VisualAssignments — Camp Magic MacGuffin

Archive for the ‘VisualAssignments’ Category

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I’m not much one for creating “how to” videos, at least not ones that I share publicly on a regular basis, but I felt as though I owed it to some of the people whose blogs I’m following to help out a bit with the monolithic application that is Photoshop. Don’t get too excited though, I am far from being a Photoshop expert, most of my skills having waned since being a heavy Fark.com Photoshop Contest participant in the early 2000s. When I saw Melanie Barker complete the quick, but fun “Slide Guy” assignment (which coincidentally remind me of a lot of the Fark contests), I was impressed. When she said she did it because she was afraid of Photoshop, I wanted to share just a couple of simple tools that I use for cutting and pasting elements from one image to another. Below is the image I created for the ds106 Slide Guy Visual Assignment using a still from a rather famous movie and a shot of Tim Owens joyously sliding down a child’s playground slide.

Look at that slide guy having so much fun trying to crush poor Dr. Jones!

Again, please bear in mind that I am an absolute novice when it comes to Photoshop, and the tools I show may very well be the worst tools to use for cutting, copying, and pasting images as far as a professional graphic designers are concerned, but these tools are super easy to use, and don’t really require that much to figure out, just a bit of practice to master. If it benefits you at all, please enjoy my 6 minute walkthrough of using the magic lasso tool in Photoshop. You can view it below or click here to watch via YouTube.

Posted in Art, bunk5, counselor, ds106, magicmacguffin, multimedia, openonline, Photoshop, slide, software, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on How To: Photoshop Magic Lasso

Life is like a box of chocolates

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I searched for a movie scene that everyone would know and was from a movie that I enjoy. I used Photoshop to insert myself in this famous movie. I used the scene as the background and used the lasso tool to copy myself out of another photo. I then pasted my image and moved my picture around to the right spot. Yet, it still was not quite right. I used the same technique that I used to cut myself out on the suitcase in the background and pasted that onto of my image. So it looked like I was actually in the scene rather than pasted on top.

I love Forrest Gump. It makes me laugh and it always moves me to tears. You watch as Forrest goes through his life, making friends, overcoming obstacles, and wandering through history without a clue. So just for a moment, I will be someone that sits and listens to the story that Forrest has to tell. As Forrest would say, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”

Posted in bunk4, magicmacguffin, umwsum12, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments559 | Comments Off on Life is like a box of chocolates

Andy Warhol

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I took this photo with Photobooth on my computer and added the pop art effect. Quick, easy, and simple! Finding the subject worthy of being Warhol-ed though was a different matter. There were so many things I could choose from, including myself.

This is my mother’s grandfather clock that has been in my life forever. I grew up with the sound of it chiming. Too the point, where I know the the rhythm of the chime anywhere. It seemed worthy of becoming pop art. It stands at an angle in a corner and with every step or shift of weight on the floor it will let you know it happens to be there.

This photo combines classic and funky. And any photo of a clock makes the viewer think about time. We think about the amount of time we have, in a day or in a lifetime. I normally think about the speed of time and how fickle it can be. Why must it crawl in a boring situation? Why does it speed through when I am having fun? And why, oh why, must it stop when I have to give a presentation in front of people?

Posted in bunk4, magicmacguffin, umwsum12, VisualAssignments, visualassignments560 | Comments Off on Andy Warhol

Art that Pops

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I am sooo frustrated right now! This blog post has been sitting as a draft in my blog queue! Ugh! It was supposed to post yesterday!

Visual Assignment 340–Splash the Color (2 stars). I took this photo while on my historic downtown Fredericksburg photo shoot last Saturday. There is a empty lot on Caroline Street that is “sealed off” by a wooden fence/barrier. To add interest to this wall, local artist showcase 6 different paintings on this wall. I’ve always liked the little surprise that it brings while walking (or driving) down the street. On my trip through town, I decided the photograph the collection at an angel, adding depth perception to my image. Here is the orginial photograph:

After I got the photo image uploaded into FotoFlexer, it was pretty easy to turn the image to B&W and then make just one painted mural “pop”. All I did was turn the photo to black and white using the greyscale effect. Then I played with the greyscale advanced options. I selected “painted region” in the “apply to menu, selected “original” and marked the box to “invert”. I adjusted the brush size and was quickly able to recolor the one block on the image, the first mural, back to it’s vibrate colors. It really makes it stand out against the rest on the now greyscale image. This was a fun and fairly easy project to do.

Now I can’t stop thinking about all the ways I can do this to other images and create my own art to display!

Posted in bunk2, ds106, magicmacguffin, umwsum12, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments340 | Comments Off on Art that Pops

Slide Guy in the Sunshine State

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Thought I’d take a crack at another visual assignment before the focus shifts to Design. Given the recent avalanche of excitement generated by the slide guy assignment, I could resist the urge to try a doing a couple with some vintage postcards.

The postcards were found via Google image search. The minimal bit of editing was done in GIMP and the Slide Guy image came from the dropbox.

As Slide Guy’s head partially obscured the word “Keys,” I used the clone tool to cover it with the surrounding blue. The use of the definite article with Florida might make some cringe. Fortunately, there isn’t yet a grammar component to the grading of these ds106 assignments.

Posted in Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on Slide Guy in the Sunshine State

Unscrambling Messages

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Wow, what a week it has been at Camp. Everything is going okay, but this stress of keeping everything upbeat is taking its toll. The campers are all engrossed in their creative activities, and Martha and i seem to have gotten a few of the lagging students up to speed. We are seeing the beginnings of a lot of creative output, some starting simply. A number of them are not getting the stuff about embedding media and a few others could be writing more stories.

But everything is going to plan.

