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For this video assignment I had to create diary entries as if I were my host character. I decided to create a mystery that Eve had to solve to make it fun.
This assignment was really fun because I actually did one entry a night so it was almost like I had made a digital diary. I decided to create drama with her brother and added in his serial killer tendencies. Unfortunately the sound isn’t very loud and I don’t know why but I actually made it louder than it was so I tried to fix it.
You’re going to build your own mystery to solve through a series of video jounal entries. It can be a completly ridiculous case, such as “Who stole the last piece of cake?”, or it can be a real mystery like “The murder of Lizzie Bordens family”. You need at least four journal entries, and through these videos you can gather “evidence”, narrate an “interview”, anything as long as it tells the story of your mystery and the length of the video can vary as long as you clearly commnicate your case. Feel free to dress up, mess with lighting, add sound effects, etc. Have fun with it!
This assignment was not too difficult at all, and, of course, I like any assignments that let me add new dimensions to my character. Additionally, since it wasn’t a terribly difficult assignment I got to play around with features on gimp that I hadn’t tried out yet, including color filling and text boxes.
I liked messing with the typography in order to capture a noir aesthetic. It was a trial-and-error process, but I eventually found a font that I thought looked pretty cool. Additionally, changing the color of the font allowed me to add a variant design that makes each part of the bar chart stand out. For each word, I opened the color wheel and selected the base color. From there, I adjusted the levels the same way toward a silvery white shade. So each word has a different base color, yet all were adjusted similarly so that they would have a similar feel.
I wasn’t sure how much I would be able to play with my character here, but the assignment actually allowed me to add a lot of information in such little space. I think it tells a lot about my characters story, especially if you look at in the context of what we know so far.
I may have gone a little overboard on the Recycle the Media assignment. At least, I FEEL like I did. I probably spent… five hours? Six? More? trying to get this video to congeal and do what I wanted it to do. My problem was that I was inspired, and that always gets me in trouble. Oh well. I figure that since I’m including this in my 7 stars of remix assignments I have an excuse.
For this assignment I had to take at least five pieces of media, representing at least two different types of media, from our recycled media repository and tell a story with it. As I was browsing through the images and sounds a simple narrative began to take shape in my head, and I ended up downloading eleven pieces of media instead of the requisite five. I ended up only using three sounds and seven images, but you can see what I mean when I said I overdid it. In the tradition of the First Rule of ds106, I also generated my own content, the voice you hear at the beginning and end of the video, using the AT&T text to speech converter. That’s probably as close as I’ve come to “cheating” on a ds106 assignment, now that I think about it, since my original content is what ties the whole video together instead of the recycled media. But what’s done is done and if you think I’m going to go back and change it NOW, you are crazier than I am.
The first step in crafting this video was taking the sound clips I’d downloaded and crafting a soundscape in the indispensable Audacity. I realized too late that I’d made the soundscape too long for my visuals to be entirely effective, but at the time I was focused on conveying the sense of memory, loss, and a digital intermediary to both through sound alone. I used some of Audacity’s built-in effects to make all of the music sound like it was coming through a radio or a telephone. Again, its overall effectiveness might have been greater if I had use the effect more strategically and given some more contrast between sharp and radio-fuzzed music, but by the time I realized that I’d already chopped, faded, arranged and rearranged all of the music to suggest a tranquil, loving beginning and a growing tension leading into a panicked crescendo. I garbled the already-warped voice recording I’d downloaded to suggest the trope of a computer or some other digital intermediary sifting through human memory, and then added the computerized voice at the beginning and end of the recording.
Last but not least, I imported all of my media into Windows Movie Maker and proceeded to bash my face against the keyboard for several hours until I had a passable video to upload. HAHA NO, IF ONLY IT WAS THAT SIMPLE. In reality I arranged all of my images into the order I’d had in my head so they would tell a story, and then went absolutely batshit crazypants with animations, transitions, effects, colorization and the length each image showed up. It was particularly tricky to manage that last bit, because there’s no way to visually edit the length of clips or images in Movie Maker, and instead you have to fiddle around with a drop-down menu and enter the number of seconds that each image shows up. This grew desperately frustrating rather quickly, but I pushed through and I think—I think—I managed to convey something of a story in the process.
I want to share a remarkable educational vehicle for stimulating creativity and engaging students. Through the “The Daily Create” participants are offered a unique invitation to engage in creative exercises which help individuals look at the world differently. Too often, we become complacent and approach day-to-day events in much the same way with little opportunity, or time, to think or act in a creative manner.
To challenge and engage readers, I decided to describe one aspect of “The Daily Create” (TDC) in a somewhat creative manner. Can you interpret the descriptive words that are displayed in the following nine character word puzzle? If you are correct, you should be able to complete the following sentence:
Many who think outside the box* would consider “The Daily Create” as a rather …
To help readers better understand “The Daily Create”, I thought it might be interesting to compare it from the following two points of view – the teacher and the student.
TDC – The Teacher Point-of-View
The “Digital Storytelling” DS106 TDC web site states:
“The Daily Creative is an exercise in the continual practice of spontaneous creativity through short exercises. Each “assignment” should take no more than 15-20 minutes. There are no registrations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily.”
Individuals share their daily “creations” through their respective blogs with appropriate links to one of three sharing mechanisms: Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos), and SoundCloud (audio clips) where free accounts can be established.
TDC – The Student Point-of-View
“The Daily Create” is an inspirational and engaging activity that is part of the free Digital Storytelling DS106 MOOC (massive, open, online course) in which I have enrolled. The DS106 course is facilitated through Jim Groom’s hard working team at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Students in DS106 are not required to buy a textbook but they are required to purchase, if they do not own one, their own domain (e.g. www.ideasandthoughts.org or www.life-long-learners.com) together with hosting services to set up their own blog. This blog will become their online diary where they will document and reflect about their engagement in this important educational process.
The DS106 course just officially started last week and for many students new-to-blogging, their task was to secure their own domain, write their first post, and ensure that all necessary “feeds” were linked back to the DS106 learning community. One might think that because I already owned my “life-long-learners.com” domain and was somewhat familiar with the WordPress blogging process, that I would be idle waiting for the “newbies” to catch up. I assure you nothing was further from the truth!
Enter “The Daily Create” … an amazing adventure to help students express their creativity, to explore some of the DS106 linking mechanisms, and to provide an activity to stimulate the sharing of experiences through student blog posts.
In my opinion, “The Daily Create” fosters the contagious creativity that Albert Einstein recommended we share, as illustrated in this month’s “Teacher Feature” remix:
Teacher Feature #15 – Albert Einstein – January, 2012
To help the reader gain a better perspective, I will list some on “The Daily Create” tasks. These descriptions are purposely short because they are shared using Twitter’s message limitation of 140 characters. Online readers are encouraged to view these links to gain an understanding of the creativity demonstrated by this amazing DS106 community of learners:
From a student perspective, I am so amazed at the creative ideas that are showcased by my fellow DS106 learners. In addition, one of the important aspects of the entire DS106 environment is that most of the engaging assignments, together with “The Daily Create”, activities are suggested by those who have enrolled in the course. Furthermore, as a K-12 educator, I am wondering if we might modify this “daily create” mechanism to stimulate engaged learning by our own students. I welcome readers’ thoughts on how such an “outside the box” process might be accomplished.
Take care & keep smiling 
* Outside the box challenge – I purposely have not provided the answer to the above nine character word puzzle which describes “The Daily Create”. Rather, I encourage risk-taking readers to share their interpretations in the comments below.
