I totally ripped you off by co-opting a short clip from a well-known movie and turning it into my DS106 Radio bumper. I’m sorry. I was desperate. Attempts at other audio assignments failed. Miserably.
I’ve listened to DS106 Radio a few times, and I’m enamored with the set up and what I’ve been hearing. When DS106 Radio was first mentioned, I thought about that 1990 Christian Slater classic, Pump Up the Volume. God I loved that movie.
Over the weekend, I watched Awesome: I Fucking Shot That, a Beastie Boys concert film shot by 50 members of the audience. After this viewing, I got it in my mind to do the “Forced Collabo” audio assignment. Who wouldn’t really? Skip to about 3:30 in this video and tell me that Mixmaster Mike’s job doesn’t look totally easy. Right? Right?
Yeah. Not so much. After many attempts to find the perfect songs to mash-up, I gave up with the realization that (1) I have a crappy music collection and (2) I have been blindly consuming music rather than listening. Sad.
Here’s another clip from Awesome just for fun. It’s “Intergalactic.” Look how happy everyone in the crowd looks.
After last week’s excitement, I have fallen a little short of my own expectations this week. I’ve not been near minecraft, didn’t even get started on the Design Safari. I manage one Design Assignment, the creative commons one and then tried the Lyric Typography Poster.. I saw a couple of greatresults (and this looks like something professional) for this and though it didn’t look too hard. I cranked through iTunes until I remembered one of my favourite song Judge Not, there are a few different reggae songs with this title but the one I like is by Dennis Brown:
The phrase I like is Judge Not, for we all fall short of the glory of Jah. I’ve taken Jah out of the quote as I am not religious. I like the idea of trying and falling short more than Judge not lest you be judged (Matt. 7:1).
I started thinking about this, googling King James font, I saw a reference to calson, so decided to go with Big Calson which seems to be on my mac. I was hoping to get a sort of old looking text and spent a couple of hours failing to get anything like my imagination. I did consider the old english type of font. I was also thinking for some reason about flags and decided on a flag background; red gold and green seemed obvious. Many tutorials and tests later I ended up with this:
This falls very short of the target: Choose one of your favorite lines from a song and illustrate it using only typography. Consider how the font, color, sizes and placement of the typography can reflect or emphasize the meaning of the words.
Nevertheless I have now spent a deal of time playing with photoshop and trying out various tutorials, hopefully this will help.
Here are a few of the tutorials I read through:
It’s fun to think what Warhol may have done with digital and social networking tools. I can see a mash-up of Four Square and his famous Warhol effect with maybe each square placing the image in a different location.
Nothing so interesting with my first Warhol effect. I did use GIMP to create my first and then tried a “toy” on the BigHugeLabs site to generate the poster. I learned from the machine-generated Warholizer that a more abstract effect is more appealing — and takes 20 years off!
This week I found another block of time through which to sprint after a number of ds106 design assignments. I had some trouble narrowing down which assignments to tackle until I began them; clearly, I do not yet have the patience or chops for some of the work, so it’s great that the ds106 community has shared so many different ideas for assignments. I hope to contribute some ideas this summer and fall as I try to implement a more ds106/MOOC feel in my middle school classroom.
Here are my basic hardware and software specs for the week: MacBook, OSX 10.6.8, 2.26 GHz Intel Core Duo 2, 2 GB of memory, Chrome, Wacom Bamboo tablet, SketchBook Pro (for drawing), Acorn (for fills and copy).
This week the work is not in any particular order. I made an animated comic book cover that looks pretty crummy next to all the awesome examples out there. I don’t yet have the animator’s patience to pull off a decent attempt, so I’ll pass on sharing for now. It was a simple snikt effect.
I’m becoming interested in how the community categorizes tasks. At times today, I definitely felt like a designer; at other times, I felt more like I was tweaking a pre-existing design for my own education (which seems more like a visual task to me), or mashing-up a number of designs. Some of the visual assignments feel like design tasks, too – like the album cover. I’d love to hear more about how contributors and organizers think of course- and task-design.
