Visual Assignment #4

View Assignment Details

For this last visual assignment, I did the Troll Quotes, worth 2 stars.

Here’s the image I came up with:

In the directions, it said to pick people from related universes. I chose Democrat women/politicians. My three people were Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi. Although I am a fan of Pelosi’s faces, I chose to attribute the quote to her. With a simple google image search, I located the photo of Clinton, which happened to have the empty space. I LOVE Eleanor Roosevelt quotes; the one I used I found here. I went into Pic Monkey and chose the font, and simply typed the text into the box (it’s really simple to use). I saved the image to my desktop, and then uploaded it to flickr with only a few clicks. The hardest part was deciding what people to do…I almost did it on male detective leads (Elliot Stabler (SVU), Jethro Gibbs (NCIS), and Aaron Hotchner(Criminal Minds)).

View Assignment Details

Microappoogle

View Assignment Details

Troll Quotes

Picture of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, quote from Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and attributed to Larry Page, CEO of Google. The quote definitely sounds off for Jobs, and I think his fans would be thoroughly enraged to see someone else’s name on his photograph.

2/5 stars

View Assignment Details

Troll Quote, Troll Quote, Off To Make A Troll Quote!

View Assignment Details

As a fan of Babylon 5, when I read the description of Troll Quotes, my thoughts immediately went to Londo Mollari, the sarcastic, sharp-tongued Centauri ambassador. Any script from the show could be mined for a dozen or so entertaining and insulting quotes from him, though the line “What do you want, you moon-faced assassin of joy?” from the episode “Born to the Purple” has always been one of my favorites.

I decided to use this quote, and then was faced with who to attribute it to. Col. Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica seemed like a good choice. He too has many sarcastic one-liners. He might have said this to Starbuck while hungover. And I also thought of Quark from Deep Space 9. I seem to remember him having a lot of amusing dialogue (though admittedly I haven’t watched Deep Space 9, and could be confusing Armin Shimerman’s portrayals of Quark and Principal Snyder). Plus Quark makes for an interesting visual.

Combining the image and quote in Photoshop took about 2 minutes, though my first attempt looked too similar to the example used in the assignment:

(Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/42/QuarkDS9.jpg/250px-QuarkDS9.jpg)

So I decided to make a second attempt with a more challenging image:

(Image source: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120329231624/memoryalpha/en/images/2/28/Quark,_2375.jpg)

I tried to set it up so that the background to the text looked like Quark’s reflection on a counter (perhaps the bar at Quark’s?). I flipped the image vertically, set the transparency to 65%, and then created a mask and manually did a gradient with the brush and blur tools (you can still see some of the individual strokes; I’ve decided to pretend they are streaks on the counter). I then added the text with a drop-shadow that matched the color of his shirt (three cheers for the eye-dropper color selector!). I’m still not completely happy with how it turned out, but I think I would need to spend a lot of time digging for the right image to get it exactly how I want. And that would cut down on my precious time trolling B5, BSG, and DS9 fans on the interwebs.

View Assignment Details

tie me up, tie me down

View Assignment Details

The Daily Create for the day is to “Take a picture featuring rope or knots.” Given my genetic predisposition for making puns, there was no avoiding this. I was hoping to find a picture of Don Knotts tied up, or one where he has rope in his hands, but unfortunately I couldn’t. The picture is Barney Fife from the Andy Griffith Show, the quote is from Capt. Quint, and Mr. Roper is the guy Barney replaced in his later career as a landlord. There you have it – three’s company.

View Assignment Details

Triple Troll Quote: Harrison Ford vs. John Cazale

View Assignment Details

Just so that people don’t think I am relying entirely on animated GIFs for this week’s visual assignments, here are a couple of Triple Troll Quotes. What’s more, they are themed—both of thee triple troll quotes are centered around an actor who was in a number of amazing films in a very short period of time.

First, between 1977 and 1983 Harrison Ford was in Star Wars (1977), Apocalypse Now! (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) (all within 5 years!). What’s even more remarkable about this is he couldn’t act to save his life. Ford was an icon for me as a kid, but in the 2000s I began to like him less and less given his dismissal of Charles Bronson’s career, which I’ve already discussed on this blog. Regardless, he was in the holy trinity of films for me as a kid: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Blade Runner—what ever I may think of him now, that’s a pretty sick run.

And while Ford’s run is impressive, it doesn’t hold a candle to John Cazale’s—who actually could act!—he was only in five films over his entirely too short career, but every single one of them was a masterpiece (I’ve written about this before as well). That’s a hard act to follow. The five films are: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978). Wow! Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Michael Cimino. He died way too early, but he leaves behind him a filmography few, if any, could ever match.

