This week’s update from Camp Magic Macguffin. I’ve been supervising some work on the new orientation center, and it features a new outdoor activity area that can be used any time day or night, including a rock climbing wall that extends deep into the upper reach of Hairpin Canyon.
When I saw the Master of the Flying Guillotine movie poster, I knew I had to animate it for this ds106 design assignment. This is a very rough first draft, and I only got this far thanks to Tim Owens’ seemingly boundless patience with my idiotic Photoshop questions (it was a good refresher of the details I learned for the animated Hulk comic book cover I did). Like I said, it is a very rough first draft, but I have a sense of what I need to do to fix it up now. The difficulty with this one was getting the elliptical movement of the guillotine to be convincing and somewhat centered, on my next run through on this work-in-progress I’m gonna see if I can’t master that. Any and all future versions of this draft will added as an update to this post.
In honor of Jim Groom, who can’t quite seem to keep the H.M.S. DS106 in ship-shape (it’s hard, all of us passengers are always banging on the hull and tossing vital equipment overboard). As the counselor of Bunk House 5 at Camp Magic Macguffin this summer, I thought it be best if I lead by example. For starters, I’ve invented a new camp game, called “ds106 technical difficulty art” and for this week only it’s worth 36 stars! That’s right, 36 stars, which means I’ve topped Mr. Groom’s star count for this week of Visual Assignments. I will gladly add this to the official ds106 assignment repository once it’s back up and running.
UPDATE
I’ve now added this as an official assignment in the ds106 assignment repository, which means I fully expect a whole heap of ds106 technical difficulty warnings/labels/macguffins by the end of the current incarnation of the course. I really wanted to place this assignment in a “free form” sort of category, as you could easily complete it with a wide range of media (especially given ds106radio doesn’t handle images too well last time I checked). In the end I felt a visual assignment would be best because you can create a still, or the illusion of a video with an animated gif (which is what I did above).
Visual Assignment 44—Album Cover (2 stars). This was a fun and fairly simple project that I could do on my lunch hour at work. It also gave me a good opportunity to try a few free web-based photo editors. For this project, I used FotoFlexer (www.fotoflexer.com)
In keeping with the instructions of the assignment, here’s how I ended up with a voyeuristic bird on the album cover of a curiously named band:
Followed the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article that that this link generates now becomes the name of my band. Thus, my band became “Checking Out”. 
The title of the album is generated by using the last 4-5 words of the last quote of this page: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3.
Checking Out’s debut album is now called “The First to Admit It”.
The cover art is based off a randomly generated Flickr photo. The 3rd image that shows up here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days is the foundation for “The First to Admit It” album cover.
Here’s a closer look at the original:
Credit to lucia bianchi for the photography: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lubi66/7344834132/
I used FotoFlexer to assemble the random elements to create the complete album cover. Specifically, I applied a filter and adjusted it to soften the image and blur the edges to frame the birds. Then I added and manipulated the text until I found a compilation that I like and viola! Checking Out’s very first album art is ready for release…complete with a dirty bird watching the birdie couple like a green-eyed stalker!
Ok, Jim asked me to up the game, so I am going to get more particular about frame selection for my animated GIFs. We are working on the ds106 kickstarter awards for people who requested an animated GIF in their honor. I’ve got the task to do the one for Boone Gorges, who requested something “bad ass”.
My first neuron went to maybe something from Mad Max, which I might still do, or maybe Tyler Durden who was the baddest because he wasn’t…. never mind. I went to Samuel J as Jules Winfield, those mutton chop sideburns quoting Ezekiel…
I’m really happy with this one! Jules just keeps ranting, but the little hand/head motion of the scared kid in the foreground make it complete (IMHO). Plus, by doing these by hand, working with your fingers in the mud and not just using some fricking iPhone app, it comes in at 526k, almost svelte, lean, mean…
Jules: [Jules shoots the man on the couch] I’m sorry, did I break your concentration? I didn’t mean to do that. Please, continue, you were saying something about best intentions. What’s the matter? Oh, you were finished! Well, allow me to retort. What does Marsellus Wallace look like?
Brett: What?
Jules: What country are you from?
Brett: What? What? Wh – ?
Jules: “What” ain’t no country I’ve ever heard of. They speak English in What?
Brett: What?
Jules: English, motherfucker, do you speak it?
Brett: Yes! Yes!
Jules: Then you know what I’m sayin’!
Brett: Yes!
Jules: Describe what Marsellus Wallace looks like!
