openonline — Camp Magic MacGuffin

Archive for the ‘openonline’ Category

Friday, July 13th, 2012

I’ve been following Jim Groom’s “Name that 80s movie” 4 icon challenge series, and while he promised that they would become more difficult, I think the many summers I spent glued to the TV watching HBO for hours on end gives me an unfair advantage (I totally nailed the Flash Gordon one). I thought I’d try to up the “name that obscure movie” difficulty level, and while it was entertaining for myself to put together the following 4 icon challenge (I learned how to make a parchment-like background in Adobe Illustrator), I’m not sure if I did actually come up with something that will stump anybody….at least not anyone who is halfway decent with Google searching. Think you can name the this movie?

I continue to fiddle with the 4 icon challenge concept, this time blending both icons and actual images, one of those images laying over another. It’s not that I think it adds to the piece any, I’m just having some fun as I mess around with trying to visually represent the major elements of the story.

If you haven’t read any of my previous posts about the 4 icon challenge, you can check out how visually summarizing a movie, book, or other story is both really easy using tech, and is a great way for students to summarize major story elements, while having a bit of fun.

image credits:

vitruvian man - http://thenounproject.com/noun/vitruvian-man/#icon-No2532
gold brick - http://www.officialpsds.com/Gold-Bricks-PSD31100.html
mask – http://www.denbigharmysurplus.co.uk/army-stores/balaclava004.jpg
cup – http://thenounproject.com/noun/coffee/#icon-No16

Posted in 4 icon challenge, adobe, Art, bunk5, counselor, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments358, digital storytelling, ds106, Illustrator, Language Arts, magicmacguffin, multimedia, openonline | Comments Off on The Hardest 4 Icon Challenge Yet

Femme Fatale

Friday, July 13th, 2012

Just before shooting this electrifying glance at a breakfasting Agent Cooper, young Audrey Horne delivered this priceless line,

Sometimes I get so flushed, it’s interesting. Do your palms ever itch?

Posted in Animated Gif, just plain blogging, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Femme Fatale

Tornado, Revisited

Friday, July 13th, 2012

On Wednesday, @cogdog issued a seven-day-challenge for The Daily Create, and the prompt for Day One (June 11th), was TDC185: Draw a Tornado. Given that my drawing tools at hand were somewhat limited, I elected to “draw” the requisite tornado using a stylus on my iPhone, and used a photo from the day as my background and ink source. This is the original photo, taken using the Pano app on the phone.

Original PANO photograph (before Tornado)

To introduce the tornado, I used the clone tool within the iRetouch app, borrowing sections of the existing clouds for paint, trying to introduce swirls (not too successful with that), and saving my work periodically. When it was done, I posted it to Flickr and tagged it with the required tdc185 so it would be added to the assignment page along with the others.

@DoremiGirl was a bit taken aback by what I had “drawn,” …

@aforgrave wait, you drew that?!

— Yoon Soo Lim (@DoremiGirl) July 12, 2012

… but I’m comfortable with the artistic license offered by these sorts of daily challenges. Although am keen to continue to develop my actual drawing skills (for real, with paper and pencils), this was the result for the day.

It wasn’t until I was offloading my photos from the last two days that I came across the successive “saves” of the process, and realized that they might collectively make a nice animated GIF. As it would turn out, Photoshop CS6 has a Timeline feature where an Animation feature stood in CS3, so it took me a few minutes to get that sorted out (good learning!). I added in some hand-made “in-between” frames, and here is the result. (Sorry if it doesn’t represent the proper stages of formation of a tornado — these actually represent the stages I took in drawing this tornado!!

Tornado: TDC185 (animated GIF)

Posted in @DoremiGirl, alan levine, Animated Gif, bunk1, cogdog, ds106, imaginages, magicmacguffin, openonline, Seven-Day-Challenge, something made, tdc185, The Daily Create, TheDailyCreate, tornado, Yoon Soo Lim | Comments Off on Tornado, Revisited

DS106 Confidential 2012-07-13 09:46:00

Friday, July 13th, 2012

OUTSOURCED MEMES, ROGUE HOLOGRAMS, AND “DISAPPEARING” CAMPERS: CAMP MAGIC MACGUFFIN CONTINUES TO UNRAVEL!!!