View Assignment Details

If you’ve got them…

View Assignment Details

Okay, true confessions time: I have a celebrity crush on Sam Elliott. Despite the fact he’s more than 30 years my senior AND older than my dad, I find something about him sexy as hell. No Sean Connery for me. Sam Elliott all the way. If I only had him by the balls…! Just kidding. Maybe.

When I came across an assignment that involved using a celebrity (or three), I couldn’t resist my Mr. Elliott fixation. What, or more accurately who, do I think of when I think of him? Well, Sam Elliott is famous for his western movies…and so is John Wayne.

John Wayne starred in 142 movies and said a lot of stuff. I started googling John Wayne quotes to find one I recognized or liked or could work with. Something fun. And sexy. To go with the sexy Sam Elliott.

Now we have a western movie star theme going. And I need one more strong, male, western man to participate in this activity with us. And in walks in none other than the one and only Clint Eastwood.

One picture of Sam, a quote from John, and the use of Clint’s name…tweek a little in Picasa and, yep, I have compiled three rough, gruff, sexy, older western heroes into one hot shot. And I muse…will my boyfriend raise his eyebrows at me when this image becomes my wallpaper? Maybe!

View Assignment Details

Trollin’, Trollin’, Trollin’

View Assignment Details

I spent some time visiting the blogs of fellow campers this afternoon. I stumbled across the Troll Quotes assignment on Marcey’s Blog and knew that I had to do this one. I decided to use a handful of pop divas. Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Cyndi Lauper look out! Here’s the result:

I found an image of Madonna by searching Google Images. The quote is supposedly from Lady Gaga. I haven’t heard Lady Gaga say this, nor have I read it in print, but it came up in a Google search, so it must be true.

I imported the Madonna pic into Adobe Fireworks. I then added the text and green stroke effect. All of this was added using Fireworks too.

View Assignment Details

I suppose you expect me to talk

View Assignment Details

When the commercial for Cee Lo’s show came on, my wife asked, “What’s he doing with the cat?”
“Maybe he wants to be Blofeld.”
She didn’t get it, but it made me think of the triple troll quote. So I took my favorite Goldfinger quote, put Blofled’s name on it, and added it to a picture of Cee Lo and cat. I was pleased to find someone had made an animated gif of it.

View Assignment Details

Time’s Up

View Assignment Details

It seemed like such an easy idea upon waking up this morning. Knock out a quick little Triple Troll Quote and I’d be back on my way with the blogging project. The alternative would have been to write one of those hand wringing mea culpa posts of apology for not being more dutiful with the writing and stuff.

The lyric from The Chambers Brothers’ Time has Come Today was an instant and obvious choice for the quote. Though the past several weeks have been full of turmoil and toil, there’s also been a great deal of creative exploration and research that are sweetly and imperatively alluded to as “things to realize.” But to complete the Triple Troll Quote assignment, one also needs an image and author to falsely attribute the quote to. And there must be thematic connection between all three characters of the TTQ – in this case band names with the word brothers.

The first choice for a Mills Brothers image was from the wikipedia entry but I was unable to get the text to display properly on the unevenly lit portion of the stage where it seemed to fit best. Fortunately the Google image search also revealed a recent post from …With Both Hands from which the picture above was grabbed. In GIMP, a couple of hundred pixels were added to the canvas size at the bottom which was filled in with a black background to make room for the white text.

The font is called Anderson Stingray and was designed by Steve Ferrera and was found at Da Font. In retrospect, I think Ferrera’s Market Deco would have been a better match with the mood and era of the photograph.

Not much to say about the Doobie Brothers except that if I hadn’t been able to get the Mills Brothers image I’d have used this poster from their Jesus is Just Alright world tour.

In fact, the only reason I used them to complete the TTQ instead of The Everly Brothers, The Flying Karamazov Brothers, The Righteous Brothers or The Brothers Four was that China Grove recently popped up on my iPod in shuffle mode and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

I’d like to be able to say that there is some deeper level of significance to this blog post. I had expected it to take less than an hour to pull all the elements together and publish this entry. That was several hours ago. As so often happens when getting involved with these ds106 assignments, a string of trails and connections are made that cause a rush of memories and emotions and branch off in unanticipated directions. And also it’s helped me to pick myself up and get back in the race.

View Assignment Details

Troll Quotes

View Assignment Details

Well this last assignment (Troll Quote) will make ten starts and here’s the description: Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure.

The background photo it self is just amazing because it can change a person’s mood from happy to angry. Some might see this as a paradox, like why would someone burn that much money? It dosen’t make any sense but I found this quote that suits the picture perfectly. The quote is simple but very powerful. It makes you wonder….Just think about when you were a child and you had no responsibilities and we all used to bitch about being broke (unless you were spoiled), now that we’re older we still bitch, but the more money we have the more problems comes with it. I mean in the photo, that is a lot of money, but it is “too much money”. Yes there’s such a thing.

By the way, I made the text pink to make the background less dramatic.