Jerry – (Character Dossier)

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As I work in ds106 alongside noir106, assignments sometimes are based upon a character that was developed in the first weeks. Character themes are not a requirement for open course participants and there are plenty of ways to complete assignments or choose assignments from the banks without one.

Looking at the archives of individuals who have worked this framework, a theme seems to have a positive edge for cohorts. There was Wire – looking at things thru a TV show, summer trailers, and other themes that seemed to help participants move thru with a thread and build skills within a parameter so that you didn’t eat up your time thinking of a new angle, but the actual work.

Spring 2015 UMW students are using the theme NOIR films. I am now in week 5 and can see if I had a character, some of my work would be more part of the group and be easier for feedback purposes.

My target is still to gain skills to be able to begin to use all the content I have from family. So in that thread, I am going to use my Dad as my character. He had a great way of looking at life and the things that happened in his life. He also lived during times that were different than mine and his stories of how things were seem fitting as “character” material. As I use him, his life will be a foundation of my character  – with some truths and some elaborations.

JERRY 

My character is my Dad – but with creative license to embellish the truth for the purposes of creating in ds106.

Name: Gerald Elmer Gruenewald –
Nickname: Jerry
Birthdate: May 30, 1937 (Memorial Day)
Place of Birth: Milwaukee Wisconsin, USA
Occupation: Mechanical Engineer
Marital Status: Married
No.of Children: 2 daughters
High School: Senior Picture

Jerry

2009 (4 years before passing away)

Granpa of the Bride

Bio:

Jerry is a handsome man at every age. He never had to have school supplies in high school. The girls were more than happy to make sure he had what he needed in class when he needed it – whether it was pen, pencil. paper or other. His mother was of Polish decent and his father German. His father passed away when he was 16 from cancer and Jerry became the man of the house for his mother and brother Bryan – 7 years younger. He fell in love with DixieLee at the age of 18 and eloped at age 19. They were married for 52 years before she passed away. He was a star on the high school football team and popular in his class. He started as a machine apprentice out of high school and continued to learn and perfect his skills. While he had some college credits, he never entered a full program or completed a degree, but he became the first Wisconsin state certified professional engineer based on his proficiency and expertise over the completion of a college degree. He built 3 homes, loved woodworking, cars, and especially family. He was a Green Packer fan.

Favorite Food: Pretty much anything with lots of flavor. Seafood – fresh was a favorite later in life.

Favorite Drink: Whiskey on the rocks. There were those Manahatten times in early years.

Favorite Color: He said he didn’t have one because he was color blind. – But it seemed to be blue.

Favorite Book: Loved books on local history

Favorite Movie: 

Favorite Posesion: License Plates of every car he drove, his vinyl record albums

Personal Motto: Fantastic!

I can already tell this might be helpful – there is so much about a person we take for granted or think we know, but never really asked them. This will be good for looking into the rest of our family as well as capturing some of these things from those of us still around.

 

 

 

Queen Tillie and the Rabbi

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Design Unit

Create a tv/movie poster that captures the essence of the story with minimalist design/iconography.

Poster: Minimal Design

Based on my character Jerry and the adventures and daily activities of growing up on Milwaukee’s Eastside in the early 50’s.

This was 2.5 stars, however it seemed easier for me. Having done professional work in websites, learning systems, professional development promotional brochures – the idea of a minimalist or any kind of poster or flyer seemed like another day at the office. Although the days doing this kind of things were anything but “another day” – they were the fun days of being able to create.

Design principles in play are:

  • Color – keeping to one color and shades/tints.
  • minimalism and use of space –  framing and using the rules of thirds was helpful in framing for visual impact and effect.
  • symbols – using the icons of the football helmet and the buildings.

One can make a case for many design elements but focusing on a few brings the result into being.

Using PhotoShop for image creation using layers and beginning with 3 rectangles of color each a little smaller to make the frame. Icons and text were than added. The image flattened and exported as a jpeg for publishing. The icons were selected and edited to add or change color for this poster. The E was lime green when found. The helmet was only a black and white icon. Times Roman is the font.

Queen Tillie and the Rabbi were the class president and the class thug turned businessman in life who narrate the story of the neighborhood and the adventures, antics and life of those who lived on Milwaukee’s Eastside in the 1950s.

Post Script: It is really bugging me that I didn’t align and make the borders even! Every time I see this I want to go back and adjust. And if you didn’t see it – thank you….! I will go back and fix that….just not sure when…..balancing learning and products yet. 🙂

Sketchy Dr. Groom on Assignment

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Learning By Design

Turn ideas into pictures!

Visualize a blog post, TED Talk, Class lecture or even dense text from a book- through drawing. Use the pictures to symbolically represent & concretize abstract concepts, and to make connections between ideas. Try to use words sparingly and only to reinforce your imagery.