I take a ton of screenshots in Minecraft. I love discovering new sights in Minecraft, as well as new perspectives on familiar places. I ask students to take a ton of screenshots, too, so I can share their work easily through blogging. (Teaching in a multi-age classroom in a middle school, I haven’t yet solved the riddle of whole-class social media use, so I try to collect and share as many digital photos and artifacts as possible.)
For this assignment, I looked through my ds106-server screenshots, found a picture I liked, cropped it some, and then appended a snappy postcard/bumper-sticker-ready punchline in Acorn. Lastly, I mocked up a simple back for the card and let it be.
Since I wrote about how much The Road terrified me when I posted my Liminal States story-shape, and since The Road showed up as the exemplar for this assignment, I went back to Liminal States and riffed on my fake album cover assignment; with Liminal States you really can’t go wrong with a boy and his dog.
However, I wanted to use a different image this time around, so I found
“>a picture of a boy dressed as a cowboy riding a dog in The Commons on Flickr.
I brought the photo into Acorn and composed the rest of the cover there, darkening the bottom band to offer better contrast for the tagline.
The boy dressed up as a cowboy reminds me of my [privileged, white male] love for archetypes, even though many of those archetypes make horrible, horrifying decisions, like the genre-riffing characters of Liminal States. Moreover, in the book, youth – the eternal kind – is not all its cracked up to be. Considering the source material, it’s also significant that the boy and the dog clearly have different ideas about what’s going on and are, in fact, headed – or at least looking – in separate directions. The presence of grass is germane to the novel, as well.
I picked Trajan Pro for the font because it has that somber, elegiac, official feel like the title of a Tom Brokaw book.
The tag line is neither entirely true nor entirely false in its description of the book.
I’ve cartooned myself many times – some examples can be found here, here, and here. There’s even a short comic I drew about the first year of our school out there in a filing cabinet somewhere.
I find using a cartoon alter ego to be very helpful in breaking up the monopoly that text holds over my blogging, and I like to use drawings in class materials, as well. Cartooning is a good way to and bring some humor to the engrimmening proceedings of American public education.
For this assignment I wanted to draw myself differently than I normally do, so I went online and searched after
“>an image of Savoy from the comic Chew as drawn by series-artist Rob Guillory. (I have no idea why I’ve never cosplayed Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing Chris Farley playing Savoy, but I know I could rock it.) I like Guillory’s style – it’s cartoony, dynamic, busy; as with Jeffery Brown’s completely different work, it makes me think I could draw a comic. It gives me hope.
I tried to capture Guillory’s sense of Savoy’s form, but left much of the interior clean, as I tend to do in larger work; paradoxically (maybe)I detail little doodles like crazy. I also colored myself for a change since I usually work in black and white.
I drew myself in SketchBook Pro using a 2.5-sized brush rather than a 4.0-sized one so that I my line would look more like Guillory’s and less like mine. I began with a blue-line drawing and then added a layer for a black-line drawing to bring into Acorn. Then I deleted the blue-line layer, switched to Acorn, and colored myself.
To make my own, I went for a popular, yet nerdy, property – The Lord of the Rings. In looking at spacesick’s use of patterns, I decided to use a ring motif to build Mount Doom and to perch Suaron’s eye atop it. I used a different color/material for each level of rings: silver for the Elves, bronze for the Dwarves, and iron for the humans. While that progression isn’t canonical, I used it to bring more color to the page and to communicate of how Middle Earth rank-orders its species. I could have made the other rings all white and left the one ring golden, but I am not at all unhappy with this design. I wonder also about linking the rings to show their interconnectedness in a chain-mail kind of way.
I used Acorn to compose the cover. I read up on spacesick’s fonts
“>here. The projector is the only element I lifted directly from any of spacesick’s covers.
Finally, I opened the image in SketchBook Pro for some final touches with textured brushes to worry the cover.
