Assignment Idea

Thumbs Up For Ebert

Just a week after the Spring 2013 ds106 class applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie to analyze scenes of movies, he went on to that big movie theater in the sky.

For this assignment, create a tribute to Ebert’s love of movies; but do more than just make a montage of clips of him. Put him in context with film characters, musicians, or place him inside one of the movies he loved or hated. Or mash him up, Do anything to show some respect for Ebert’s devotion to not only appreciating film but teaching others.

Dancing Jim all over the world

Take the template gif of Jim Groom dancing and add a background and foreground, to make him dance in an interesting place.

Looking at yourself

Draw, photograph, or paint your self portrait.  Make it interesting, in some way tell a story about yourself within the image.  You can use one or mulyiple images to complete this assignment.

It can be realistic or abstract. 

 

StereoGIFs

Back in the 1800s, stereograms were a popular way of creating the optical illusion of depth in a static image by placing two very similar images side by side. they could be viewed using a stereoscope to create the illusion. The New York Public library has an extensive collection of stereograms, and recently created the Stereogranimator tool (http://stereo.nypl.org/) to allow people to turn these into animated GIFs, which are just as effective in creating a sense of depth. Use the Stereogranimator to create an animated GIF that makes the image appear to be 3D, or try manipulating the frames to create another interesting effect (e.g. http://stereo.nypl.org/view/41623)

Storytime! SongTag Style

Make a story using at least 5 different songs, the <a href=”http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/music-tag/”>SongTag</a> style.

Try to make the songs around a theme, for example, a story created using songs by Sondheim or things you work out to at the Gym or your favorite musical guilty pleasures.

4 lines, 5 dots, 1 curve

Use drawing software a picture using only:

  • 4 lines
  • 5 dots
  • and 1 curve.

The picture can be representative or abstract. Play with size, colour, texture and overlaying – so dots can be large discs or tiny pin-pricks, they can look like spots or holes; curves can be deep or shallow; lines can be thick or skinny, long or short.

Scott Lo The Driveby Show Interactive Audio Contribution

In what promises to be yet another wonderful ‘slice of life’ internet production, our friend-in-the-field, Scott Lo (@scottlo), has launched (at 6000 RPMs!) The Driveby Show on our very own #ds106radio. Each morning on his way to work in Saudi Arabia (or alternatively, on those mornings when Scott feels so inclined) Scott will broadcast his commute from home to work place, sharing his early morning reflections or his previous day’s learnings, accompanied by a nice background mix and selected classic engine revs from The Yaris.

Scott is asking you, the ds106radio community listener, for short, potentially interactive .mp3 audio files that he can incorporate into his broadcast. He’s looking for fun and original items and elements that wil serve to engage both himself and his listeners in educational, entertaining, and meaningful ways. 

Create an audio file (say a minute to three minutes in length) and either post it to soundcloud, or email it directly to Scott at scottloradio at gmai dot com. Then tune in to ds106radio to hear Scott and his take on the contributions from listeners, and how they relate to life. You, too, can listen to your own content shared from the other side of the world in real time. And we can all learn from that.  :-)

Fruedian Alphabet

Go to Google type in “I hate a” and look for the auto-complete (additional examples here).  Screenshot your auto-complete suggestions as you move from A to Z and pick one letter to make into an animated gif.  

Do them all if you’d like.

Music Mashup

Using Audacity (or any other sound editing program) create an audio mashup with 2 very distinct songs. According to wikepedia these mashaps may fall under “fairuse”.

At Least It’s an Ethos

Take the line from the film The Big Lebowski “Say what you will about National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” and change National Socialism to a different -ism, like, for example, [[Veganism]]. Here is the GIF for you to use as a template to change National Socialism to a different -ism. Now here’s the trick, after that you need a GIF to setup the punchline. So Walter Sobchack is referring to Nihilism in the scene we are quoting when defining National Socialism as an ethos, my idea for this (now convoluted) assignment came from Tom Woodward’s unsettling animated GIF of me eating Roy Rogers chicken, which could only lead me to the following punchline…