I didn’t know I needed a logo! Naming the blog was one thing – it took a while and so man choices. Trying to decide who I am – who I want to be – what I want others to see or remember. “Chamaeleon”, would have been better – I love change and diversity – but also am a collector.
First you had to name your company. I decided to use Digital Mustard. Until I went through the generator I hadn’t realized that the D or DM could be part of it. That didn’t play out well in my mind. D was not right. I looked for DM or just the full title.
Then there was color, font, uppercase, lowercase, squeeze, stretch, y-axis, x-axis and so on! Too many variables and all dependent on what order.
Others seemed to figure out how to come up with symbols – I may need to go back and try those out.
I settled on two variations. I like them both – but will need to live with each for a while to decide which is right – or go contrary to marketing advice and use both. 🙂
It also pushed me to figure out how to use my theme and still include an image in the header. I didn’t want to create an image that had the logo embedded – but use them independently. About 30 minutes of futzing and I got a reasonable presentation. My next image update will need to include new dimensions and strategy which is a good thing.
Between “Ma” time and other – some time for trying to figure out this #ds106 socks thing….haven’t a clue- but it is fun.
After #ds106goodspell last week the subject of socks came up. It only took a few tweets by others to get @dkernohan going and then @jimgroom, @ cogdog and others joined in. Lots of fun watching the narrative expand.
I got my Reclaim Hosting T-Shirt! Yeah! My girls say I wear too many men’s T-shirts (baggy and comfy!) so I asked for a ladies t-shirt this time….fits well and actually looks pretty decent. I will wear it with pride!
In some ways it took me back to Oct2015 and trying to step up into the Gifitup challenge. Taking time to make a GIF art over just an animated reply or statement. I am of the camp that they all have a place and purpose. The snarky fast GIF can say more than a full blog post at times and a really great art GIF can mesmerize for hours.
So the next conversations were….
I want to learn how to make cinemagraphs … Anyone have resources? Tutorials? #ds106
So as I am waiting for the arrival of grand baby #1 – whom at this time seems to be teasing us with a later than expected arrival and some false starts and my body is sore from spring garden clean up – I decided to try and focus on the challenge. I have to admit – my focus ability is very short now – so this is going to take a few iterations. To keep it in scope and to keep building – I started with the inspiration. Well -Cristopher Benitah spent a year collecting photographs and is at more of a professional level than I am -but that should not be a show stopper.
Subject and planning are key here. Not wanting to get to invested or too far from home in a video shoot if “the call” comes, I found his example of hands, sky and water. I thought this would be a reasonable goal and would use the subject as a way to deconstruct the process and decide what I need to do. Hopefully this will then help make a video set up more productive when I get to that point. I have visions of baby cinemagraphs floating thru my brain. 🙂
Started with a photo of my husbands hands to be able to crop out back ground and make my still. I used his because it was a quick shoot instead of setting up a tripod and remote to take a shot of my own hands. Nice to have a model around at times.
Pulled into PS – standard stuff. Lasso and magic wand and eliminated the background. Adjusted the photo to B&W and saved it.
Searched for some video footage of rain that was labeled reusable. Wasn’t very obvious in what I found, but then used the GIFIt plugin for YouTube and captured 6 seconds. Imported into PS using tutorial suggested by @mdvfunes at http://photodoto.com/how-to-make-a-cinemagraph/
Brought it into PS via Open after setting my workspace as Motion. Had to do some problem solving as directions were not for same version of PS and things are in different places…. Set frame rate at 12. Pasted the hands in as a layer and lowered opacity and then that gave me something and I am still not sure what it was or is: Not very long – should probably loop it for better effect…
From there I went back to what I know – imported video as frames. Used Timeline and created frame animation from layers, made sure all new layers visible in all layers was checked and pasted in the hands. I ended up with an 8mb GIF – so went back and got rid of 40 frames and got down to 9. Copied the 9, reversed them and added them to get 18 movement frames. Applied the hands frame but wasn’t able to take the opacity down -still trying to figure that one out. That would make it look like the hands were actually in the water. Scaled down the size to 500 pixels and got a gif at 863k.
