All the new adventures for this summer of 2015, it just seemed right to update the blog and give it a fresh look for the work ahead. It also gave me the opportunity to follow up and do another GIF after creating the Bovine Badge for Artists in Residence to see if I actually am learning or if it was chance and luck that things worked out. I think I am learning! Look above for the outcome of the banner. DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments1412
Summer 2015 and I am now a multiple residence individual. Wisconsin folks often have a primary home and a home “up North” that they go to on weekends, vacations and certain times of the year.
This summer I will be an Artist in Residence at the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival and staying at the Burgeron Trailer. Looking forward to nights around the campfire, listening to Nanalou and others tell stories and maybe a cup or two of family made beverages that will help me overcome my fear of music week!
My other residence will be The Village. I am not sure where it actually is located. Most check in and even when checked out can never leave. I am getting there and back via Dr. M’s teleporter from her treehouse near the trailer and also by hitching a ride with Cousin Ron on his famous time cycle. I am looking forward to meeting some of the residents there and find out what all this number stuff is about. Number 6 seems to have a real need to leave the place and is providing some interesting down time for me in trying to follow his adventures.
To finance my stays I am working on the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival PR team in Bovine. I needed a little more funding – so I am also the Interior Designer and Painter at the Village. Hopefully, between jobs and traveling, I will be able to keep up with my creating and assignments. I hear if things are not done according to schedule in the village, I will lose electricity in my bungalow. That won’t help keep my laptop running to get things done.
Gotta go – the Sunday deadline is approaching and Number 2 and Rover will be looking for things. I also have a load of Holland fairy tales to pile thru and figure out the trail of web story they have left.
The summer of 2015 brings several groups in #ds106 coming together to make art.
Two of the groups are open groups: Prisoner106 and Bugeron106. there is also cross participation between the two groups (Villages).
Prisoner106 has set up as a more structured format after the #ds106 format and a calendar.
Bugeron106 is a revisit of the summer of 2014 and continues the story of the Burgeron Family of Bovine County who are now leading the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival.
The two villages in addition to cross participation has also created some friendly challenges. Prisoner106 created a badge for blogs and has specific design elements. To meet the challenge, I worked on a badge for those in the Burgeron106 group. And of course since it is #ds106 it had to be GIF.
As the Bovine Fairy Tale Festival started to get off the ground, @RockyLou22 and @NanaLou had created a series of Puffins for the festival. Nanalou also organized the family by providing some focus points thru a Around the World of Workshops for each week of the summer so that members can align more easily in work together.
I decided since these images were an organizing part of the group that I would use them and not introduce new visuals. We are all involved in many things, and asynchronous collaboration can bring about confusion if too many things are circulating at once.
My first attempts were individual pics that would be used in frame animation in photo shop.
I was happy with the concepts and was really glad to have been able to create the puffin animation of it moving through the frame. The result was too spastic and more like a fast slide show than a GIF to me. It had about 60 frames and used frame animation in photoshop. There was futzing and putzing with each image by capturing it, scaling and cropping. The standards are high in the Burgeron106 and ds106 families so sloppy work was not acceptable by the PR department. More work was needed.
I have friend who shares access to her Lynda.com account for help when needed. Looking at Photoshop is overwhelming. So many available courses and screen casts. They really show how complex PS can be. I hopped around and saw a few things to explore – but my brain was not in a place to go through the tutorials. I opted for some exploration, but maximizing features that I have found already. I know there must be a way to do what I did, faster, smoother, and with good results.
I spent a day working with the images. The frame animation was a lot of duplicating and minor changes. I also had to do a lot of merging of layers as I added things.
The result was less than satisfactory – but a little better. A shower and some lunch to clear the head, move the muscles, and fuel up and I went back again. This time I went back to some of the first GIFs I made as part of the open course a few months back. At that @cogdog – Alan Levine was facilitating the You Show in Canada and thru his blog I found a tutorial which used video in PhotoShop. I decided to try video editing to GIF instead of frame animation. This allowed for a smoother transition and motion.
I saved the ground work of the basic images of each section. I went to timeline and created a video. I set a work length so that I stayed within a certain time sequence so that the GIF didn’t become an actual movie in length.
Adding transition, changing opacity and putting in motion. All of this was done with pure abandonment and free will – no logic or system. Lots of do it and try to then undo it. Lots of saving versions to have something to go back to if steps did not work.
Once I thought I was close – I changed the video to frame animation so that I could tweak some parts and to try to cut frames that are not really needed as a GIF to cut back on file size. Doing that worked well – but I lost some layers and changing things after the switch caused more issues to correct – like losing the Holland graphic and key frames that didn’t translate smoothly. It did however get me to pare down even more which was good for design.
I went back to a saved version and this time did more timing within video. This was a little cumbersome at first – but actually made more sense to me than working with the frame animation with such a large number of frames. I was able to get some images resized and placed without losing or chain reactions. I am still not able to explain how – but my mouse hand found the rhythm and pattern to repeat.
This time I went to save for web right from the video. I found by paring down and making sure that layers that were not used deleted instead of just turned off helped make the file smaller. Saving as video did not create a larger file than animation – so it worked.
The last step was getting a font installed so that I had one that I liked more from a design point. I started on my laptop which has different fonts than my desktop. This was a risk as I had a good result and changing the font meant re-establishing a base layer composed of 5 merged layers. I made sure things stayed named the same and that the one layer remained as the foundation. The digital fairies were watching over me – and I got through it without an issue. Once I got those changed and put in – it was a save as for web and done. Whew!
For use by others I saved 4 different sizes and put them in a Google Drive for access.
and….to meet part of my Prisoner106 tasks – the bike is in the GIF to represent the Artists infiltrating the Village. 🙂
After starting my ds106 journey, I soon realized I was going to be #4Life. The ds106 community network has many nodes which grow from the main hub. One node I follow along is the #ds106 Google Community of people who love to create and share their talents.
