This idea was first suggested by Tom Woodward and has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment.
The assignment is to reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them. Write your blog post up but do not give away the answer, let people guess! The challenge is to find the icons that suggest the story, but do not make it so easy. For icons a great resource is The Noun Project.
In honor of Valentine’s Day, use three photos to tell the story of a relationship. You can use “real” photos that you’ve taken in a relationship. Or search for Creative Commons images on Flickr and find a story to tell with what you discover. You can find a bunch of examples at Slate today.
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.
Take two photos of the same subject from slightly different angles. Merge the two photos into a single looped, animated gif to create a wiggle stereoscopic image that simulates 3-D. A very good tutorial explaining the full process can be found on Martin Sutherland’s website.
Find some spam. Could be email spam, could be comment spam, whatever you want. Read it aloud. Make it your own. Try to make sense of it or make it more absurd than it already is.
Take a recent dream or nightmare you’ve had and make a visual representation of it for others to see.
Color, lighting, saturation, contrast, and many other factors all play in to taking a decent photo and making it fabulous. This assignment is to change the mood or tone of a photograph by altering the contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, exposure, etc. You do not have to change all of those things about the photo, but you can if you would like to. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to take it to the extremes, and don’t be afraid to be subtle. Familiarize yourself with your editing software, whether it’s Photoshop, GIMP, Picnik, or any number of other editing platforms. Most of all, enjoy what you are doing!
Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minmal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff. See a bunch of examples at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/02/10/photo-gif-peanut-butter/
“The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist—each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)”
From this article in Complex’s Pop Culture section
So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat’s face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it.
Take a picture and experiment with the “Halftone Effect” in some photo editing software to create a comic book effect. There are lots of tutorials on Youtube and Google.