I’m really eager to see more of these designs from the ds106 community.
I’m not sure why this assignment is worth zero stars; I think it should get two.
For this task, I decided to make a children’s book cover for a hard science fiction novel – House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. I love that book. It gives me hope.
My cover, however, gives me the giggles. It’s so profanely incongruous – and yet so weirdly apt – that it delights me.
House Of Suns for kids
I drew the cover in SketchBook Pro and then colored and lettered it in Acorn.
As I hunted down stray pixels in Acorn, I discovered that it’s much easier to draw and paint in that program while zoomed in a level or two (this is both an a-ha and a duh moment). I still prefer SketchBook Pro for drawing, but it was satisfying to find a way to draw and color productively in Acorn, as well. At the default zoom, even a medium-sized brush can disappear on-screen in Acorn because its reticle isn’t persistent. That means if you’re trying to paint stray pixels in Acorn without zooming in, you lose the tip of your brush if your brush color is the same color as your background. That frustrated me greatly, but now I know that it’s easier to keep track of your brush tip while zoomed.
I hope others will jam on the idea of making children’s book covers for novels meant for adults.
Aude aliquid dignum: dare something worthy. I try to approach teaching and learning as if they were the most worthy things I could do and help others do. I think it’s important to ask kids to do worthy work. I think it’s important that teachers dare to resist the standardization of education. I think it’s important and worthy that we talk about how to subvert the status quo in our primary and secondary schools so that learning matters to kids, their families, and their communities. So here it is:
Aude aliquid dignum
I made the image in Acorn. I tried to minimalize the sans-serif text’s presence on the page without making it illegible (I probably cut too much of the “g”). Then, while trying to stay away from the Dr. Manhattan symbol, I made a little hydrogen atom to frame the words, with the “e” inside the electron. Hydrogen is a pretty minimalist element, but the proton and electron are also the building blocks of everything else. Hydrogen can exist by itself, but atoms do great and terrible things together. We humans can do the same, inside and outside Minecraft, a game about building – and/or destroying – alone and/or in a community!
I put another atomic particle in the upper right-hand corner so that the eye would be drawn there in an attempt to connect the two white spaces with one another over distance, which made me think that maybe the electron (which wants to create a bond) is also little person or organism looking to the stars and wondering how to connect with another being over a vast distance. I think connecting is worth daring.
I found a CC-licensed picture of a glorious, insanely detailed, embroidered Moss, brought it into SketchBook Pro, and traced over Moss’s hair and glasses. I used green in homage to the show’s pixelated, primitive CGI credit sequence. Then I went into Acorn to fill it in and clean-up white speckles left over in Moss’s hair and glasses.
For this piece, I searched The Commons on Flickr for propaganda. I went into my search looking for an ad or poster about building a shelter. I wanted to make a visual pun on our Minecraft work. However, when I found this picture, I switched gears. I hate Creepers. I’m playing the ds106 server on survival mode right now, and the Creepers have not been kind. If you look at my stretch of the beach on the server (behind camp), you can see how much Creeper damage I’ve had to patch. Finding a way to rally against the Creepers was just what I needed to lift my spirits.
I grabbed a CC-licensed picture of some Creeper cosplay. I took a screen shot of the head and cut out the background in Acorn. Then I brought in the propaganda poster. I used the scale and perspective transformations to size, angle, and position the Creeper heads. Then I made the heads monochromatic and color-matched them to their bodies.
Beat the Creeper
Now I’m ready to go back on the sever. I hope someone will put this poster into a ds106 texture pack for Minecraft!
#DontBlogNow starring Martha Burtis and Alan Levine. Somehow featuring the Bava, Timmmyboy, and Slaughterhouse 4. I did a lot of cutting, filling, and smudging in Acorn. I grabbed the movie poster here. I found Martha here and I found Alan here. I sepia-toned their faces, shrunk their heads, and then altered their saturation and brightness to help their faces better fit the gestalt of the photo in the poster.
