Can you guess this movie? The assignment was to depict a movie in four basic icons. I had a lot of fun working on this assignment, and worked hard to create identifiable objects with my minimal drawing skills. While I could have done this assignment using Pixlr, or another photo editing software, I chose to draw it as I thought it might be a bit more enjoyable. I hope you can guess the film!
HINT: The Oscars are tonight!
For this assignment, we had to summarize the main plots of a movie into four icons. You can try to figure out what it is.
I got all the pictures from The Noun Project and compiled them into one image using Gimp.
When it came time to do my One Story, Four Icons assignment, I’ve realized that I have a bit of an odd taste in movies. I’d much rather see live theatre or go to a concert than watch a film, and the films I do tend to watch tend to be not all that mainstream.
Because of this, and because I was having fun while doing my first one, I decided to give people three films to guess.
To do this assignment, I made a blank canvas in GIMP and imported the four icons I chose from The Noun Project for each movie into the canvas. I scaled some of them up so that they were the right size and added text to the bottom of each before saving them as a gif.
It was my first time using GIMP since I could not get the files to open in Photoshop. I like GIMP but I don’t plan on using it all that much since its font selection process was tricky. I like to be able to see all of my fonts in a list since I have quite a large collection and do not know many by name and GIMP makes you type in your font name.
Leave your guesses in the comments, and I’ll reveal the movie title during my weekly summary
Now I have known for years that two-bits is a quarter, and four bits is fifty cents. In fact, use of the word bits in currency terms had all but stopped before I was born, because I remember asking “what does two-bits mean?” when I heard my parents and aunts and uncles using the expression, “Shave and a Haircut, two bits.” I’m sure that even when I was very, very, young, inflation had written that song out of reality.
I do remember chocolate bars being a quarter though. Ah, good times …
At any rate, it used to take eight bits to make a whole, going back to the days when the Spanish silver currency would be physically cut up into “eight bits” (little pizza-sliced bits of coin, hence, Pieces of Eight) and traded for items worth less than a full coin. It’s easy enough to cut a coin in half, and a half in half, and a halved half in half — but dividing a whole up into ten pieces was way too tricky back in the day. So no decimal based currency back then. (For more on this little digression, you may find some really interesting bits on the Wikipedia entry, like I just did. I especially liked short bit and long bit. BTW, there were 2 puns in that linked text. Plus I changed the title to put it there, too.)
The Noun Project
They make attribution SO easy!
This is the first time I have undertaken the One Story / Four Icon assignment, and I fear that I have made the following retells too easy. I found it very difficult to not be too iconic. However, it has been a very valuable opportunity to poke around in The Noun Project, to play with some .svg graphics files (aha — @bellekid, I got there about half an hour after you did, I think!) and to note how nicely they have set up their site to support attribution. Very nice, in fact! Specifying the image name might make understanding the noun choices a bit too easy to interpret, however, I did combine two into one (and added some) for one icon, and only used part of one for another. So have a go!
I also encourage you to submit your guesses via the embedded Google form below. That way you can commit to your guess, and yet not publicly give away your guess, thereby not make it too easy or too little fun for all the others who will be playing. There will be a prize(s) awarded at the end of the week. Oooh!
Clock designed by Brandon Hopkins from The Noun Project
Robot designed by Simon Child from The Noun Project
Earth designed by Francesco Paleari from The Noun Project
Peace designed by Jim Slatton from The Noun Project
Bone designed by Massimiliano Mauro from The Noun Project
New Moon designed by Adam Whitcroft from The Noun Project
Full Moon designed by Alex Fuller from The Noun Project
Rocket designed by Cris Dobbins from The Noun Project
Evolution designed by Jakob Vogel from The Noun Project
I decided to do the 4 Icon Story assignment. As soon as I read the assignment I knew immediately which story I wanted to do. I loved this story and it is still very fresh in my mind. I would be impressed if anyone guessed this one.
I didn’t find this assignment too difficult, although it was a little difficult to find the images I wanted. I used the icons from The Noun Project and then used gimp to merge them together. I did have to struggle with it a bit before I realized I had to open each as a separate layer. Before that, it was just a big blurry pile that didn’t want to cooperate. I just thought gimp was mocking me again.
door - Designed by Michael Rowe, The Noun Project
gun - Designed by Olivier Guin, The Noun Project
wheelchair - Designed by Pieter Willems, The Noun Project
medicine - Designed by Emmanuel Mangatia, The Noun Project
To really get you thinking visually, I chose to do the One Story/Four Icons assignment (**). It may sound easy at first, but picking four images to represent a story, without giving it away, is actually challenging! And I loved creating it! I chose this assignment because I enjoyed looking and guessing at the ones previously done by DSers, so I wanted to give it a shot. Can you take a guess at what it is??
No hints are going to be given. And I am not going to tell you if you are right or wrong until SUNDAY the 24th because I want as many people to guess! Also, if you read that someone already guessed what you were going to say…it’s ok! You can still comment with your guess — it’s not for a grade…or is it??
Photo Credits:
For my One Story/Four Icons image, I used 4 images from The Noun Project website. That’s all I am going to say, and it is up to YOU to guess the movie! 
The next assignment I decided to do was One Story/Four Icons. This assignment was 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.”
Another part of this assignment was to NOT share what movie you were doing! So I’m obviously not going to share the process I went though to decide which movie I was going to do. I will share the process I used in making this though. In the description of this assignment they suggested going to the The Noun Project for the pictures for this project. I went and looked around and was thrilled with the choices. I choose the skull, flying saucer, sheriff hat, and pizza as my four icons. I imported these four icons into gimp and aligned them side by side. I found this project really easy to do!
So can you guess which movie I did?
Nine stars down! Six stars to go!
We are on to design week, this week. And I’m ready to show you my first assignment!
This is a required 2-star assignment called “One Story/4 icons.” Basically you need to get 4 icons that describe the movie/story/event you are trying to portray. Don’t tell people what it is, but rather have them guess!
I got all of my images from google image and created a collage using Picmonkey, which was SO much easier than using Gimp!
I ended up making two DIFFERENT Collages, so you have two chances to guess what I am trying to represent here. I feel like one is a bit easier than the other, but I’m excited to see what you all think about them!
Set 1:
Set 2:
Any guesses??
Star points: 2/15
This week in ds106, we’ve moved on from visual assignments straight into Design Assignments. To get better acquainted with designing, we have to complete at least 15 stars worth of design assignments from the ds106 Assignment Bank. Everyone must complete certain assignments in order to achieve fair exposure to design elements. My first assignment, One Story/Four Icons, is a 2 star worthy assignment in which we choose a movie or novel and reduce it to four key symbols to represent the plot. I chose this activity over the others, because it seemed more stress-free and fun!
I chose one of my favourite movies, but I can’t tell you which one! You have to guess! Below are my four symbols:
I found each of the images via Google: the mustache, drink, flute, and prompter. I added them to a folder which I opened in Picasa, highlighted them all, and clicked “Create Collage”. I then sorted them the way I wanted and uploaded my final photo to flickr.
