Description: The assignment is to take a photo, a quote from a different character than the one in the picture, and a name from a third character different from the other two, place the quote in the picture, and “sign” it with the third person’s name. The three characters are to be from three different, but similar in genre, series. It’s known as “troll quoting.”
My Three Trolls:
Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy
Captain Kathryn Janeway
Dylan Thomas
Steve Jobs, but I don’t know if a referent is considered a troll?
I have seen a lot of pretty funny Triple Troll Attacks, but I’ve been wanting to do something that honored the passing of Steve Jobs. This seemed like a great opportunity.
I love Jacqueline Kennedy’s patrician look in this photo. I tried Princess Diana, but she really does have sort of a party girl glimmer lurking in her eyes. I wanted the High Priestess on the other side of the Black Veil of Death.
Captain Kathryn Janeway from “Voyager” had the verbal cadences of a starship authority very different from Onassis-Kennedy’s East Coast accent.
I take my text from Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
Let Shakespeare have the last word:
“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
Original context: Eat dots, avoid ghosts. This is 1980! There is no context!
Reappropriation:
“Day 1000. I still don’t know how I got into this maze, or if I’m ever going to get out. Frankly the way this is going I’m beginning to give up hope. Occasionally I find fruit on the ground though…which despite the mystery of how they got there proves a necessary, even delicious source of sustenance. Nevertheless I feel that my time may soon be up; I have begun hallucinating, seeing multi-coloured ghosts floating around these bland, blue halls. Little by little everything is becoming so colourful to me…and I can’t help but feel a sense of twisted melancholy at this unforeseen development…”
Original screenshot here. One interesting consideration this time was how to integrate text into a game as old as this without it seeming out of place and what I opted for in the end was to use a “dot-style” font to try and camouflage the line in there with the white dots, with the intention of blending dots with the “…” that might be part of the line itself.
As for the “how”, well there wasn’t much photo manipulation done this time around, but a big part of the process, as mentioned, was applying the right “dot-style” font so I guess I’ll elaborate a little on finding and installing new fonts to your computer. What you wanna do is basically do a simple Google search on “free fonts“, which will give you a list of sites where you can download…well, free fonts! (surprised?)
You can search for basically anything (even ones which mimic a specific moviefont) but once you have your file downloaded you wanna go and unzip the folder (it’s usually zipped), look for a file with the font name that ends with the extension “TTF“, “OTF” or similar, and do the following:
Go to “My Computer”
“Local Disc”
“Windows”
“Fonts”, and basically drop the TTF/OTF file in there.
After that…well there’s no after that actually. The next time you open any font-using program (can you say Photoshop?) your new, shiny font should be added to your list of selectables! Go ahead and use it for your next assignment!
ds106 assignment on reinterpreting a logo with the inclusion of what one buys most at the place.
And the original 7 & iHoldings logo:
So here’s the rundown: For those of you not in the know convenience stores in Japan are really living up to the name (being convenient, who would’ve thought it!). I go there all the time to buy food, stationery and other miscellaneous stuff but the one thing I go to 7-11 specifically for is Pokemon merchandise; cards, lucky draw prizes etc. simply because the other convenience stores don’t carry that particular item (they’ve got other awesome stuff but that’s for a different post).
Given the above I decided to go in and reinterpret the 7-11 logo with a Pokemon twist and the above image is the result. My considerations this time were about how to balance the iconography of the original logo with the Pokemon reference(s), and what really got me started I guess was the circular “swish” that the 7 & iHoldings version had, which I reappropriated into a pokeball. Other ways of balancing the two elements were by maintaining the original logo colours, and trying to keep each object (the ball vs. the “7″) from becoming too prominent.
Video tutorial of some of the processes to follow (full size here):
ds106 assignment on reinterpreting a logo with the inclusion of what one buys most at the place.
And the original 7 & iHoldings logo:
So here’s the rundown: For those of you not in the know convenience stores in Japan are really living up to the name (being convenient, who would’ve thought it!). I go there all the time to buy food, stationery and other miscellaneous stuff but the one thing I go to 7-11 specifically for is Pokemon merchandise; cards, lucky draw prizes etc. simply because the other convenience stores don’t carry that particular item (they’ve got other awesome stuff but that’s for a different post).
Given the above I decided to go in and reinterpret the 7-11 logo with a Pokemon twist and the above image is the result. My considerations this time were about how to balance the iconography of the original logo with the Pokemon reference(s), and what really got me started I guess was the circular “swish” that the 7 & iHoldings version had, which I reappropriated into a pokeball. Other ways of balancing the two elements were by maintaining the original logo colours, and trying to keep each object (the ball vs. the “7″) from becoming too prominent.
Video tutorial of some of the processes to follow (full size here):
ds106 assignment on Un-scene Stories; writing about a minor character in a movie or TV series before or after the scene in which they appeared.
Going off the given example of Star Wars (and trying to stick to something everyone would have a clue about), let’s talk about Episode IV’s A New Hope.