#DontBlogNow
I love how different their expressions are, as if Martha has caught on to something that Alan is asking about again. “A serial killer in a red raincoat? Really? Was that a deliberate design decision? Where?” “Over-ay ere-thay, Alan-ay! Et’s-lay o-gay!”. Why someone snapped a photo of them at this moment I will never know.
I picked Don’t Look Now to avoid making a quick and easy visual pun about a movie I loved. I despise Don’t Look Now. I loathe that movie. I will never go to Venice. I refuse to look at myself passing on a boat. Forget it.
I will, however, spend hours remixing the film’s poster.
I just wish I was better at digital production – I really like the way the poster turned out, but I wanted it to be perfect, like my utter, unutterable, intangible, illogical contempt for this Don’t Look Now.
That’s it for today’s products. As I go further into the ds106 experience, I’m trying to stick with at least a few assignments per week that push me out of my comfort zone. I also want to balance the camp nature of camp with the profundity of the learning experience available to me here. I need to socialize more with my fellow campers, too.
I try to teach to what kids are doing in my classroom; in the same way, I’m learning to design what I discover instead of trying to design what I plan. It feels good.
Today I mashed up the Daily Create with the “An Album Cover”Mission: DS106visual assignment. Last time I attempted the cover, I ditched some of the random elements (the name of the album, the album art), so – after catching fellow campers’ work – I wanted to design a more random cover in the spirit of the assignment.
So here is the cover for List of Women’s Football Clubs in Spain’s new album, I am not mad.
I am not mad by List of Women's Football Clubs in Spain
I captured a square screen shot from the original image and dragged it into Acorn. I cut out the dog. Then I applied a green monochrome filter to the rest of the image and adjusted its saturation and brightness. I picked green because of the lush vibrancy of the original photo.Then I pasted the dog back in, blurred it, and bulged its head. I wanted to isolate and transform the dog from the rest of the image to create some ambiguity about the album’s title and its speaker or subject.
I inserted the text thinking about this week’s photo tips encouraging the use of a 9-square grid for arrangement elements in an image. If the boy and the dog make up the skewed squares on either side of the image, I hope the lettering fits into the squished middle squares in a complementary way.
It’s been over a year since I first discovered ds106 and it’s amazing to me how much creative energy I’ve discovered since then – I’ve made more work in the past year than I have in the previous ten, seriously.
Ok this isn’t exactly true, I’ve made many things over the past decade, but they’ve principally been of the industrial sort – client work mostly. There’s a lot I’m proud of, particularly media materials for my wife’s non-profit Row New York (videos like Monique and Because I Row (with Daniel Phelps) as well as photography and design).
But in the last year I’ve begun to make work that reminds me of the work I used to make. Back then I made lots of stuff, all sorts of stuff, but when I made it, I was just creating, and creating and never reflecting. Despite that fact that I was in an MFA program, I was prickly about critiques, always evasive about why I made this or that. And it wasn’t because I thought ‘my art should speak for itself,’ it was because I didn’t have any confidence or sense of how or why to describe what the heck I was doing.
So probably more important than the creative energy that I’ve rediscovered is the feeling that I can and should describe my work. I falter at this effort (it’s taken two weeks to write this post and only a few hours to make Cary Grant into a track star), but it’s one I realize I need and want to work on. I want to be more confident and comfortable describing my work, not just making it.
This summer I’m hoping to focus my energy toward a bigger project. One that’s inspired by the ds106 mashup, pop culture, ‘make art dammit‘ mantra. Above is an animated movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. I previously created one for Rear Window, and I love making these. So I’m thinking I should commit to a series, six? A dozen? I’m not sure.
But I’m also thinking about something else. Earlier this semester I read an article in the New Yorker about Christain Marclay’s mashup masterpiece ‘The Clock.‘ Marclay assembled thousands of clips from films that referenced time into a 24 hour mashup movie, that when viewed it would reference the present moment in time. So if you happened to start watching at 11AM, the clips you’d see would reflect that time.
