VisualAssignments1330 – Assignment Bank

A Mountainous Climb: Week 1 Reflective Practice INTE 5340 Digital Storytelling

Introduction

As part of the educational discourse in digital storytelling each week, I will conduct a reflective practice self assessment. These ‘reflections’ will serve as both formative and summative assessment to the learning goals of the course INTE 5340.

See learning goals in the INTE 5340 syllabus. See DS106 syllabus.

Requirements and Production

The Daily Create (x2)

“Digital Graffiti” – The Daily Create 1247

A Flower for Grief: The Daily Create 1251

DS106 Assignment Bank (Visual)

Where The Ocean Meets The Sky Meets The Land

Response to Lankshear & Knobel “New Literacies” chapter one and selected scholarship

New Literacies and Creativity are Intertwined: A Chapter 1 Response to Lankshear and Knobel

Digital Story Critiques (x2)

A Critique of A Hero: Sir Ken Robinson

A Critique of Visual Mastery (RSA Animate)

Comment Peer Critiques (x2)

“Digital Story (selected scholarship) Critique #1, Week1 – There’s No Health Argument for Veganism”

Learning to Critique: Assessment of Digital Storytelling Series – Part 1

Comment Peer Chapter One Responses (x2)

FALLING OUT OF LITERACY: A 21st Century Paradox

Literacy as a Social Practice: Chapter 1 Reflection

Reflective Summary

A Mountainous Climb: Week 1 Reflective Practice INTE 5340 Digital Storytelling

What was challenging?

The most challenging part of week one was getting started with this course and also producing an incredible amount of work whilst overcoming week one hurdles. Hurdles such as, “Who else is in my class and where is their blog? How do I connect with my classmates on Twitter? How do I create a Twitter list? How do I write a critique? How do I ‘blog like a champ’? Who should I tweet? How do I state a clear and concise message in Twitter within the character limit?” Essentially, technical stuff I now know as ‘ontological’ in nature. The second challenging part was the discovering of the sociocultural sense of literacy and coping with the fact that myself and my classmates are becoming literate in ‘new literacies’. This ‘coping’ means accepting I am only beginning to learn and I have many great technical, artistic, and social ‘things’ to create and discuss to become ‘newly literate.’ In other words, I’ve got a long ways to go looking up from the base of a mountainous climb.

What was most enjoyable?

The most enjoyable aspect of week one was discovering the power and freedom of digital storytelling in an open forum. It was great to see collaboration beyond the walls of a classroom or beyond the confines of a LMS. As a student who spends a lot of time crafting digital stories for consumption by peers, it is refreshing that our voices can be heard beyond the confines of a limited LMS forum of say, twenty peers, and one to two instructors. One of my favorite moments from the week was when I was tweeting with @jimgroom about some of my work on DS106. It is incredible to learn and to practice with current technologies and appreciate the access we have to key people to involve in our conversation or issue at hand.

What was learned about the focal theme and what issues / questions have emerged?

When I began to critically think about the Lankshear & Knobel text in conjunction with my focal theme ‘the importance of creative arts in education’ I began to realize: the arts and ‘new literacies’ are intertwined. I am starting to understand that there is significant learning and ‘meta learning’ that happens when creating digital stories. And masterful expression of digital stories cannot be realized with a simple practice of one exercise. One may learn how to write a blog post, but masterful blog posts may include embedded pictures and videos, with links, in a font and layout that is visually appealing and contributes to the focus and ‘read’ of the story. The ability to ‘express effectively with mastery’ takes lots of practice and critical thinking to develop an aesthetic appreciation for details.

Points earned 10/10?

I am traditionally my own worst critic. Working in an art related field for many years, and having to ‘show’ my work and thought processes to the world constantly, and deal with both extremely subjective and objective criticism, I have developed a way to internalize criticism of myself as I am creating ‘things.’ And I often times do things more than once to get it right and pay attention to the details of whatever I am crafting. I thrive in iterative processes and ‘fix’ my work as I go rather than trying to get it right the first time. All of that to say, “I am very critical of myself and when I can score myself highly it typically means I went above and beyond what I expect for myself.” Score 10/10.

Where The Ocean Meets The Sky Meets The Land

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Image Crop of Panoramic

DS106 Surreal Panorama VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments1330

I have been fascinated with surrealism art since I first learned about it when I was in highschool (1998). I was captivated by the works of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali among several other incredible surrealists. What is interesting about surreal art, is that it often times combines photorealistic qualities to give a sense of realism yet something isn’t quite right with the juxtaposition of the elements in the scene. The viewer gets an odd sense of an alternate reality or dream like state. The inspirational works of surrealism provides a creative lens to the tangible world, and the world of visual arts.

Rough Concept Sketch

The works of Magritte has had such a profound impact on my interest in art, I chose to pay homage to the influence by focusing on the “water” and “clouds” in the scene I created. Many memorable works of Magritte include manipulation of clouds and water in juxtaposition with objects that are not naturally part of the environment. Initially, I drew a sketch of “sea clouds” with ships upside down and the earth landscape rendered as clouds.

