VideoAssignments1225 – Assignment Bank

Goodnight Moon!

View Assignment Details

Click here for the original assignment!
This assignment is 4 stars.

This assignment stood out to me because I have never done anything like this before. I like trying new things. I decided to do a voice over for one of my favorite children’s book, Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. I used Plotagon to make my video. I saw that other students had used this in the past and I thought I would give it a try. It was really easy to use and it is free! I probably could have played around with it a little more but I was excited to record. I know I will be using this app again soon because I loved it.

What do you guys think? Have you used Plotagon before?

View Assignment Details

Apocalyptic Airwave Streaming on Video!

View Assignment Details

Plotagon is amazingly fun! This (free) program lets you pick characters, scenes, dialogue, and emotion to create stories. It took me a while to figure out how to add four characters because only two can be shown at a single time. Once I figured that out, it was simple to create this video! Exporting it, however, has been a difficult process and is ongoing as I write this post.

I chose the four star assignment, Animated Classic Reading, but I decided to slightly twist the requirements (I hope that’s allowed!) I saw this assignment as the perfect opportunity to involve my group’s apocalyptic narrative! Besides, the Apocalyptic Airwave radio show may be a classic one day. I had to make Joan into Jonas due to there only being two males and two females in the free version and I cut out a lot of the flashbacks (making the video a reasonable length), but everything they say is exactly from the script! It definitely meets the dramatic reading requirement of the assignment, even if I cut out many of the background stories.

I am so in love with this program, and I have no doubt I will use it again in the future. If I had to change anything, I would change their voices. The women sound so much more monotone than the men, which takes away some of the emotion that this script has. There was also not a good place to face the camera during Alex’s speech because (since I can only have two characters in a scene at a time) only Carson and an invisible woman were there. I did not want to reveal the whole table because I try to make it appear as if hey are all sitting together, but if I zoomed out, it would reveal that Carson is alone. There are likely some tutorials on what to do about this on YouTube, but I ended up going with my best judgement instead.

I know we are supposed to upload via YouTube, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to export the video other than by putting it onto Twitter or Facebook. I tweeted the video (which you can watch below), or you can go to this link (that for some reason will not embed). Regardless of the difficulty exporting, which is probably an issue from me and not Plotagon, I would suggest everyone check it out!

"Apocalyptic Airwave" https://t.co/OhpEVi3M9D

— Samara (@Sam_ara106) April 1, 2018

View Assignment Details

It Was a Pleasure to Burn (Animated Classic Reading Assignment)

This is my submission for the Animated Classic Reading assignment, a 3-star assignment for DS106. This is the third of the five required video assignments for the two-week period, bringing my total to 13 stars. Here are the instructions for the assignment:

Take a classic piece of literature – something that begs to be read aloud – and have animated characters do a dramatic reading.

Here’s the video. The program I used wouldn’t allow me to upload to YouTube, so I shared it on Twitter and am embedding the tweet. You should be able to view the video in this post that way.

DS106 Work https://t.co/AhvNG5QnAf

— Ben Brady (@BBrady92) November 16, 2015

I chose to have the character read the first couple paragraphs of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. My brother gave me the book for Christmas when I was in the sixth grade and I’ve probably read it at least 15 times since. It’s one of my top-five favorite books. Most people think the book is about government-imposed censorship, despite the fact that Bradbury himself said that was not the point. To me, the point of the book has to do with people voluntarily giving up any intellectual pursuit in favor of constant senseless stimulation. I’ve written about the book in a couple different papers over the years because I think that’s the way a lot of people are headed these days. Anyway, I’m getting off on a tangent. It’s a great book!

When I saw the assignment in the assignment bank, it stuck out because I had no idea how it could be done. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the assignment to see how other people had done it. There were only two submissions and both mentioned a program called Plotagon. I did a quick Google search and found that the program was actually extremely easy to use. So I decided to do the assignment! I downloaded the program and booted it up. I first had to design my character, which I modeled after myself. I started a project and made a couple decisions about how the scene would take place. I chose a classroom, with my character sitting at a desk and another character sitting at the teacher’s desk. I typed in the dialogue, which only included a couple lines other than the selection from Fahrenheit 451, and I was done.

Animated Classic Reading: Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

View Assignment Details

While browsing the DS106 Assignment Bank, I came across the Animated Classic Reading video assignment. The premise of the assignment is to use animated characters to recite a famous piece of literature. Using the program Plotagon, I created an animated classroom setting where one character is reciting the first half of Marc Antony’s funeral speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to another character. My original intention for this assignment was to use an old web-based program known as Xtranormal, but unfortunately it was discontinued nearly a year ago.

When I first read this play in 10th grade, this particular speech captivated me and was my favorite of the play. After seeing this video of the scene from the 1953 adaptation of the play, I was even more impressed with the speech. I was between this scene from another Shakespearean play, Macbeth, however, my sheer love for Julius Caesar prevailed and I ultimately had to recreate the Marc Antony Speech.

Using Plotagan was incredibly simple. After selecting the characters and scene that I wanted to use, I inputted the speech into the program and assigned it to the correct character. Some editing of the punctuation was necessary in order to make the speech flow as smoothly as possible.

With all the text in place, and after previewing the video, I was able to export the video to Youtube!

Here is the completed video:

This Video Assignment was worth

View Assignment Details

Plotagon and Gilgamesh

View Assignment Details

The software is Plotagon, which is free and in beta. It was shared with me by Tom Hodgers, a member of the POT Cert class, because I was looking for a replacement for the now defunct Xtranormal. I ran it on Mac OS 10.6 even though it requires 10.7. Then I uploaded to Vimeo, until I realized they (still) don’t have captions. So I uploaded to YouTube, put in the script for the new transcribing service, and then used a special embed code (cc_load_policy=1) to force the captions to show.

I liked it enough to make it my own Video Assignment (#1225).

More on the pedagogy at my other blog…

View Assignment Details

Animated Classic Reading

View Assignment Details

So far 5 people have completed this assignment.
It has 2306 views.

Submitted by: Lisa M Lane

Take a classic piece of literature – something that begs to be read aloud – and have animated characters do a dramatic reading.