Doodle it in your notebook, use your tablet, or scribble it on the back of a napkin. Just be sure to digitize it and then blog about the process, including citing where your inspiration came from.

I decided to follow another ds106er path (that”s you @spencer_cscott) and take an assignment and tweak and create it into an assignment of my own. Learning by Design is creating a doodle or sketch of a complex topic and making it into a visual with design principles.

I have been interested in sketchnoting and been reading the work of Sylvia Duckworth. (Sketchnotes for Beginners) And for years now RSA style videos have fascinated and tempted me to discover how to create. The next thing that came into play was all the mystery around Dr. Groom this week. It is hard to not want to jump in as you are doing the assignments. The adventure actually creates a thread of connectedness in the community. (Probably designed that way don’tcha think!). As we each explore digital media and how to use it, a common thread helps as we approach our own content in learning new ways of creating and expression.

PROCESS

After reading about sketchnoting and downloading a few apps for my iPad. I settled on Paper 53. I liked the way it handled and the quality of the sketch. It makes scribbles, and bumps and jumps, look like a style and intended.

At first I thought I would use video and make it more of an RSA kind of presentation. I used an IPEVO document camera which captured my sketching in video format. It is cool and it worked and I will definitely go back to it for another assignment or creation. For my intent here, the distraction of my hand drawing (it looked HUGE) was not an example of thinking of design.

I refocused on the topic of the week – design and then decided to use photo shop instead, but add the audio and animation features as well. So here is the tweak – I did a design, of still images with audio to produce a video. To keep it manageable and an assignment not a project – I used only a part of the weekly videos to sketchnote. The reasons were that this was not to actually create a product of the content and it will be old in another few days. I wanted to understand the steps and process and create something short enough for feedback from others.

I downloaded the Groom Week 4 Video and the Intro to Week 5 video to extract audio. This was a good follow-up to week 4 and pushed me to stay with Audacity and audio editing. Another plus to continue with audio from last week and build.

I worked on the audio portions that I wanted to include in my story. From there I needed to now listen and do my sketchnote of those portions. I used the Paper 53 and created a full image just as the original assignment had suggested.

Sketchnote

After saving as a JPEG I moved to Photoshop and opened the image.

The next steps:

  1. Create 22 duplicate images and name each in sequence of sketchnote graphic and context.
  2. Create a first layer of a white background to act as the whiteboard.
  3. Start with the first of the sequence and erase all but the one image.
  4. Continue with the next 21 layers.
  5. Export from Audacity and then Import the edited mp3 into Photoshop
  6. Use the Timeline feature of PS and set all images at END of audio clip. I needed the story to stay within the audio so I worked backwards first to prevent running out of room at the end and having to continuously go back and move all the layers around.
  7. Added transitions to layers when needed.
  8. Locked position on each so that they would float in without jumping.
  9. Created and added a last image for closure and identification, then added it to the timeline.
  10. When satisfied with placements and flow I went to RENDER VIDEO and exported as mp4.

So sounds not too bad. BUT – I had to do this more than once – I stopped counting after #3. The first time I started on my desktop machine. As evening rolled around, I decided to switch to my laptop and at least be in the same room as my family and a little more comfortable. By this time it was mostly just the grunt work of moving layers a fraction of a space etc. Thought all was going great – it played in preview just great! I rendered and when I opened it NO AUDIO.

Okay – go back and try again. But then I found that after rendering and saving – the timeline turns into something flat and you really can’t go in and change much. So I had to get rid of the timeline and replace all the layers before rendering again.

Done –  rendered – NOW IT HAS AUDIO BUT IMAGES ARE TWISTED! I needed to redo again! And this time I stressed out my laptop and it ran out of memory and froze up! Now I had to do machine maintenance and repair. Time for bed!

The next morning – I just went right to my desktop and worked there. I had saved some copies- but basically they had too many edits in them and it was faster to begin again. I had this down now – back to the Next steps above. Followed them and YEAH!!! It rendered and it came out fine!!!

LESSON LEARNED: Before exporting or doing a major change to the file – save at least 2 copies. This way I will have a master copy of a place in time to go back and not have to start completely over. I will need to remember to update that file as I go along as well. Next would be to get rid of all the copies that won’t make a difference anymore if you have to back so that I am not eating up memory and storage.

The original assignment was 3.5 stars. I am bumping it up to 5 stars on my chart – but I’m not tracking stars as an open course participant anyways. 🙂

I will cover design principles in a later post.

 

Fractured Iterations

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Still continuing with some iterations of the FRACTURED animated poster.

To see where this started.

From feedback and suggestions I reversed the build. I still want to go in next and change some of the text will be more group specific.

reverese2

Also found the feature to create a gallery. Here is the Fractured Gallery starting with the first attempt to the most recent. Still working on how to title and make this smoother. Right now this feature is rather clunky – you have to click an image>go to a page> click on image to get it to run. Too much effort for a visitor. Working on it.