But for video within a video with a still as a mask and constant will still take many frames being merged – at least in my brain and my level of PS. So I am thinking there are actions and presets to do some of this to be explored to speed things up over merging layer one of vid 1 with layer 1 of vid 2 and so on….don’t cha think?
I may try the long and tedious way with a short clip to try it out when I want the video within video with still.
The real challenge and task ahead is starting with my video and capturing that….seems there is plenty to keep me busy on this.
I am also now thinking I could use the accidental video now as an import as one layer – so again more to think of in creating the parts to get to a whole. Hoping eventually to document more precisely start to finish – that will help me – but let’s just call this the semi-focused keeping busy so I am not worrying about when “the call” will come for now.
Thanks @dogtrax, @mdvfunes, @twoodwar, and #ds106 club for the diversion and a reasonable challenge to take on in staying creative each day and between larger projects. Doing the sprints of creating art objects is good practice and spurs the thoughts and visions of ways to use in other things.
Geesh! Time flies when you are doing lots of different things.
I took on some consulting hours to help an organization write their technology plan and have ended up taking on the clean up of their website. A content management system is used which is great and distributes work. But for the last 3 years there have been many transitions and all of the check points fell off the map. The front end just look tired and had some dead ends, some loops and some things that were conflicting- not too bad, but only because there were no viewers using much of it. The back end – out of control and very tangled. Becuase of their host and set up – there isn’t a staging or development area. You can not publish things – but it makes the clean up of the back end even more tedious and error prone. So the only way is jump off the cliff and try to fly! So after a week of 12-16 hour days – I was ready for some sleep and a break.
First came my Happy Cow! A local paint and wine studio had a Friday afternoon session- so I signed up. When I got there I found out I was the only one and they didn’t cancel – so it would be me and Fred the instructor. Fred and I painted away and even finished 90 minutes sooner than was scheduled. I could have gone a little more leisurely – but it worked out fine.
I would like to do another one and work on a different type of eye, plus make the background a little brighter for some contrast.
Saturday morning – well started with some of the web grunt work – but just was not ready for it. My first grandchild’s due date is within this week- so I decided I needed to get the “Waiting” video done before arrival. Several months ago this had a lot of grand visions in my head – but I couldn’t get all I wanted. The plus was a weekly shot of Mom that shows the journey. We don’t know who the little person is – that will be a surprise for all until entry into the world. So excited!
Here is the video. I do want to get to more than just music and get more audio and narration in the family stories – but that is still evolving. Until then it is trying to find music that goes with the idea of the video. I have also begun to get better at keeping them to under 5 min. Any longer than that – no one wants to watch and they just go on. These are being placed in a flip book so each video created is separate and a reader can view, skip of view multiple times within the book.
So – my #ds106 #4life friends – I am still creating – still learning from you, still growing my skills. And still tracking what you are all doing. One of you will soon have something that I won’t be able to pass up being a part of even if there are websites to clean up.
This turned out to be more of a poster than a sign. Sign to me would be either in metal or wood somehow – but for a daily in 20 minutes – a poster is the route.
I Googled licensed for reuse flying pigs and found a rather more rat looking one with wings that was called fantasy. I took it into Photoshop and cut out the scary rat pig and then found a more piggy pig in black.
Increased the canvas size, joined the wings and the pig and then added a layer of background. From there I played with the filters using Difference Clouds. Not sure how the colors change – I will have to explore that more. First time I got cotton candy blue and while a nice contrast – didn’t strike me. Randomly I got a similar color to the wings that changed. Added difference clouds to both the background and pig. I also added a lens flare behind the pig for lighting effect.
Fonts. It is all about Fonts. Not sure I hit it – but seemed it needed a serif font. Settled on this one and then used the word art to arch around the icon.
I did end up with two versions but went with the cloud renders for the submission. And of course now have second thoughts….and also want to do more…but daily and time to move on….