How crazy is that? A T-W-E-N-T-Y F-O-U-R H-O-U-R movie, about time. It apparently took Marclay 2 years of slaving over his computer to create it. And its supposed to be amazing. You can only see it in galleries or museums. And I’m dying to see it, here’s a BBC story about the piece to give you some sense of it.
So besides animated GIFs I’m thinking about something else – it’s not a 24hr movie – I could never. But it’s a mashup that would require help. I’m thinking about telling a story about education through the innumerable portraits created of teachers and students in movies. I feel like there might be something we could learn from these portraits of schooling.
I’m picturing a mashup of scenes that portray high school and the interactions between students, teachers, parents, and principals. I want to see what will happen if I create interactions between characters from the Blackboard Jungle and the Breakfast Club. Too crazy?
Anyway that’s where I’m thinking of pointing my creative efforts – Hitchcock GIFs and/or a high school mashup. I’m excited and anxious at the same time. It’s been a while since I’ve felt ready to do something like this.
It’s been over a year since I first discovered ds106 and it’s amazing to me how much creative energy I’ve discovered since then – I’ve made more work in the past year than I have in the previous ten, seriously.
Ok this isn’t exactly true, I’ve made many things over the past decade, but they’ve principally been of the industrial sort – client work mostly. There’s a lot I’m proud of, particularly media materials for my wife’s non-profit Row New York (videos like Monique and Because I Row (with Daniel Phelps) as well as photography and design).
But in the last year I’ve begun to make work that reminds me of the work I used to make. Back then I made lots of stuff, all sorts of stuff, but when I made it, I was just creating, and creating and never reflecting. Despite that fact that I was in an MFA program, I was prickly about critiques, always evasive about why I made this or that. And it wasn’t because I thought ‘my art should speak for itself,’ it was because I didn’t have any confidence or sense of how or why to describe what the heck I was doing.
So probably more important than the creative energy that I’ve rediscovered is the feeling that I can and should describe my work. I falter at this effort (it’s taken two weeks to write this post and only a few hours to make Cary Grant into a track star), but it’s one I realize I need and want to work on. I want to be more confident and comfortable describing my work, not just making it.
This summer I’m hoping to focus my energy toward a bigger project. One that’s inspired by the ds106 mashup, pop culture, ‘make art dammit‘ mantra. Above is an animated movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. I previously created one for Rear Window, and I love making these. So I’m thinking I should commit to a series, six? A dozen? I’m not sure.
But I’m also thinking about something else. Earlier this semester I read an article in the New Yorker about Christain Marclay’s mashup masterpiece ‘The Clock.‘ Marclay assembled thousands of clips from films that referenced time into a 24 hour mashup movie, that when viewed it would reference the present moment in time. So if you happened to start watching at 11AM, the clips you’d see would reflect that time.
How crazy is that? A T-W-E-N-T-Y F-O-U-R H-O-U-R movie, about time. It apparently took Marclay 2 years of slaving over his computer to create it. And its supposed to be amazing. You can only see it in galleries or museums. And I’m dying to see it, here’s a BBC story about the piece to give you some sense of it.
So besides animated GIFs I’m thinking about something else – it’s not a 24hr movie – I could never. But it’s a mashup that would require help. I’m thinking about telling a story about education through the innumerable portraits created of teachers and students in movies. I feel like there might be something we could learn from these portraits of schooling.
I’m picturing a mashup of scenes that portray high school and the interactions between students, teachers, parents, and principals. I want to see what will happen if I create interactions between characters from the Blackboard Jungle and the Breakfast Club. Too crazy?
Anyway that’s where I’m thinking of pointing my creative efforts – Hitchcock GIFs and/or a high school mashup. I’m excited and anxious at the same time. It’s been a while since I’ve felt ready to do something like this.
