Archive for the ‘VisualAssignments’ Category
Saturday, June 9th, 2012
lazy weekends call for lazy art, right?
It’s the weekend, time for a few errands, grocery shopping, mending a bit of that landscape edging you promised your wife you’d get to a month ago, and spending some time with the kids. Truth be told, our weekends are usually all sorts of busy here in the Rimes’ household, and I’m sure any other family with younger children will agree, it’s far too easy to find yourself working harder on a Saturday than you might have during the week. We’d like to think of Saturday and Sunday as “lazy” days in which we can relax with our family and friends, and just enjoy the brief time we have before heading “back to the edu-coal mines” on Monday. Reality though, typically means that we plan more activities and structure instead of playtime on those two precious days (at least it feels that way in our house many weekends).
So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by capturing a silly moment, and completing a ds106 assignment (yes, even ds106 can feel like one of those weekend chores if you’re trying to “play good” and complete the right number of assignments).
But that’s beside the point! How in the world is this applicable to the classroom? Quite often I see teachers in my district using Photobooth for one of two projects; either photos of everyone at the beginning of the year to go up on walls or special bulletin boards, or “special effects” photos for big projects. It’s a shame that they don’t have access to the Macbooks more often (each elementary only has 2 MacBook carts, the MS and HS 3 carts apiece), because Photobooth would make an excellent visual journaling tool for capturing daily learning experiences, moods, and just the general well-being of learning going on in a classroom. Photobooth does stills and video, so you could switch it up from day to day, maybe even taking subsequent shots to stitch together as an animated gif, or create a series of video reflections from a bunch of students after a rather large project.
Today, I just used it to capture the kids and me being silly around the breakfast table. The “Warhol Effect” was appropriate, and rather than print it out, post it on a nice bulletin board to make the hallways or classroom walls “more presentable” like I see at school, I’m just going to post it here in a quick “this is what’s going through my head right now” manner. No doubt the kids and I will stumble across it in a few years time (I’ve dumped it into my iPhoto album as well) and have a nice memory of this morning.
Posted in Art, bunk5, counselor, digital storytelling, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, visualassignments560, warhol | Comments Off on Slow Life Down with Photobooth
Saturday, June 9th, 2012
Visual Assignment 107 – Common Everyday Object
I admit, I am not one of those people who wake up easily. It usually takes me a while to focus and at first my surroundings might seem strange and unfamiliar to me. Is it a wonder, then, that the object you see in the picture above appeared to me exactly as you see it? It is one of the first things I see when I open my eyes every day. Can you guess what it is? Though, I have to say, I am notorious for giving tasks that are too easy. See my previous attempt at being mysterious.
It took me a lot of coffee and tea and good music to wake up properly:
Visual Assignment 42 - One Shot
I should have read the task more carefully, though, since I missed an important point here – this set of photos doesn’t really tell a story, nor does it create tension, unless you are worried about what I might write into that notebook after all the caffeine that I am about to consume.
By the way, the above set of photos were created from a single shot which looks like this:
The photo was taken in front of my holiday house in the country last spring and it shows some of my favourite things, including a Kurt Vonnegut book. As I am a proud resident of Slaughterhouse 4, I chose this picture on purpose here.
If you are wondering what music my ipod was playing at the time, wonder no more. It was my favourite group, Experience Rating. Their new album The Spiritual Equivalent of Oxygen is something I warmly recommend:
Visual Assignment 44 – An Album Cover
Then I spent some time thinking about people who really matter to me:
Visual Assignment 357 – Love: In Three Frames
After that, I was ready to face the world. And this time I faced it with a camera in hand.
The school where I teach is in the centre of Belgrade and the day was lovely, so I decided to attempt Visual Assignment 376. I was also influenced by several of our weekly readings, particularly by Photography as Mindful Seeing and the advice that we should take photos of ugly things and constantly search for the odd angle. What this meant for me was walking down the street and quickly shooting random photos at some really weird angles. Some of the photos were terrible, some barely usable. I chose ten of the barely usable ones and kept them just as they were. So I produced this:
Visual Assignment 376 – Mission Defamiliarize
After school, I listened to Experience Rating some more and did my Daily Create assignment. I also wrote a blog post.