Through this community a summer theme developed for any and all who are interested in building new creations. I am now trying to absorb all the wonderful and intricate story lines created and figuring out how to jump in. The Burgeron Family was established and family members created as well as location, family histories and linkage. A summer event at the family trailer was held in 2014 for the 100th birthday of the family matriarch – Nana Lou. Workshops and classes held by Sappho, time travel trips by Cousin Ron as the story of Ron Burgeron tells his secret is told. Many adventures told by Anna Cow. Dr. M’s Treehouse, music created, and so much more!
I have discovered Bernie Burgeron, although her exact place in the family tree is still in the research stage. As Bernie’s story unfolds I find myself needing a flow chart of
who is who,
when is it a family member (character) when is it a ds106 #4life person,
what art is created by family?
what art is created by a ds106 person for family?
am I communicating with family or ds106?
who am I when communicating – KOnarheim or Bernie?
how far can I build on another’s story?
in an asynchronous environment how do you communicate creative direction with enough info to not cause undo stress for self and others?
How do you share your own work for other’s use and use other’s work in your creations with respect and creativity?
Many of the above are self-imposed. It is ds106. You are respectful of others – but you create and build. Different tangents others may grab hold of and expand, or sometimes they just sit out there on their own and don’t connect in as complex way. Just as each contributor sees things in different ways – so will any audience that finds the information.
It is grand! I love how there is no right direction but MANY right directions to follow the story. This format includes the audience in an open story and engages one to fill in what they think is needed and not passively view in a linear path. Even if you are not creating products to continue story lines – just viewing requires one to engage in reflection, imagination and creating an understanding unique to your own thoughts. It is active story telling and active story viewing.
I still have to figure out Bernie and her story and work on an actual Fairy tale. There is plenty of summer for that to take place. I just need some simmering time to figure it out.
In the meantime, I have looked, or at least tried to see the Burgeron Family – (is it Burgeron or Burgerons – I find it both ways – but have stuck with Burgeron as that is how the name is listed in the family tree and descriptions), Bovine TX, and the Fairy Tale Festival from entering as a new viewer and the 100,000 foot level.
It seemed to me that the bi-annual story telling festival focusing on Fairy Tales needed some PR boosts.
I started with an answer to a daily create and used one of Nana Lou’s Puffin fairies:
Nana Lou jumped on it and identified me and the fledging Bovine County Burgeron PR department. From there I realized I had a job to do.
The Burgeron Family works hard at their creations and they are some of the best things out there for enjoying by others – but in a world of so much media not often found. So I began to create the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival website.
I had wanted to try WIX as a tool to decide its usefulness as a marketing tool and if it was something others might be able to use and what the criteria might be to make it a tool of choice for specific endeavors. More on the tool in a future post, but I do love the bells and whistles of the HTML5 in a WYSIWYG when you are focusing on messaging over technical focus for a project.
I began to pull info together to promote the event – NOT replicate the content or give it a new home – but highlight and attract interest.
Bovine Count Fairy Tale Festival Home page
I had started and let the other family members know by sharing a link to a start-up via Google Community. And by gosh – it got some notice! I was faced with the place of now having shared my work, it is open to others and that brings questions, feedback and expectations. Attributions being a critical piece, I also found that is sometimes easier said than accomplished. It also has helped me realize how organizing and sharing my work in different ways makes it easier for others to use and to attribute.
As I have travelled my ds106 path, most of the work to date was assignments and sharing, but assignments were not connected to others. I missed the timing on group work in spring 2015 with radio show creation. I now have realization of the power of collaboration vs community support. Up until now, I have had great interaction, feedback, and support for personal creations. Now I was in the realm of creating collaboratively. WOW – the power in that and wealth. It does bring with it many dynamics and expectations from self and others. I can say however that the ds106 community is open and accepting and a model of how collaboration by a group is accomplished, yet very personal. Something not often found in our life chosen professions as easily.
I have taken the web site and started to inject some building blocks for more creations by myself as well as an open opportunity for others.
Since the festival is virtual and in Bovine County, I thought it was necessary to help festival goers know what kinds of activities and events would take place over the summer. Below is the overview page and suggestions.
Click to view page
The activities list allows for creations in several media creation paths to tell the story around the festival and the family in addition to writing fairy tales and their media tangents. I have several of my own visions for each of these areas, but not sharing at this time to keep possibilities open for others who might see a path they want to build.
Artist In Residence Breakfasts
Childrens’ Theater
Behind the Scenes Tours
Concert Series
Fairy Garden Tour
Out of This World
Fairy Tales From Around the World
To stay with the PR Marketing theme, I created a News/Info and Where to Stay page. Bovine is a remote area and not highly populated. It in some ways is like the Sturgis South Dakota of Texas as its population exponentially increases during the festival. This offshoot also has potential for some building and content creation in the story around the story.
Added Note 6/14/2015: Seems the Bovine Arts Council according to the Bovine Daily paper and some town folk were concerned about the festival overpopulating the area and requiring resources. Still a bit of a political controversy and topic at the diner each day. Pluses and minuses on each – we will see what develops.Read about it in Aunt Sappy’s post.
All this just percolates in my head and is mushrooming into so many paths of possible creation. It is the synergy of connectivity to others and collaboration vs collaborative support. I hope that others may find some inspiration and share their creations as they build or connect. I also hope that I can build and connect from the work of others and do so in a respectful and creative way to take things to new dimensions in my learning. The greatness of building is the beauty of using the strength and quality of pieces to create new iterations and dimensions – which in turn should spur yet more creativity.
