I did my first GIF today as part of an Visual Assignment for this week. This assignment was worth three stars and it was pretty fun. It was called Say It Like the Peanut Butter and you can find it here.
This is a clip from the movie Contagion, which I saw for the first time last night. Though Gwyneth Paltrow wasn’t in the majority of the movie, I thought the time she was in it was hilarious because I got to see some of the best “sick” faces I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t get over the above clip, where she’s sick and the doctors are trying to examine her and she can’t stop making the most unattractive face ever.
I made this clip by taking three screen shots from the actual DVD, saving them as JPEGs and converting them into a GIF in Photoshop. I’ll add more detail to a GIF I add later once I figure out how I actually did it. Mostly I clicked around and I would have you greyscaling it a few times, inverting, accidentally deleting the file, etc.
I have been keeping myself busy at the Macguffin Camp - reading about photography, doing my Daily Create assignments (did each and every one so far this week) and thinking about my visual assignments. I have completed two and the third is under way, but nobody knows about them. The reason why nobody knows about how diligent I have been is that I haven’t updated this blog of mine.
I am going to be brief here, since I desperately want to go back to thinking about my visual assignments. I swear, they are addictive. These days I can’t wait to get home so that I can update my Daily Create and play with my photo editors. I have even started carrying my camera with me and today, when my students left the classroom, I took some more photos (of the classroom and out the window). I did this, I reasoned, so that I could catch the light. Most of my Daily Create photos so far have been Nightly Creates, as I usually do them when I get home from work.
Anyway, what’s this story of my ship coming in?
Visual Assignment 379 asks us to photograph our best daydreaming window and alter it to show what we are dreaming of. I am dreaming of the holiday and of the time I am going to spend at the sea-side with my family. It is as simple as that. Though, while I am at the sea-side, I will have to abstain from the Daily Creates and other Camp activities. You can’t have it all.
And here’s how I did this task:
I used PhotoFiltre. It is not in our packing list, but it is free to download and use. I wrote about PhotoFiltre here.
I copy-pasted the ship onto the window as shown in this video:
After that I painted the area around the ship using the brush tool and some dark red paint matching the window.
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”.
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.
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!
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.
A long time ago (almost 3 years ago) I had this life where I watched movies and read books and listened to music. Then I had a baby (now a toddler), and I don’t do any of those things anymore, because my time is spent trying to raise this child to be a decent human being.
Back when I watched movies and read books and listened to music, the husband and I would visit our friend Matt Mills (who can be seen playing drums in the video below).
Matt Mills worked/works at Video Fan on Strawberry Street in this lovely city called Richmond. Here’s a picture of Video Fan that I didn’t take:
Matt Mills was a horror/exploitation/cult movie aficionado. We spent a lot of time watching questionable movies like White Dogand Tenementand gems like Spider Baby. He talked a lot of Argento and Bava. Matt was sweet enough to lend Will and I his Bava boxed set after my son was born. Unfortunately, I was too sleep-deprived to remember any of what I saw.
I do, however, remember the shadows in those Bava films. After reading the prompt for “Creep on a movie scene,” I thought about those Bava movies and I thought about this great picture I have of myself mopping up someone’s spilled drink at a party. The picture is a shadowy, dark, and creepy:
The original photo is in color, so I just did a quick edit in iPhoto and changed it to black and white. I then open the photo in Photoshop. I found the still from Black Sunday through a Google Image search. I downloaded that photo to my desk top and opened it in Photoshop too.
There was a lot of fumbling around in Photoshop, which I’ve never used before. I created two layers–one with the mopping photo, the other with the Bava still. The background from the mopping picture was deleted. I experimented with the brightness and contrast. Then I dragged the altered image into the Bava still. I looked like a giant compared to the characters in the Bava movie, so I sized myself down a little.
I’d like to repeat it all just to make sure I have the hang of it.
Evil truly does lurk in the shadows. Here’s the proof:
For my first Visual Assignment I chose the “Make An Album Cover“. I’ve done this before on some other blog of mine but, I enjoy the random elements to this assingment.
Gathering the pieces
The first step is picking the band name via the random page function in wikipedia. I landed on a page about the Carex nudata, which is apparently a species of true sedge.
Lastly, the hardest part, finding an image on the Explore Page of Flickr that had a creative commons license on it. By the third roll I lucked out with this one:
Credit to Michael Lamberty for the original photo
Also does anyone know what good practice in when remixing someones photo when they put their name at the bottom of the photo? Is it ok to delete that? Or should I maintain that as a way to connect back to the original source? Deleting is probably ok as long as I give credit somewhere, right?
