The Rolling Stones’ US tour of 1969 culminated in a free concert in the San Francisco area. Being free, the concert drew a larger crowd than anticipated. The Hell’s Angels were used as security. They beat up a number of people throughout the day, concertgoers as well as musicians, and finally stabbed a man to death in front of the stage while the Stones were playing. The Maysles brothers made a documentary of the tour called Gimme Shelter.

I thought I’d try telling the story on animated GIFs, but the Stones’ and Angels’ logos suggested iconography. The knife would be another icon. I scanned through clips of the movie on Youtube. There’s a scene of people climbing scaffolding to get a better view that I thought I might use to represent the crowd. It doesn’t appear that the Stones were using their famous logo at that time, but the singer wears a stars n’ stripes top hat on stage, and an omega on his shirt, so I went with that. I captured a few shots with Grab, a Mac utility, and played with contrast and levels in Photoshop to try to reduce the images to B&W. That didn’t quite seem to do it. I thought of Frank Miller’s Sin City books, which were stark black and white, heavy on the black, with an occasional splash of color.

But it’s more four panels than four icons. I thought instead of representing a crowd I should find something that says “concert,” so I searched for some spotlight clipart. Then I got the idea to combine that with the logos and a knife.

I tried to skew the logos to make it look like they were on the floor, but I wasn’t very successful. I got the spotlight/shadow effect by duplicating the background layer, bringing it to the top of the pile, lowering the opacity and setting the layer blending mode to darken.

It’s just a shot away…

When I saw how many people had done this assignment, I figured my DS106 experience would not be complete if I didn’t try it myself.

So here’s my Four Icon Challenge.  I chose a book rather than a movie.

 

What follows might be construed as a story spoiler, though a pretty mild spoiler, but I just thought I’d mention it in case you care about that sort of thing.
I distilled the story down to four sentences based on my interpretation. You might not agree with my interpretation of the story, but if that’s the case, go make your own icons. Here’s what I came up with.

Mankind was desperate and afraid we would not survive another attack. It would take time to find and prepare one child who could do what no one else would do. Conditioned and manipulated, our hero, now adult, succumbs to the ultimate deception. The earth is saved; victory is declared.

From that I extracted the four themes – Desperation, Time , Deception and Victory.

I thought about it a long time before doing any work on it. I actually started over a week ago, but set it aside to focus on the photography projects.  Early on though,  I thought of using an optical illusion for deception. I also wanted to go as minimalist as possible, since I don’t have the drawing skills to do anything very elaborate.  Once I thought of the Rubin Vase for Deception, things started to fall into place. I figured I could make the other three icons from that. So that’s what I did. I found a Rubin Vase on Wikipedia. I made 4 copies.  Working in gimp, I hacked and slashed (and cussed a lot) until I transformed each one into the appropriate icon. Then I just lined them all up in a Powerpoint slide, added the labels and saved the whole thing to jpeg.

My learning take-aways: By spending some time just thinking about it before making anything, I ended up with a much better work-unit than I expected. I also learned a lot more about Gimp than I knew when I started.  Finally I learned that I still have a lot more to learn about Gimp.

Once again, here’s a link to the assignment page.

If you’re not up to guessing it, just keep scrolling down.

That’s my story. Any questions?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.