Movie: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
Scene: These are not the droids you’re looking for. After. Character: The Force-influenced Stormtrooper.
So if you watch the scene you’ll notice that it seems only the main “head” stormtrooper was brainwashed by Obi-wan, although the others probably kept quiet because he was the one in charge (evidenced by the guy’s brown shoulder pad).
After the scene cuts however, word spreads among the other stormtroopers during break about their commander’s strange behaviour.
“Don’t you think those folks in the hovercraft were kind of suspicious?” goes one stormtrooper.
“Yea I know right? They had droids and everything!” agrees another. “And don’t you think the conversation that old guy had with the commander was a little strange?”
“Definitely. I thought so too. Reminds me of a story I heard from one of the old guys a couple years ago. Spoke of a group of weird monk-people, Jedi I think he called them. Said that they had special powers and stuff. Do things like control your mind.”
“Whoa Bob, that’s messed up. Could you imagine if that were true? I mean, they could totally abuse that power to do all kinds of stuff! Steal credits, secrets, ..”
“Or..get past a security blockade?”
And all the stormtroopers turned silent in an instant…
A week later the former commander of Stormtrooper Unit 13 sat in a dingy, badly-lit cell awaiting personal interrogation by the man known as Lord Vader. He had never seen the man personally himself, not many people do and under normal circumstances he would have been overjoyed at the honour of meeting the Emperor’s right-hand man in person. But no, on the contrary he was shaking in his shiny, white boots as he imagined the horrors of what lay in store for himself. This was no courtesy call, it was an interrogation, and according to the stories he had heard of Lord Vader’s “interrogations”, not many people survive the life-changing experience…
UPDATE: Original illustration based on a photograph by Gary Sheriston. Illustration inspired by comments below, and made by…
…first placing a new layer in Photoshop on top of the photograph.
Turned opacity (top of the Layers window) of the drawing layer down to have a translucent effect through to the photo.
“Traced” the main Vader and stormtrooper figures while simplifying their colours and shapes, sort of like the “silhouette” technique here, but just a bit more detailed.
Multiplied the stormtrooper figure to have a crowd.
Added original background (looks complicated but look closer it’s just simple shapes) and text to finish.
For this assignment forever change the plot of a movie, tv show, etc. by changing a single line of dialogue. Put this new line of dialogue below a screen-cap of the moment in the movie you’re changing.
Can we stop by a pharmacy? I need to get a Nasonex refill before I sneeze my pointy little ears off.
I still enjoy making my own icons for this assignment using the live trace tool in Illustrator. I made a quick tutorial of how I do this using the Dr. Oblivion image as my example to convert a bitmap to vectors.
And please guess away, the biplane should be the tell tale icon for most!
For the interview/music mashup I did a remix of Dickie Goodman’s “Kong” (original can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsELgtExsEs) where Goodman interviews King Kong while he is roaming around New York City. I used audacity again, had to find the close to exact timings of all of the songs that were edited into the interview already to overwrite them and the same for the snippets of the songs I put in, all of which had to be toned down a lot (using amplify, decreasing dB). While all of the songs might not fit in perfectly, this one took a while to do and a good amount of thinking and searching through songs. I tried to use a set of music that allows everyone to recognize at least a few songs! Here’s what I chose (in order in the remix):
Don’t Worry Baby – The Beach Boys
Help! – The Beatles
Never Gonna Give You Up – Rick Astley (rickroll ftw!)
Let it Be – The Beatles
In My Dreams – Kid Cudi
Crank That – Soulja Boy
People Are Strange – The Doors
You’re a Jerk – New Boyz
Airplanes – B.o.B. (feat. Hayley Williams)
Young, Wild, and Free – Wiz Khalifa (feat. Snoop Dogg)
Sky’s the Limit – Lil Wayne
Popular – Lil Wayne (feat. Lil Twist)
Back in January Lisa M. Lane came up with an awesome assignment for ds106radio which was basically to turn a movie into good radio. What this entails is taking key parts of a film’s soundtrack (music, dialogue, sound effects, etc.) and compressing it into a tight, somewhat cohesive version of the story—at least that is how I read it. She did a 7 minute version of Three Days of the Condor, and it blew my mind. Ever since hearing Lisa’s example I’ve been dying to do a version for John Carpenter’s The Thing, but between one thing and another it fell by the wayside, even though I had ripped all the audio from the film and cut it up into 45 separate tracks back in February. This morning I went through those tracks and cut them up into a 7 minute version for ds106radio. It is by no means perfect, but doing it was a ton of fun. I tried to preserve some of the humor of the film (MacReady’s calling the Norwegians Swedes, etc.) while capturing what I believe to be the overarching horror of the film: nobody can trust anyone else anymore. I changed the ending a bit, or at least added on to it—the only moment of real license on my part—but the rest simply tries to distill the plot of The Thing into seven short minutes. Not sure I totally succeeded, but it felt good to make it. What’s more, it should count as the first of my May Day Stories.
Back in January 