as an add-in bonus, while searching for existing images for 12 Monkeys, I found this:
Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys as an animated GIF (not mine!)
I’ve been looking for a film to explore the cinematic animated GIF assignment, Say It Like Peanut Butter. Perhaps I’ll take a further look into 12 Monkeys…
And, if that weren’t sufficient monkey-related input for summer reflection, my copy of our Camp Magic MacGuffin Monkey House name inspiration arrived recently in the mail.
“Summer Reading for Monkeys” by aforgrave, on Flickr
Read on, Monkeys and campers! Read on!!
Back from the void
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012
Super Secrete Base
As many of you may already have known, my other persona is Max Power (Super Evil Genius Number One). I have been working diligently creating my Super Secrete Island Fortress of Unpleasantness (located at the lovely Aogashima Island off of Japan). Me and my minions have been working our butts off on this for a few years and now is 90 percent operational. We are experiencing some growing pains with the Geo Thermal Energy Power Generator. That’s right, we may be evil but we care about the environment just like everyone else. When it becomes fully operational, it will power the most destructive laser ever known to mankind. Hopefully by summer’s end we will be able to destroy the Amazon Rainforest unless our ransom from the World Government has been met. A shout out to the minions on this one! I couldn’t have gone this far without you. Even though you constantly remind me in the Suggestion Box that you don’t like your orange jump suits. So what you stand out like a sore thumb in combat situations. You look sharp wearing them, that count’s more then concealment in my book.
Ciao for now.
Jumping the Shark
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012After some discussion about whether a certain conference has “jumped the shark,” I was inspired to create an animated GIF of Fonzie’s legendary water skiing jump over an ostensibly man-eating shark in a 1977 episode of Happy Days, which, to some observers, signaled the beginning of the venerable sit-com’s steady decline and which inspired the very useful notion of “jumping the shark.” Here’s my first stab:
This is a big file, around 5MBs so not necessarily all that useful and it’s long. I felt the shark was essential and I didn’t really want to re-edit Happy Days so I included a fairly long portion of the jump sequence. In playing around with individual shots from the water skiing scene, I came up with this version where Fonzie skis and skis on forever, unconcerned with sharks or his show’s hearty embrace of the absurd and implausible, like the idea that someone “cool” would water-ski in a bomber jacket:
After I shared these on Twitter, the inimitable Scott Leslie, with whom I had the aforementioned discussion about that certain conference (which I’m not convicted has shark-jumped, fwiw), created two shorter versions from my original:
So there you have it: an iconic TV moment ad infinitum and some collaborative GIF-ing. DS106 4 life, bucko!
UPDATE:
Michael Branson Smith added this to the mix: “Megaladon eats the idiom . . . never ‘jump the shark!’”
Bobbie and Me
Tuesday, June 19th, 2012My memories fade over time, but sometimes there is a song that can take me back to a place that revives the memories of my past. The song allows me to remember things I thought I had forgotten. So, for an assignment, pick a song that does that for you, and tell some stories about what you remember… …In the assignment you might want to mix your voice over parts of the song, give an intro, tell the story first and play the song, break up the song with the story – lots of options. But nothing too long – my attention span is short. These would be great to post on ds106 radio.
About two minutes, hopefully not too long.
ISTE 2012
Tuesday, June 19th, 2012For the fourth year I am headed to ISTE just after the end of the school year. This year it will be extra fun because the whole family is headed to San Diego. We’ve got plans for Legoland and the San Diego Zoo set already. I’m hoping to be at Social Edcon on Saturday and I’ll definitely be at the opening stuff for ISTE on Sunday.
On Monday at 4:15 I’m copresenting about teachinghistory.org and we have a poster session about the site at 1:00 on Tuesday.
If there is something I shouldn’t miss, let me know! Mostly I expect I’ll be in the bloggers’ cafe quite a bit.
