DesignAssignments172 – Assignment Bank

Another New Timeline

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For my last assignment, I decided to change the events of a whole movie with one little change of dialogue. I watched the first of the Star Trek reboots earlier this week, so I decided to mess with that movie. Specifically, the scene where Captain Pike dares Jim Kirk to do better than his father and enlist in Starfleet:

I figured there was a pretty good chance this alternate version of Kirk would totally ignore Pike’s dare, and just continue on with his life.

Just like that, the entire course of history is changed. Oh, and say hello to Captain Spock of the Starship Enterprise for me.

Tools used:

Inkscape

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Dead Ripley

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I’m a huge film enthusiast, so I loved the assignment idea of messing with central plot points of movies. What if major events had never happened? How would this impact the rest of the movie? I find such questions inherently fascinating, so I had to try my hand at these alterations. As such, I began combing through my favorite movies, eventually settling on examining Aliens. I’ve always loved this film. In fact, it is one of the only movies where I truly think the sequel surpassed the original. But what if Ripley had never been rescued? What if she was dead when her pod was discovered? The rest of the movie would simply never have happened. So I grabbed a screenshot of Ripley enclosed in her pod, and added an altered version of the dialogue following her discovery. The result is below.

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Less Trouble When You Do Not Eat Alone (Messing with the MacGuffin)

Playing more with the #ds106zone for the Twilight Zone episode of the Invaders. All of the screaming, banging, and destruction might is averted if Alien Lady checks her iPhone.

Instead of getting zapped by laser guns and whopping spaceships with her axe, instead, Alien Lady and Jim Groom laugh at old stories over the best tacos in Virginia, perhaps the entire east coast.

Messing with the Macguffin may be one of my all time favorite ds106 assignments, because technically it is pretty simple (superimpose some text on a screen capture of a movie scene):

Wikipedia defines the MacGuffin as “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.” For this assignment forever change the plot of a movie, tv show, etc. by changing a single line of dialogue. Put this new line of dialogue below a screen-cap of the moment in the movie you’re changing. Credit to Tom Woodward for posting an example of this idea in the #ds106 Twitter stream.

The beauty here is in the thinking and decision of what incident might unravel the plot- the storytelling here is in the thinking not the tool tinkering. In this case, if Alien Lady is not in her house, she never encounters the spaceship (maybe they fly on to Jim’s house), and the creatures on the ship get to go home.

I knew I wanted one of the earlier clips she she is cooking in the kitchen, and holding objects in her hand. I got the idea to throw in a twist, what might get her out of the house, but tweet from a friend? So while her house is a shack, has no electricity or running water, she does have an iPhone (solar charger). I clone brushed the knife out of ehr hand in PhotoShip, and made room to insert an image of an iPhone (there must be only 10,000,000,000,000 of them out there). I did paste in a screen cap of a twitter screen rather than an iPhone ome screen, it is so small you canot read the tweet. I placed it over her hand, then copied her hand from the screen layer, returned to the oPhone layer, and deleted the selection to make it look like her hand was on top.

For the tweet, I used a very key site for doing ds106 fake content- LEMMETWEETTHATFORYOU http://lemmetweetthatforyou.com/ lets you type a username in a box, and the twitter message. In this case there really is an @AlienLady, so I inserted a clip of the TZ character for the icon.

And there you go, the power of the MacGuffin is that it can neutralize the Twilight Zone!

Rewriting Film

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The purpose of this assignment was to pick a pivotal point in a film and rewrite the dialogue of that moment so that it changes the outcome of the movie. After browsing through a bunch of webpages, I found one that lists 40 iconic screenshots from 40 famous movies. After that, I chose my favorite movie of the bunch, which was Into The Wild. As most people know, the film concludes with the main character starving to death in the Alaskan wilderness. At no point throughout the film was there any notion that he wanted to return home, which led me to my screen-cap.

For those who are fans of the film, I hope you enjoy it! For those who have not seen it, I apologize for the spoiler.

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Jack, You’ve been Working Too Hard

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One of my first two contributions to the #ds106radio community (likely back around February, 2011, uploaded to the dropbox) was this little audio story clip from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, starring Micheal Keaton in the title role, and Jack Nicholson as The Joker. Also highlighted in the film was Jack Palance, playing the part of crime boss, Carl Grissom. In the audio clip, Grissom asks his henchman Jack Napier (Nicholson’s character, before he becomes the Joker) to handle a job down at a chemical plant.

But what if Grissom had valued Jack differently?

“Jack and Jack (Batman1989)” by aforgrave, on Flickr

Created for the #ds106 Digital Storytelling assignment, “Design Assignment 172: Messing with the Macguffin”.

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2 Stars- MacGuffin-ing it up

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This was for the “Messing with MacGuffin assignment that said to change an important moment in a movie. I can think of no more crucial moment in a movie than the choice Neo, I’m sorry, Mr. Anderson makes in the Matrix. What would happen if Mr. Anderson didn’t go down the rabbit hole?

I pulled a picture from the movie by taking the picture from google images. It was really simple from there, just putting in the text layer in GIMP and picking the font (Arial, because it’s a typical font that captions are done in). Sorry it wasn’t more complicated.

10/15 Stars down, 5 to go!

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Messing With The MacGuffing but in here is messing with the meat ball

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messging with the meat ball. In this Desing Assignment i change the whole setting in a funny way

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Messing With The MacGuffin

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In the assignment Messing With The MacGuffin, I took images from both movies, Spider-man and The Mask and opened them both up with the program paint. I extended the window frame of the picture and filled the rest in with black. I then selected the text tool and used the font Tahoma. Then I inserted a clever line.

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Week 5: Busy Little Gergy

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Yes, a busy little Gerg am I. I’ve got some more Daily Creates and some more Design Assignments, just like I promised. I’m a man of my word. You’re anxious, I can tell. So let’s get started.

Daily Create 30 – The Place of Losing

I should have posted this one a while ago, but, to be perfectly honest, I forgot I even took this picture. The assignment was to take a picture of a place you lose things in your house.

Lots of books. Comic boxes. Sword rack. Stitch, wearing a leopard-print santa hat. Zim’s house. Boondock Saints flask. Statue of Silent Bob. Animatronic hamster that sings “Kung-Fu Fighting”. Yup, this must be my bedroom. Hard to imagine losing stuff in there; it seems to organized.

Daily Create 42 – The Job

Take a picture that represents a current or former job. Gladly. Having recently resigned from my soul-crushing call center job, I turn my attention to a much more fulfilling (albeit less lucrative) job:

I’m pretty impressive on paper.

Design Assignments!

Pop Culture Gif;

This was the easiest. Downloaded the clip from youtube using keepvid, then trimed it down with Roxio Creator and plugged the result into Adobe Media Encoder and bingo! Gif. (Adobe CS5.1 makes my life so much easier)

Messing with the MacGuffin

This was a bit slapdash, honestly. It may be hard to read. After opening titles, we have Tom Hanks, as Robert Langdon, running toward the crime scene, noting a message in blood. Then, the message by the body reads “It’s downstairs.” Finally, Langdon kneels by the pyramid at the Louvre under which the Holy Grail is burried, noting “That was easier than I thought.”

Is that it? I think that’s it, for the time being.

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Chicken Farming

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Inspired by Ben’s Video Game Remix show, I found a Zelda Replay Value/MacGuffin visual assignment. (Ben says it’s totally worth double points)

What if Link never made it to the end of the game because he became so enamored of the chickens? I know I like those crazy chickens.

Played with Fireworks for this one. Found the image somewhere online and added a Zelda font with a little glow.