 

Snap, Crackle, FRACTURE

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DESIGN: Create an animated movie poster

unitfiveposter600_2

Lesson learned was saving final GIF in several sizes for different uses. When I first saved this it was huge (see at end of post). In order for it to run in the blog the file has to be inserted as a full size. Which then means if you want it to present nicely (design!) you need to have options of different size files to insure they will run, unlike a photo which you can resize within wordpress itself for different design considerations. How to video embedded below.

From feedback received – a tweaked iteration in which the build is reversed.

I chose this assignment for the following reasons:

  • 4 stars to challenge and stretch
  • Theme of movies seemed in alignment with #noir106
  • Having to use PhotoShop for more than a quick image manipulation.
  • To be successful in figuring out PhotoShop animation at an entry level.

I first searched for NOIR movie posters. Several options came up including several “100 Best Noir Movie Posters”. I ended up on a site with posters from the 40’s-today. (I will put the link here when I find it in my history).

There were several posters that text, color, placement- the design elements this unit is focusing on,  were prominent. But they were not great candidates for pushing my current animation skill level or too complex. I was looking for something that would give me a chance to learn animation, but also give the chance to apply principles of design.

My next step was to narrow a choice down to interest and forms and shapes that would challenge me, yet be proper for using in photoshop animation. For this first attempt I wanted the pieces of the poster to build the and not try to create movement within an image like a leg kicking or gun firing. That attempt will be the next creation. I decided to do “Fractured”. It is actually a newer movie, but does come up as Noir. I will gladly wait for comments to tell me how it is not Noir. Not taking a full noir slant to ds106 I do have license to be as Bond has stated – a heretic. 🙂

Using the resource links from the UMW instructors for #noir106 I came across a screencast created by Alan Levine from a poster for the movie Bridge over the River Kwai. It was helpful in pointing out Photoshop had an animation feature and that it built upon the concepts of layers. Seems that Shrek’s reference to life is better as an onion – it has lots of layers is a key in this creation process for digital media.

@cogdog screencast: https://www.screenr.com/Lcos (can’t get this to embed – any suggestions?)

I began with making the segments. Lots of do overs, and using blurs, cuts, smudges. With the pieces completed, it was time to find the animation. The screen cast was an earlier version of Photoshop so a few queries on Google and I found where the location in my version. Some time spent in things being grayed out, etc. Finally got the slides and timing to an acceptable point. It was then time to Google how to save as a gif.

How DESIGN was a part of this assignment

Design considerations were a big part in this assignment. While the poster already designed for effect, taking it apart to animate also had design considerations.

  • What order should pieces become visible to show design and story?
  • At what speed and duration for each piece?
  • How much of the original picture should stay static?
  • Are there pieces that should be cut?

One part I did have was the tag line coming before the title of the movie. Tendency is for one to read or view left to right for comprehension, but for visual interest how would the pieces coming in take the viewer’s eye from one place to another?

I began with the left upper piece – to start as this would be what the eye and brain would expect. I then jumped to the right to pull the eye across and then top center to join. This gives the viewer activity, yet in a flow. The static background becomes the canvas. Once 3 top pieces are in place the form or the man becomes visible and the viewer knows it is a person – but not who until the end.

At this point I was bringing in the tag line. Again following convention of reading top to bottom. When finished it just didn’t feel right or flow. It looked okay and ran – but design wise it wasn’t at the mark yet.

Back to the order and animation. I had to start over with the timeline because I couldn’t figure out how to put the correct stops in again after changing a layer in the original. Not a big deal – I was getting faster at doing it and it reinforced what the steps were so that I can do this again.

This time I switched up the middle sequence and brought the 3 parts of the title in then the tagline. So much better. It emphasized the title and made more sense to me now. I liked the flow and order.

Looking at each part as an object and not content provided the mindset needed to do this as design.

Settings complete. Saved and it works when I open it in a browser.

My next try at this will be to add position – flying in or out etc. as well as some actual builds of the visuals coming in view thru opacity levels rather than as full picture at once. With this poster, the abruptness of entry I thought was appropriate to the feeling of fracture.

Assignment Prompt:  http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/animated-movie-posters/   This assignment was rated 4 stars.

Thanks to @mdvfunes, @cogdog, @phb256, for help on getting the graphic to run. The solution is to insert as a Full file not smaller in word.press. Which then is the new lesson to save and create the gif in a size that is right for posting within a blog or other space. I will go back to the file and save again in a smaller canvas.

Right in the ds106 handbook!!!

Thanks to the ds106 community. Feedback and critical friend comments ease frustration and help growth at exponential rates!

Way too big for good use in publishing here – this was the first save. Also note: The following had a white band across the background layer as a fix for the wording. Design wise it detracted. So more tweaking and corrections were made to get to the version at the beginning of this post.

posteranimateunit5

 

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