It’s been over a year since I first discovered ds106 and it’s amazing to me how much creative energy I’ve discovered since then – I’ve made more work in the past year than I have in the previous ten, seriously.
Ok this isn’t exactly true, I’ve made many things over the past decade, but they’ve principally been of the industrial sort – client work mostly. There’s a lot I’m proud of, particularly media materials for my wife’s non-profit Row New York (videos like Monique and Because I Row (with Daniel Phelps) as well as photography and design).
But in the last year I’ve begun to make work that reminds me of the work I used to make. Back then I made lots of stuff, all sorts of stuff, but when I made it, I was just creating, and creating and never reflecting. Despite that fact that I was in an MFA program, I was prickly about critiques, always evasive about why I made this or that. And it wasn’t because I thought ‘my art should speak for itself,’ it was because I didn’t have any confidence or sense of how or why to describe what the heck I was doing.
So probably more important than the creative energy that I’ve rediscovered is the feeling that I can and should describe my work. I falter at this effort (it’s taken two weeks to write this post and only a few hours to make Cary Grant into a track star), but it’s one I realize I need and want to work on. I want to be more confident and comfortable describing my work, not just making it.
This summer I’m hoping to focus my energy toward a bigger project. One that’s inspired by the ds106 mashup, pop culture, ‘make art dammit‘ mantra. Above is an animated movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. I previously created one for Rear Window, and I love making these. So I’m thinking I should commit to a series, six? A dozen? I’m not sure.
But I’m also thinking about something else. Earlier this semester I read an article in the New Yorker about Christain Marclay’s mashup masterpiece ‘The Clock.‘ Marclay assembled thousands of clips from films that referenced time into a 24 hour mashup movie, that when viewed it would reference the present moment in time. So if you happened to start watching at 11AM, the clips you’d see would reflect that time.
How crazy is that? A T-W-E-N-T-Y F-O-U-R H-O-U-R movie, about time. It apparently took Marclay 2 years of slaving over his computer to create it. And its supposed to be amazing. You can only see it in galleries or museums. And I’m dying to see it, here’s a BBC story about the piece to give you some sense of it.
So besides animated GIFs I’m thinking about something else – it’s not a 24hr movie – I could never. But it’s a mashup that would require help. I’m thinking about telling a story about education through the innumerable portraits created of teachers and students in movies. I feel like there might be something we could learn from these portraits of schooling.
I’m picturing a mashup of scenes that portray high school and the interactions between students, teachers, parents, and principals. I want to see what will happen if I create interactions between characters from the Blackboard Jungle and the Breakfast Club. Too crazy?
Anyway that’s where I’m thinking of pointing my creative efforts – Hitchcock GIFs and/or a high school mashup. I’m excited and anxious at the same time. It’s been a while since I’ve felt ready to do something like this.
Walking around NYC this afternoon I saw the IFC Cinemetal t-shirts (scroll down that page—what a terrible website the IFC center has) at their theater off West 4th Street and I really, really wanted the Carpenter t-shirt. These t-shirts are heavy metal t-shirts/album covers mashed up with film diirectors. For example, The Carpenters album Lovelines is mashed up with John Carpenter’s They Live.
And there are many more that have been around since 2008, where have I been?
And that’s just a few of them…but the enw Carpenter is the one I have eyes for What”s more, this is right in line with a ds106 mashup assignment “Remix an Album Cover,” and what I like about this series is the focus on two specific groups that make ti easier: independent, hardcore film directors and Heavy metal bands. There may be something to such focused pairings to produce an inspired series.
Take a favorite cartoon or anime like show, take some clips, mash them together and add music to it. Try to pick out a specific theme in your clips that follow the theme of the music. Keep an eye out for changes in the music and plan your clips accordingly.
The cartoon I chose was Pokemon. Growing up as a 90′s kid pokemon was extremly popular back in the good days and it still is today. It also shows how powerful friendship can be so this also relates to it
What”s more, this is right in line with a ds106 mashup assignment 
