VisualAssignments

In the bag – No surprises

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I am not creating a character as the Noir106 sections are – so to do this assignment it is my bag.

This first picture shows the contents that are standard in my bag no matter which season it might be.

My Bag

My first attempt was to place each item as a photo on its own within the post, but when embedding from Flickr I have not determined how to size the image to present in a better format. So I took the items and created a collage with Picasa. Each item can be seen as a photo of its own in my Flickr album for ds106.

Whats in my Bag

Contents of My Bag:

  • My loyalty cards from restaurants, food stores, and other retailers. keeping them all on one ring helps me keep them in order and available. They are also fun to play with this way. 🙂
  • My wallet – usually empty of cash, but holds drivers license, credit and debit cards, identification, insurance cards etc. I almost called it a pocketbook – that sounds like my grandma!
  • The top right picture is my purse hook. This attached to the edge of a table and allows me to hang my purse. This way it is not on a dirty floor or hanging off the back of a chair where it can get knocked off or I can’t see it. Love my purse hook!
  • Phone – how did we manage without these before? That is my grandpuppy, Teddy, as the screen picture.
  • Coin purse. An old-fashioned idea, but when dealing with parking meters, tolls or vending machines comes in handy. Saves wear and tear on my wallet too. Not to mention – if it is full it can act as extra weight and be bordering weapon status if needed.
  • I wear glasses for reading and computer work – so the hard case protects them when not wearing. This is an established habit. When I think of how much my glasses cost – there is not another option but to protect them.
  • Mini brush – fluff and puffs the hair as needed. I find a brush works better than a comb for my fine hair.

Visual Assignment “What’s in Your Bag?”  VisualAssignments1556 –3 stars

Your purse, bag, backpack, purse, whatever, is your constant companion throughout your adult life. What are the essentials in your bag that get you through the day?Take a picture of the items and detail each of them with a description.

GIF Mania on Nightmare Alley

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nightmare3xcf
Doing this again I would constrain to jus tthe head movement and cut the frames of the hands.

Nightmare Alley 

The animated GIF process needed more practice for me to begin to get a better feel for how it can create message and meaning. The first one I did in Unit 2 was accidental in that I didn’t do much more than click, fumble and go “ahhh – okay!”. So with this next unit focusing on visual I am opting for a few of the assignments and paths from #noir106 and the Burtis prompt to create a Noir animated gif, along with my open course challenges. Finding some Noir films on YouTube, I settled on Nightmare Alley with Tyrone Powers. Mostly because I new his name and that he was considered a hunk of a man for the time.

tyrone
I chose this section because I just liked the way his eyes bug out and he goes from talky to serious.

This time around the download software didn’t work – so I needed to find a new app that was free. It worked! From there I used the Jim Groom tutorial as a guide and used the Streamclip editor and Gimp. I LOVE GIMP! While I do have Photoshop, it keeps needing upgrades, has far too many features it will take me a life time to explore and I believe in open source and sharing as a business and cultural premise. So using GIMP and finding it as developed as it is was wonderful.

I feel more accomplished after these 4 animated GIFs and their outcomes and ready to move on to another visual assignment task. I am most excited about moving forward with my own content and applying the methods.

one
Trying to capture just the blinking – but with this one still couldn’t figure out how to retain the speed I set it to before exporting.
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This one I pulled what I had in the other tools and then went to the gifmaker app and was able to slow down the speed, but not crop the picture.

But do you want to know the real eye opener? This creates a really loaded up desktop!

I need to establish some habits for creating folders and spaces for saving, uploading, etc. instead of using my desktop as I usually do. This process creates tons of files! And for someone who tends to save rather than toss – I won’t be successful if I keep trashing my desktop and then lasso it all and put it in a folder called “To Be Filed”. Some of the learning in this #ds106  #4life experience is to learn strategies for efficiency and organization so that time is spent creating – not following the elephants in the parade. The tagging, the blog structures, categories – all help as habits so that focus is on creation. Thanks #ds106er’s for sharing.

What strategies have you begun to make a habit?

Assignment: Say it Like The Peanut Butter   and is 3 STAR

Glitched the Favre & Carve Way

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Glitch Art    Unit 3 AssignmentSTARSTAR

Superbowl Sunday is coming up and WIX is promoting it’s website tool with former NFL stars with the slogan “It’s that easy”.

output_2sCbtvA Wisconsin born girl – my blood runs green and gold. Brett Farve even with the controversy is still one of the greatest Packer players. The Farve and Carve  spoof website has already drawn lots of views. True to #ds106 it employs audio, video, visual, writing – a nice example in itself.