It was getting rather late at night (or, shall I say, early in the morning) and I was beginning to feel hungry, so first I demotivated myself:
Visual Assignment 191 – Demotivate Yourself
And then I opened that fridge…
Tags: DS106,, VisualAssignment107,, VisualAssignment191, VisualAssignment357,, VisualAssignment376,, VisualAssignment42,, VisualAssignment44,, VisualAssignments,
Posted in bunk4, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignment107,, VisualAssignment191, VisualAssignment357,, VisualAssignment376,, VisualAssignment42,, VisualAssignment44,, VisualAssignments | Comments Off on My Day in Pictures
Friday, June 8th, 2012
This challenge is about placing members of your family in a world that’s too big for them. I chose to place my mum next to some daffodils. The two photos were taken metres apart within seconds, but in this photo they juxtapose well.
I used this video from Serif’s own bank of tutorials to help me with this technique, which was new to me.
The greatest challenges – and how to overcome them – are:
1. Choosing a good image of your subjects – the cleaner the background, the easier it will be to remove them from it. I made the mistake of choosing a pic of my mum in front of a historic house!
2. Fine tuning those virtual scissors - again, choosing a nice simple image is key, but also be sure to use the ‘zoom’ tool when you’re extracting people from your original scene as even the smallest bits of background will show up in your new creation
3. Is it a fitting tribute? - as you choose your images, it’s wise to consider your subject’s expression, their body language and what they’re wearing… before you place a beautifully cut out skier on a lush green meadow….
Thanks for the challenge, ds106!
(2 stars in the visual assignments category)
Posted in bunk3, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments419 | Comments Off on A Whole New World
Friday, June 8th, 2012
Task for digital storytelling course DS106 was to transform a photo into a drawing.
Here’s the original – I chose a photo that meant something to me (this is a friend’s baby) and that had plenty of light and dark areas.
Using Serif PhotoPlus (don’t ask, it came with my computer), I wanted to see if you could represent the curve of skin as effectively through digital shading as you can with a pencil…. I tried this two ways: firstly, by using the pencil draw quick-fix tool under the Artistic menu. It didn’t work out that well, as you can see:
I then followed J-rabbit’s excellent tutorial which got me much close to the effect I was hoping for….
It needs a little more grainyness, and perhaps some more dark areas to really show the potential of the shading, but overall I think this is a good start. Thanks J-Rabbit!
Posted in bunk3, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments504 | Comments Off on Turning a photo into a drawing
Friday, June 8th, 2012
I didn’t know about the Say It Like the Peanut Butter assignment until I noticed kag0715′s awesomely frightening first animated GIF come through the ds106 stream.
The assignment requires us to create an animated GIF from our favorite or least favorite film – the clip should be one which captures the essence of the scene with a minimal amount of movement. I chose to go with a moment in my favorite scene from my favorite movie: The You’re All Right scene from Repoman.
The brilliant YouTube Downloader plugin for the Chrome browser was used to grab the clip. With this plugin installed, videos on YouTube can be downloaded with a single click of a button that automagically appears below the player.
The next step was to trim the segment of the clip I wanted to use in MPEG StreamClip – I chose 8 frames per second for the 1.2 second clip. This produced a half dozen or so png files which were opened in GIMP as layers.
Using the Filters > Animation menu choice, which I just learned about today from Alan, I was able to narrow my choice down to three frames. As there was a bit of distracting camera movement causing Otto to jitter back and forth, I decided to use Jim’s layer masking technique to animate just the beer pouring out of the can. Everything but the beer has been removed from the two topmost layers except for the bear stream. This allows the still frame from the bottom layer to show for the entire loop.
After cropping and resizing (scaling) the image, I saved it as a GIF and set the delay rate to 160 ms.
I’m pleased and surprised that the entire file weighs in at 70 kb. My next step will be to turn it into a tga texture file and take into Second Life to sell at Scottlo’s Animated GIF Emporium. The price, as with all other items, will be 106 Linden dollars – or two for twice the price.
Posted in ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments2 | Comments Off on You’re All Right
Friday, June 8th, 2012
My second attempt at one of the Visual Assignments from the DS106 repository is Time of Day, which appealed to me because of the image appearance and because I wanted to try some more work with layers and combining photographs.
Take a picture of the same spot outside several times in a day, then merge them all together in a way that shows the differences in appearance over the day.
When the Daily Create for that day turned out to be take a picture multiple times over the course of a day and represent it as one picture, it seemed an obvious choice. So I set up a small camera on a tripod and took a picture every hour at 6 after for 12 or so hours.
This was my finished product with the earliest photo in the strip on the left and the latest in the strip on the right, but it didn’t come easy for me.