Yet I worry. I hear whispering in groups of people that go silent as I walk by, and the nasty anonymous notes appear under my door on a regular basis. I think they dont like me; and IO hate that cause I am giving my all to this camp, working 20 hours a day, commenting to everyone, spending a ton of time in the control room tweaking the pipes and feeds. Stuff no one sees. I’ve been also banging the pipes on the Assignments collection making some functional improvements (has anyone evne noticed the random generators we added? Do they know all the cleanup I am doing each week to prep the new assignments?)

Mostly I am getting worried because Martha appears so paranoid, and more and more she acts like she does not trust me. I have gone to every effort to calm the worries of the CVI staff; they do not know how things get tricky when they put me in a position of looking like I am being secretive.

And how can Martha think I am not even in camp? I wave at her all the time, yell out her name in the mess hall. I was sitting there right opposite her at the last campfire, she was looking my way, but her eyes kept unfocussing like she did not even see me. I’ve knocked on her door a few times the chat after the last rounds, but she never answers; I can only hear the low tones of that old Morrisey LP “Maladjusted”.

Why does she think I am keeping shed 4 a mystery? I know no more than her- I’ve not gone in, and now she is expcting me to show it to her tomorrow. She seems really creeped out by Marco, and I suggested he pick some flowers for her tomorrow.

I saw her this afternoon walking down to the lake, and I ran to catch her, but she ducked inside the library. I was going to follow her in, but found this curious sheet of paper that had slipped out of her backpack:

lines of ???

On the back it was scribbled “be #4life”. I did not know what to make of it until I saw that one of our students had done the blackout poetry assignment. With some guesswork, I laid the found paper over a print out of Martha’s recent camp post Embedding is #4life- on its surface, this was a very important message for our students, and Martha writes them so well.

But see why I am worried now? I get this message by combining what I found with her blog post:

I get:

I see ways I could share ways I want to link what I did there, a poopy way, I have to look at a prettier way to get to a bunch of other stuff

Its cryptic, but she seems stuck on the things that happened last year. What is a “prettier way” – is it being nice to me? And what is this other stuff she wants to get to?

I really do not want to alarm the home office, and honestly, it feeds into the paranoia I already feel, and the lack of trust. So I am sitting on this and looking for more clues. It might backfire to not report to CVI, but they just take my stuff in and never give me much feedback. They just give orders.

Posted in magicmacguffin, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments11 | Comments Off on Unscrambling Messages

Start with a Bang . . .

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Assignment (Visual): Photo It Life Peanut Butter . . .

I confess that I’ve never before seen the appeal of animated GIFs. Weren’t those the goofy little hyper cartoon characters that ran rampant in PowerPoints in an early era?

So I’ve had a bit of a change of heart, though I still think you can get too much of a good thing when it comes to animated GIFs and that the animation needs to contribute to the visual story’s compellingness (that should be a word) substantially. Animation for cuteness’s sake just doesn’t cut it for me.

To date, these are the most compelling animated GIFs I’ve seen — CogDog’s Animated Water. I get a real sense of being there. I can hear the splashing. Feel the mist. Yes! The animation makes the story richer. I also love the subtlety of this water-enhanced image “Animated GIFs from Your Own Photos.”

So you may laugh when you see my first animated GIF. I realize you may feel that I’ve resorted to cuteness, but I’d like to think that the fireworks shooting around me (my avatar) conveys a bit of the sense of the wonder I feel every time I pop into this virtual world. I am there. And when I watch this GIF I hear sizzle, pop, and bang.

I thought of sharing the experience of flying among the fireworks over the Bookhenge on Star Island because one of my students, Jennifer, emailed recently to say that she still often returns to the Bookhenge just to fly among the fireworks. And I thought I was the only one who loved to do that.

So do come visit the Bookhenge some time and fly up among the fireworks. If there’s no display going off, just let me know — 2B Writer — and we’ll create a fireworks celebration just for you.

GIMP is new to me but I’ve had some excellent tutoring from a PhotoShop pro. Still, there’s nothing like tying yourself to a Herman Miller Aeron until you come up with a decent product. The most valuable lesson I learned is that you need to make sure that the dimensions of your image fit your theme. I’d remembered that 640 filled the blog column so I went with that. Thank goodness I did. I later, when trying to troubleshoot the lack of animation on my blog, found a chart with the max dimensions per blog theme. 640 it was for my Twenty-Ten.

I think beginning with the GIF was actually a good intro to GIMP because it helped me begin to grasp the layers concept without actually having to do any real editing yet.

I’ll look forward to making more GIFs when I see that the animation serves my story.

Posted in bookhenge, bunk3, Camp MacMuffin, crissman, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments347 | Comments Off on Start with a Bang . . .

Slide Guy Meets Carly Rae Jepsen

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

A few months ago a students started playing “Call Me Maybe” in the library. He played it over and over and over again. I thought I was going to kill myself, and I told him as much. His response, “It really grows on you.” And so it does. I went home that night and instead of putting my head in the oven, I pulled up the video on Youtube and listened. Over and over and over again.

It looks like Slide Guy likes Carly Rae Jepsen just as much as the rest of ~~the~~ ~~world~~ teenage America.

There’s nothing better for sliding than a soapy windshield!

I started working on this assignment in Photoshop, but I find it too overwhelming at the moment. I saw GIMP mentioned a few times, so I decided to download and use that. I downloaded “Slide Guy” from the visual assignments page. I downloaded the “Call Me Maybe” video from Youtube. I then imported the video into VLC and found the scene I wanted. I went through the scene frame by frame until I reached the one you see above. To capture the still image, I used the “snapshot” option under “video.” Once I had the two images, I opened them both as layers in GIMP. It took me some time to familiarize myself with GIMP, but it was definitely manageable. I still hope to master Photoshop… or at least become competent in Photoshop… before the summer is over.