However, after I starting creating I flipped the canvas and turned the boats right-side up. The decision to do this was because I did not feel the viewer could be as engaged without a natural gravitational sense. The viewer did not feel so inclined to look at the protagonist (the two boats in the foreground). The surprising result to doing this made the water look as though it was falling due to gravity and the “cloud earth” looks like a bubble or containment for the environment. Overall the experience of reliving my memories of Magritte’s work and creating the artwork itself was very satisfying.

Full Panoramic

The technical details to creating this work in Photoshop is fairly challenging. However, starting out with great images will simplify the process. Fortunately, I am familiar with a website frequented for video game designers who create level art called CGtextures.com. I’ve been using the website since 2006 for various video game projects. I downloaded several images of landscapes that I knew could work for the image I had in mind. I also perused my own photo library from a weekend vacation I took to San Diego, CA. I was able to get the water and the boat pictures from my own photo library. I began by stitching the landscape and clouds together to make a panoramic style image. From there I literally cut out cloud shapes with the selection tool over the images of water and pasted them into the scene. The most work involved creating the “sea clouds”. I used the warp tool and distort tool on my shapes and then used the smudge and erase tool on the edges of the shapes to get the feathered look. I used custom brushes that I created for past project painting backgrounds and clouds for games. I cut out the boats and changed the saturation and value on them to blend them into the scene. Finally, I flattened the image and applied some adjustment layers to increase the color and contrast.

Tips for success:

Create a sketch first.
Find appropriate images to match the design in your sketch (use royalty free or personal photos).
Keep it simple. Focus on foreground, middleground, and background development.
Have fun experimenting!

Enjoy the DS106 easter egg!

DS106, CUDenver15, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments1330

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Panorama between worlds

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This is for the Surreal Panorama visual assignment. The idea was to create one of those panoramas that don’t really make sense that you sometimes get from a smartphone picture. But instead of just taking one, you make one up yourself. So I decided to create a panorama of two places, one nested within the other. This worked out great for my noir character since I could use the tears between worlds that exist within his universe. I used a picture of a New York street, and placed a house within it. The house is the one Brenda uses as the background of her website, and for the purpose of melding our characters’ stories, I like to think of it as the home of her character, Isabelle “Red” McIntosh. The house is visible through a “flash”, a side effect and smaller version of the Puncture. Flashes occasionally occur in Sardic’s New York, blurring the lines between realities temporarily.

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Montage-O-Bay

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‘Create a surreal panorama by first making a panorama (duh), and then munipulating the photograph to make it out of this world. However, don’t go out and just make a panorama via your iPhone!!! Take some pictures and mash them together!’

So, dear reader, I mashed, in response to Visual Assignment 1330 ‘Surreal Panorama’ of the digital storytelling open course ds106:

This composite image began a few months ago with recent experiments with the panorama mode on my Android phone. It doesn’t always work – sometimes it just takes multiple individual photos rather than stitching multiple photos into a single panorama. But when it works, it can produce some very satisfying images:

I had in mind that for this assignment I would montage a few similar panoramic landscapes taken on Morecambe Bay in PowerPoint, cutting them up, slicing, copying, rotating, altering brightness and contrast, and so on to create something still recognisable as a landscape, but abstracted, more architectural, and pushing the over-exposure further:

The earth is in the sky, but the in the darker contrast areas there is an attempt to make a bridge or perhaps a pier. I could have spent more time making it more fantastic or surreal, but there came a point when further manipulation seemed pointless. I couldn’t entirely eliminate the horizontal strip effect, but it has a certain amout of visual tension and patterning of the inverted earth-sky and the repeated posts that is OK. But I think that the original Android camera panoramas look more ‘dreamy’ and surreal than the mashed version. This one even has a glitch that suggests a parallel scene within a scene:

In the end, though, sometimes, as we well know, ‘good enough’ is good enough.

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Surreal Lake

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This assignment was a little bit tricky for me, it was hard to find two of my pictures to correspond with each other. These pictures were both taken on my vacation in Kentucky. Creating a panorama on your own can be very tricky.

Process:

First, I had to find two pictures that somewhat correspond with each other. Then I uploaded them into Pixlr. I had a hard time trying to connect them. So I used the blur tool to soften the edge of the pictures. Then I just clicked random sections, and put a different filter on different sections. Then I saved it and uploaded it! I am impressed how the colors turned out but I wish i could blur it together more.

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Surreal Panorama Assignment

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Check out this ds106 Visual Assignment I made, it’s a doozy! Make a panorama using multiple images (not just from the panorama feature on your phone) and manipulate it to make it surreal!

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Surreal Panorama

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Submitted by: Jack Hylan

Create a surreal panorama by first making a panorama (duh), and then munipulating the photograph to make it out of this world. However, don’t go out and just make a panorama via your iPhone!!! Take some pictures and mash them together!