Time of Day
The editing of these images (I ultimately used 8 of the 12) was particularly difficult one for me, mostly because of my unfamiliarity with Photoshop.
Scott Plunkett‘s tutorial for the assignment gave me a good approach for what I needed to try to do (specifically to just cut off increasing slices and layer them on top of the base image), but he used MS Paint and I wanted to try to figure it out in Photoshop.
I tried multiple wrong ways to edit them down and managed to crash Photoshop three times and my computer twice in the process. I walked away and came back the next day. This is the process I finally figured out:
- I opened up all of the images I was going to use in Photoshop
- My base image here was the last image taken (on the finished photo, you can see the strip on the right side).
- Then I took the next-to-last image and selected the section I wanted to keep – I calculated that each section would need to be 1/8 of the photo (in this case, I was using inches, ~2.75 per slice). That meant that each section would be 2.75 inches smaller than the previous one.
- For each photo, after selection the section that I wanted to keep, I right clicked on the photo, chose Layer via Cut, which creates a separate layer with just the selected material. Then I right clicked on that layer (Layer control is usual in the right lower corner of the PS screen) and chose Duplicate Layer. For output, I used the pull down menu to choose the base layer photo. That places the cropped layer onto the original photo.
- Then I just repeated the process, in reverse chronological order, cutting more and more off of the succeeding photos until the last one was just a single 2.75″ wide strip from the far left size and layering them onto the base image with all the other images. The result, an image with 8 layers, saves as the image you see above.
Once I figured out the process, it was fairly easy, but it was a bit frustrating as I flailed around a bit. Still, I’m pretty satisfied with the result.
Posted in Assignments, bunk3, Daily Create assignments, magicmacguffin, Narrating the process, openonline, tdc149, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments431 | Comments Off on Visual Assignment–Time of Day and TDC 149
Friday, June 8th, 2012
A lot of folks are doing some really fun album covers, so what the hell. Let me get in on the create too.
Here’s what you need to know:
Band name: Galeophobia
Wikipedia does not have an entry for Galeophobia, so if you have some time to kill perhaps you could fill that Wikipedia void. Wiktionary says that Galeophobia is (1) a fear of cats and (2) a fear of sharks. I have no idea how sharks and cats are related. There is also another term for the fear of cats. It’s called ailurophobia. But all of this is boring. Back to the fun stuff.
Album title: Part of Your Essential Being
I didn’t have a specific photo editor in mind. I knew I wanted to use something I’ve never used before. I did a search for web photo editor and selected Befunky, because it was kind of near the top and I am not discerning. It’s an easy tool to use though the font choices are limited. There are lots of photo effects though. I also like the fact that the tools can be used without registering as a user.
I’m pretty sure that Galeophobia is a metal band, so I selected some gothic fonts and made them as hard to read as possible, which is what metal bands are wont to do. I did the “Galeophobia” first and applied my changes. I wanted to change the positioning of the band name after applying said changes, but was unable to figure out how to do that without redoing the image. I then added the album title, played around the with coloring, and called it a day. Here it is:
First go
I was having fun though and I had some time to kill before graduation, so I decided to do another cover. Fun times!
another album cover, because a band has to have choices.
Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments44 | Comments Off on Hey. Have you heard about my band?
Friday, June 8th, 2012
Okay, true confessions time: I have a celebrity crush on Sam Elliott. Despite the fact he’s more than 30 years my senior AND older than my dad, I find something about him sexy as hell. No Sean Connery for me. Sam Elliott all the way. If I only had him by the balls…! Just kidding. Maybe.
When I came across an assignment that involved using a celebrity (or three), I couldn’t resist my Mr. Elliott fixation. What, or more accurately who, do I think of when I think of him? Well, Sam Elliott is famous for his western movies…and so is John Wayne.
John Wayne starred in 142 movies and said a lot of stuff. I started googling John Wayne quotes to find one I recognized or liked or could work with. Something fun. And sexy. To go with the sexy Sam Elliott.
Now we have a western movie star theme going. And I need one more strong, male, western man to participate in this activity with us. And in walks in none other than the one and only Clint Eastwood.
One picture of Sam, a quote from John, and the use of Clint’s name…tweek a little in Picasa and, yep, I have compiled three rough, gruff, sexy, older western heroes into one hot shot. And I muse…will my boyfriend raise his eyebrows at me when this image becomes my wallpaper? Maybe!
Posted in bunk2, ds106, magicmacguffin, umwsum12, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments24 | Comments Off on If you’ve got them…