In this first of a three-part series, DS106Confidential editor Red Beets unveils key aspects of the mystery behind “Camp” Magic Macguffin.

First, I need to address certain questions regarding Confidential’s involvement in this increasingly sordid story. While names can’t be named at this point suffice it to say that we were brought into this affair by a very highly-placed and highly-regarded member of the DTLT and DS106 family. I will only use his source nickname “the normal one.” He expressed great concern about the direction DS106 has taken this summer and he asked Confidential to “look into” some activities he felt were “highly irregular.” We agreed.

Now, the story behind the character CVI felt would become the MagicMacguffin icon, a character that would represent the joy and uninhibted pleasures of a camp MM summer – Slide Guy. The rise and fall of Slide Guy has been covered in these pages. We now bring you the truth behind the meme.

The Slide Guy meme was created in a studio in Mumbai, India. Yes – he was outsourced! Confidential had the opportunity to talk to the actor who portrays Slide Guy, Raj Patel, a figure well known to followers of the Bollywood film industry. Raj is shown below in a shot from his latest film Mumbai Story.

“It was just another meme job, I’ve done several. They pay well and don’t require a great deal of work.” Raj stated.

Had he heard of CVI or MagicMacguffin?

“No, my agent deals with all that.”

What about the socks?

“Well, that was kind of weird. For some reason they insisted I wear these really…uh…strange, I guess is the word, socks. I questioned it, but the director said it was an absolute, some big guy in the company paying for the meme had a thing about big, bulky white socks and I had to wear them or they’d get someone else. Is it a fetish thing? I don’t judge – but they did mail the socks back to the client, I do know that.”

What about the scandals involving the Slide Guy meme? Is he worried or concerned?

“Not really, once it leaves the studio I don’t think about it anymore. I have a very busy shooting schedule so I don’t try to keep up with any of the memes I’ve done. Some summer camp wanted to interview me as Slide Guy, but, come on, it’s a meme, I mean get a life people. I heard they hired someone to imitate me for the interview, but the guy started reading haikus and spouting some philosophy of ‘the joy of sliding’, give me a break.”

Coming up in this series: An interview with the real Alan Levine. How the hologram image was created, how it went rogue, and why Alan is suing CVI! Also – How the recent power outage “erased” so many of the Magic Macguffin “campers”, and Martha Burtis – What Happened?

Posted in bunkx, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on DS106 Confidential 2012-07-13 09:46:00

In the Morgue

Friday, July 13th, 2012

Cooper-Morgue — Special Agent Dale Cooper

One of my main goals in assembling animated GIFs is to make the loop appear as seamless as possible. To do that in this scene of Agent Cooper after he retrieved a foreign object from beneath Laura Palmer’s fingernail, it was necessary to use layer masking to isolate a single frame of his magnifying glass because the small amount of movement during the two second clip left an undesirable jump.

Because this GIF contains 16 frames with such minimal masking, the file size is 705 kb. Three parameters could have been tweaked to have made the file size smaller. One would have been to have captured fewer frames through either a lower capture rate or shorter clip length. Another would have been to crop some of the original image. The image could also have been rescaled to smaller image size proportions. Done individually or in combination, any of the tweaks above would have significantly lowered the overall impact and quality of the image. This is why I’m less concerned with file size on this recent series of Twin Peaks GIFs than I was with earlier experiments.

I still haven’t tried to manually optimize the colors as was suggested by Mark a while back. But I’m inclined to believe the GIMP does this automatically.

I think I’m going to keep working on this for a while. I’m not sure if there is any grand scheme to recent efforts. As long as it remains fun and brings such personal satisfaction, I see no reason to stop.

Posted in Animated Gif, just plain blogging, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on In the Morgue

Greetings from the Overlook Hotel

Friday, July 13th, 2012

Inspired by the work of the Breakfast Club edition of ds106 on their design assignments today (more on that anon), I took a shot at the Postcards from Magical Places assignment—3 stars! I spent the afternoon showing them how to do one of these in Photoshop, and while I was showing them a few things I got the idea of a postcard from the Overlook Hotel, and while I didn’t have the time to do it during class, I promised myself I would write a postcard from Danny Torrance to Mr. Halloran. This was very fun!