For this visual assignment I made an animated GIF that is Glitch.  VisualAssignments1239

Glitch art is a genre of art based around digital artifacts. A digital artifact is the unexpected result of when a technology breaks. An artifact could be sound of a CD skipping or pixilation on a highly compressed Youtube video. Glitch has been called the “art of the artifact” and stretching the intended use of a device or file.

This is done with the assistance of a coders tool from the glitch generator. Running the original picture thru the generator and downloading the different results.

I then imported them into gifmaker and rearranged to create the gif. It probably would have been good to add another untouched picture in the loop to give the viewer a little more time to see the image before it gets glitchy.

For some chuckles take a listen to the product pronunciation page in which audio clips are placed saying items “the Brett Way”. And as one looks at this set up  – it is a digital story with a lot of nice techniques to keep in mind for future creations of my own.

Thoughts?

It’s a Wonderful ds106 Life

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This Say it Like Peanut the Butter assignment post will have a few iterations because now that I have gotten this far….. I WANT TO BE ABLE TO CREATE A REALLY COOL ONE WITH A MESSAGE!

As part of Unit 2 in ds106, the challenge assignment is to create an animated gif from a favorite or unfavorite movie. The bigger challenge is to find resources to help you learn how to create one. The assignment was created 4 years ago and it seems things have gotten a whole lot easier to pull out a clip and make a short animated gif. So easy in fact that I am not sure I learned too much on the first attempt other than I can cut down on a lot of time by using some of the tools available.

sayitlikepb
Attempt 1 – too long

The movie I selected was “It’s a Wonderful Life”. This scene is where George realizes he does exist because his mouth is bleeding. Other scenes considered were him running up the stairs and the finial coming off, and the end where the bell rings for Clarence.

http---makeagif.com--media-1-19-2015-MVqrgc
#2 – short and looped – probably the best for the assignment. Other tools could provide a less jerky movement.
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#3 I like the tongue starting the movement – but still a frame or two too soon.

I have to admit – it took me a while to start to do this part of the unit because all I could think of was the early days of web page design and how blinking pages were the rage and then everyone settled down and they became the “what not to do” for good design. I think the animated gifs can be appropriate and useful  communication in digital stories if done with purpose and intent. So as with most creation and art – if it has purpose and meaning it will be good and of value. That being said – the exploratory gifs that come out of this assignment within the viewpoint of seeing if you can find resource, help, and the new ideas for your own learning and then share with others on the same journey is right on target and wonderful to see.

I have seen some pretty killer animated gifs in the ds106 Google+ community and some other places linked from ds106 so this first attempt is more the proof of looking for resources and trying them out to see if something can be created and to research and read about what animated gifs are and why to use them.

I found Jim Groom’s tutorial page and started to download the tools. In doing so the gif creator just showed up and made a gif for me when I thought I was downloading the video. ! I wasn’t able to eliminate frames. I would have liked to have taken about the first 7 out so that the hand motion was just the animation. When putzing with some duplicates – the gif would run once but not loop, I have my version 1.0 done so far.

This gif is the “cheater”, easy way out. but it really did spark the creative juices and desire to master the finer details. Using other tools to make it smoother, make it my own iteration so it doesn’t have a tool watermark, and some content of meaning to me. I want to get to Gimp and to Photoshop to try the creation. So I will continue to work on this assignment and create another more extensive gif. Stay tuned!

For this gif I used Makeagif.com and basically just had to put in a start time and choose 1-5 seconds and click a button. I came across this from downloading the Fastest youTube Downloader app. The movie didn’t download -but the make a gif button showed up – from there it was all dumb luck. It also has a Chrome plugin so that you can make a gif on the fly.

Toutput_ThglMAhis is actually my first attempt (or warm up attempt) before finding a movie. If using my own photos, I would improve by using a tripod so that the background and perspective stayed aligned. He was a good sport! This was a user end tool as well – Gif Maker – upload your pics, rearrange and click the button. It doesn’t allow for tweaking or details – more wysiwyg. These tools are great for the fast and dirty kinds of things in everyday work or in creating concept drafts. Learning the finer skills is desirable for a more complete end product or combing several media together.

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