Brett: What?
Jules: Say ‘what’ again. Say ‘what’ again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more Goddamn time!
This was the scene I plucked from
And I tried to zero in on a part where the camer had no movement, of which there were a lot fo short cuts, but of course, waving the gun and mouthing off fit. I grabbed the clip as mp4 (I use PwnYouTube learned it from Tim Owens), and opened it in MPEG Streal Clip. I use the selectors for the in and out point of the small scene I want, clip it, and then slowly move the slider to different scenes and saved them as frames.
In GIMP I use the Open as Layers option, and under the Filters-Animation menu is Playback so you can see how it flips. This one worked well as I saw nothing I needed to nudge. I did convert the image to Indexed (Image-Mode-Indexed) before the saving as a GIF and enabled the dithering option).
The one thing you have to play with as an animation is the time between frames- I first did 190 milliseconds but it was too slow, so I dropped it to 120.
This one worked well as full frames; the next one I want to see if I can isolate things like eye movement. I am not sure how this goes down in GIMP- I imagine I will have to make a regular background layer, and then select just the parts I want to move and merge to copies of this layer.
Yes, but just making the GIF does that Gaiman “Just Make Art” feeling flow.
Now I am hankering for a Royale With Cheese.
In case of midlife crisis, break glass.
Ha! This made me laugh, so it’s my first reblog. :-)
I took a stab at Remix an Album Cover this morning. I’m trying to see how many of the assignments for Camp I can do on my iPad — partly because I’m curious as to how good it really is as a device for creating (not just consuming) and partly because it gives me a chance to learn some of the apps I have a bit better.
I started by looking for a Flickr image, and instead of just picking the third one from random Interesting images, I took the third one in the most recently uploaded “Attibution Only” Creative Commons images. Unfortunately, I forgot to keep track of the image’s name/creator, and the image I found has long since been buried behind the 100 most recently uploaded in this category. : (
But this is what I found (I’ll keep trying to figure out the attribution):
Then I did the random Wikipedia article and got this.
Raffaëla Paton is a Dutch/Surinamese singer who won the Dutch version of American Idol.
Then I did my quote search, and got “No One Will Believe It” as the last 4-5 words. Unfortunately, I forgot to write down the whole quote or who said it.
Oh well. The assignment is supposed to be about randomness and serendipity, right.
I used SketchBook Pro on my iPad to do the album cover. The fonts in that program are really limited, and I wanted to play around with typeface. So I used one built in font and then embellished it and wrote everything else freehand.
It took me a while to decide on the placement of the album title. I tried writing it down the arm of the left statue, but the variation in color in the background image just made it hard to read no matter what color I chose. I think the window frame works well, although I might play around with a bit to see if I can make it look more like it’s written on the frame. I did erase the last bit of the last “E” so that it looks like it’s running behind the right statue.
I also used a brush to add a bit of a border to the image — It seemed to stark with just the black border.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
The animated GIF above is currently also playing at Always Be Reflecting.
I knew the moment I saw and heard her extraordinary Boogie in Second Life video that I’d use it as the backdrop for today’s Daily Rounds.
Thanks Lisa, this made my day. Please forgive me for ever thinking you were normal. 
The newspaper poetry blackout assignment is a project I’ve wanted to do for awhile. I’m a big fan of the fridge magnets that give you a limited set of words to work and create with and I see this kind of assignment along the same lines.
I grabbed my free copy of the Free Lance-Star Weekly and started looking through the articles. I found a couple of good candidates that contained words that caught my eye. I started on one and decided I didn’t like it as I moved along. I was mostly eyeballing my way down the columns and not really circling things so I easily got lost when I went back to find the poem again. Perhaps I should circle stuff in pencil first?
The article I chose was about a local former detective building a film career so there was an abundance of really good words to use in the poem. As I went down I spotted “pursuing”, “rumored”, “alive”, “challenge” but, I ended up not using them because I wanted to keep it simple. I decided to start at “life.” and treat it as the title of my poem and also a framework for what I wanted to talk about. I found that maintaining a good sounding poem and an aesthetically pleasing image is a double challenge that can be frustrating at times.
What I ended up with was this poem:
life.
a little odd familiar space where bodies get to keep up this act.
I was quite pleased with the final poem (although a bit cynical) and the way the visual of the poem turned out.
I can see myself becoming addicted to this kind of art. I definitely see myself doing more of these in the future for fun.
Sorry, but camp is over! Head over to ds106
The Campfires have all been put out.
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.....