The Creation
So the first thing I notice is the nice open space at the top of the image. A good spot to put some sort of text, right? I chose to place the band name there and stick with the kind of italics I associate with scientific naming of things.
I also noticed the brightness of the flowers might be a good place to drop some text. So after typing it in and playing with a bit of transformation in Gimp I got it to look mostly the way I wanted it to. I liked the combination of the word “closed” and the strike-through at first. I’m still not sure if I love it but, I think it works.
Once the text was placed I wondered what would happen if not only the far background was blurred but all the image surrounding the flower. As I began playing I noticed it made the flower pop and seem almost surreal. It lost a bit of its flower look when it became disconnected from the rest of the image but, I think I like the fact that it became this lone, weirdly shaped object. If I was a bit more daring I think I would have blurred the background even further to really isolate the flower.
Overall, I like the way this one came out. I imagine this band would be some kind of folksy, alt-rock kind of band. You know, a hipster kind of group that would think a scientific name was clever for a band.
I find these 3d wiggle stereoscopy animated gifs really fascinating, so I tried it.
I took a lot of pictures down at Lake MacGuffin this past weekend, so I found some shots that looked like they would work.
If you haven’t seen them before, here’s the basic idea. You take 2 shots of a subject from slightly different position or angle and then make them into an animated gif. If done right, you get a 3d-like effect.
If they’re not wigglin’, click on the image to get it going.
For the bird gif, I put the two images into separate layers in Gimp. I made one of them 50% opaque while I worked so I could see them both superimposed. Then I used the move tool, the scale tool and the rotate tool to try to get the main body of the bird matched up in both layers. Then I set the opacity back to 100% and cropped the whole thing so that both layers were the same size and shape. I saved it as an animated gif and set the interval to about 150ms. I used the same general technique for the other one as well.
Here’s a few links with some more examples and explanations of the effect.
The neat thing about this was that it sounded kind of ho-hum at first, until we saw other people pick it up and run with it, to date it has been done 29 times. The original assignment was:
Write a sentence (preferably somewhat coherent, yet on the nonsensical side), a poem, or a quick story using the titles of songs you have in your Windows Media Player (iTunes may possibly work as well). Print the screen. Paste it in Microsoft Paint (or some higher-end equivalent). Save it, upload it, and share. If you could even respond to the one I originally created as a challenge (possibly even embed it as a comment on that blog entry), that would be even cooler.
It calls on you to be creative with the titles of songs in your collection. My student last semester Tiffany actually was able to make sentences out of her song titles– my own first version was sort of a weaving of taxes driving someone to robbing banks being on the run, and ending up happy on a beach:
So I was looking for a new visual assignment to do this week, and I took my new random visual assignment picker for a spin- try it at http://assignments.ds106.us/randomvisual, and ended up on Flickr-Ized Playlist Poetry which builds on this earlier assignment. Here is another gold nugget from the bag of ds106 when people riff off of assignments to create new ones,
For this one, I was asked to
Take your Playlist Poetry assignment and find Creative Commons Flickr photos to illustrate your story. Try using a slideshow tool to interweave the song titles and images.
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And off I went to http://compfight.com to find the 20 images to match the 20 song titles; it took a bit of keyword bingo shuffling, but I never fail to find good images. To make the slideshow, I used one of the 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story Tools- this one is called PhotoPeach.
In Photopeach, I was able to upload all 20 images (plus the screenshot of the original playlist), and set a speed for the slides. To create the captions, I did a copy of my playlist from iTunes. I put it into Excel, and deleted all columns but the song title and artist, and used a function to string them together to make it in the form of Song Title (Artist)
I was able to paste in the entire list into Photopeach. I wanted to include the creative commons credit as part of the slideshow description, but could not find a way to make it part of the page, so I went back to the editor, and added the text to each slide’s caption.
Photopeach also offers an ability to add a sound track from its library, but you can also search youtube, so I used one of my songs:
It makes for a nice final package, I get the captions scrolling, the music, and a bit of Kens Burns added in for free (well it is not a choice).
The assignment is not too challenging, but a bit more work then the 2 stars it is listed at. The trick of course, is trying to find the right photos, and trying to be metaphorical and not just being literal. Not sure if I got that, but once I was started down this road, I was not going to stop!
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.....