Posted in bunkx, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments363, digital storytelling, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Greetings from the Overlook Hotel

“Look How Happy She Is”

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

laura-donna — Laura Palmer & Donna Hayward

As mentioned in an earlier tutorial on assembling animated GIFs, I use MPEG StreamClip to select the clip’s start and end points. The selection is then trimmed and the frames are exported as individual png files. It is these individual image files that are then opened as layers in GIMP and then saved as the silent animated GIF file.

I rarely pay attention to the sound and dialog from the film while going about my process. But while working on this clip from the videotape that was found in Laura Palmer’s room, I couldn’t help but notice the line Agent Cooper said to Bobby Briggs durring Bobby’s questioning at the police station over Laura’s murder. This is one instance I wish it were possible to keep the audio linked to the animated GIF file.

Does anyone know if this is even possible?

Posted in Animated Gif, just plain blogging, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on “Look How Happy She Is”

Jaws Alternative Book Cover

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

I have a ton of awesome design work to show off from the Breakfast Club edition of ds106 (a.k.a the K12 edition ), but I want to take a quick moment and feature two alternative book cover assignments done by Anna. She had an idea for an alternative book cover for Peter Benchley’s Jaws, and frankly I think it is brilliant!

And as any gambler knows, keep going when you are on a roll, her next creation was a literal cover fro R.L Stine’s Goosebumps.

Brilliant! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What is immediately apparent to me is that they’re having fun doing it, and that’s a vision Tom Woodward has both articulated and embodied for years. What’s exciting to me is that ds106 has become a manifestation of that fun in my own teaching and learning like no other experience I’ve been part of before. I’ll do a more comprehensive post about the awesome design work they churned out today, but for know enjoy the genius!

Posted in bunkx, designassigmnments366, DesignAssignments, digital storytelling, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Jaws Alternative Book Cover

Not so 80s

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

The Noun Project credits:
Community by Mike Endale
Beach Ball by Tim Piper
Cap by Oliver Guin
Bicycle by Ugur Akdemir

Posted in bunkx, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments359, digital storytelling, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Not so 80s

The Gardening

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

Meanwhile back in Camp Magic MacGuffin we are working on video projects and editing. I was eager to try out the Send a Camp Movie to Camp project after speaking with Alan during our radio programs.

As it turns out the Buffalo, NY was the shooting location for a movie titled The Burning and the movie was shot at many Summer Camps in the area including camps belonging to my Boy Scout council. Even more specifically, several of the scenes were shot at camps I was both a camper and camp counselor. I recalled stories about The Burning being told growing up in the Scouts and now I have project to show my appreciation for a little local and Scouting history.

The goal of the project was to invert the personality of the film

Take one of the movies on the list of movies with camp themes, find a trailer for it, and re-edit the audio to completely change the plot- e.g. make a horror movie turn into a comedy, or make a romantic movie seem like a spooky movie.

So you can see the difference, here is the original trailer taken from YouTube.

Here are the steps I took to invert the personality of the film in the trailer.

Took the clip from YouTube using Easy YouTube Downloader extension in Google Chrome
Created an iMovie ’11 and imported the trailer
Detached and deleted the existing audio track
Recorded a replacement voiceover track using a different theme for the movie while watching the trailer (again and again)
Laid in the new voiceover track from iTunes in the video clip
Laid in a jazzy audio track to play as background music.

This is actually a fellow camp counselor and friend of mine Paul Tynan

Fine tuned the audio tracks with the video
Uploaded the new trailer to YouTube

Here’s the modified trailer with a whole new feeling to the movie.

Pretty cool!

Now, for the touch of local Scouting history. In the opening scene of the movie the boys are skulking around a cabin (about 1’55″ in the clip below), this is lower half of Lakeside Lodge at Camp Scouthaven in Freedom, NY. At that time it would have been where the boats were stored for the waterfront. Here’s the opening scene.