The prompt

So I may have done this for the Daily Create originally, but I spent way too long on it and I realized it would make a good mashup assignment, so I made it one. Maybe it’s double-dipping, maybe it’s being efficient and proud of my work.

The process was pretty simple: find the clip of the scene, find a video of some cats, take out all the images of dinosaurs in the original scene, and replace it with cats. I tried to match up the sounds the dinosaurs were making with the sounds the cats were making.

The Assignment

For Movie Mashup I had to take a movie I like (The Avengers) and make a poster of it and a movie it has been compared to (Justice League). On my first attempt at this, I found the Justice League poster and The Avengers poster and downloaded them onto my computer. I then cropped the posters down to one character, getting a new poster for each new character, and did a collage of them all together on Canva. I added text in the black space for a new title for this movie. Overall I really don’t like the end results and wish it had turned out better. I feel like the poster combination would have worked better if their backgrounds had been more similar or if I had the time to figure out how to more precisely crop. Also, feel as if it would have gone better if beforehand I hadn’t spent over an hour gathering videos for another assignment only to have those videos decide not to work in OpenShot. Oh well… I guess I’ll chalk this one up to a learning experience to check one video before I gather multiple ones.

However, really not liking that first attempt when I went back later I decided to try again. This is second attempt is the image at the top. To create it I found pictures of the Avengers and the Justice League. I took them back to Canva and adjusted them so that each on took up about half the poster. I added text, but it couldn’t really be seen so I found an effect to add a background behind the text. While this second attempt was still far from perfect, I like it a lot better than the first.

This was worth 4.5 stars.

The Assignment

For Movie Mashup I had to take a movie I like (The Avengers) and make a poster of it and a movie it has been compared to (Justice League). On my first attempt at this, I found the Justice League poster and The Avengers poster and downloaded them onto my computer. I then cropped the posters down to one character, getting a new poster for each new character, and did a collage of them all together on Canva. I added text in the black space for a new title for this movie. Overall I really don’t like the end results and wish it had turned out better. I feel like the poster combination would have worked better if their backgrounds had been more similar or if I had the time to figure out how to more precisely crop. Also, feel as if it would have gone better if beforehand I hadn’t spent over an hour gathering videos for another assignment only to have those videos decide not to work in OpenShot. Oh well… I guess I’ll chalk this one up to a learning experience to check one video before I gather multiple ones.

However, really not liking that first attempt when I went back later I decided to try again. This is second attempt is the image at the top. To create it I found pictures of the Avengers and the Justice League. I took them back to Canva and adjusted them so that each on took up about half the poster. I added text, but it couldn’t really be seen so I found an effect to add a background behind the text. While this second attempt was still far from perfect, I like it a lot better than the first.

This was worth 4.5 stars.

This assignment comes from this one. Originally, I was going to mix together different Taylor Swift songs, but Youtube to MP3 was not working for me anymore, so I used audio files that I already had on my computer from other projects. For this mashup, I used the songs Day n Nite by Kid Cudi, The Kiss of Venus by Dominic Fike, and Pink + White by Frank Ocean. I used Audacity to cut and put these songs together. It was fairly easy and I went into this project already having a vision for what it would sound like. In case SoundCloud takes it down, I have also embedded the audio file on here too.

I twisted this assignment a little bit because it’s been a while since I’ve done a post relating back to Bob Ross and I found the perfect picture for this kind of assignment. I wanted to create this idea of Bob Ross still being alive but off in a magical land with others that are equally as heartwarming. My original thought process was to grab a picture of Santa and a picture of Bob Ross and combine them together at a barbecue, but when looking for photos of Bob, I found one that could instead be a bit romantic and funny. In the picture, Bob is reaching out to paint on a canvas, but it almost looks as if he is sensually caressing someone’s cheek…or beard. In that very moment of realization, I knew that Bob Ross and Santa Claus had to be in a loving relationship, hiding away in a tropical paradise, leaving their old lives behind to spend valuable time together. You can see by Santa’s expression that he is consistently shocked by the passion that Bob puts into everything, even relationships.

This took me quite a bit of time to create, regardless of how simple it may look. I’ve only recently begun using GIMP, specifically the selection options to crop things out of images, so this has certainly been a learning process. I spent a long time trying to smooth out the edges of Bob and Santa using the lasso tool and I believe it paid off. I also had to figure out how to set the image to grayscale in order to make everything look as cohesive as possible. Unfortunately, this is the highest quality image of Bob Ross looking this specific way that I could find, so the crispness of Santa against his smudginess is a bit off-putting, unfortunately. Regardless, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity because the two images simply work too well together. The only reasoning I had for a beach in the background is that it seemed like the most romantic and private setting for this interaction. Honestly, if anything, this assignment has turned into a bit of a fan fiction assignment, but at the end of the day I’m happy with it and I hope you get a kick out of it!

This week, I decided to create my own assignment to help push myself to do something creative and learn new skills using the “mashup” concept. This is my first time creating an assignment, but I think that it’s a really interesting option to be able to guide your own creative learning experience. Having this opportunity to force myself to try something I’ve been wanting to do for a while has been very beneficial.

As an avid watcher of Twitch streams, I find myself enveloped in the community and always wanting to engage. My favorite streamer, Kurumx, has the best community I’ve found in over 7 years on Twitch and a great deal of the engagement comes from the use of fun and silly emotes. These emotes can be anything from GIFs of John Cena eating ice cream to still images of an extremely happy frog throwing it’s arms up in the air and everything between. Because of this, chatters are always looking for new ways to use emotes, but more specifically, new emotes to add to the channel’s arsenal.

With this heavy emphasis on emotes in Kurum’s chat, I decided to become the “tiny hat” guy. For some backstory, there is an emote called “peepoBlushHat,” seen above as the image for the assignment in the assignment bank, that I’ve always loved. Feeling inspired, one day I jokingly asked if Kurum would wear nothing but a tiny hat on stream for us, pairing the message with this emote, and it quickly became “my thing” in chat. Before long, I was showing up to chat each night sending “peepoBlushHat” as my only “hello” message in chat and I would get a tsunami of chatters sending nothing but the emote in chat, as well, responding to my greeting. I knew that this was the start of something special, and months and months later I still am the “peepoBlushHat” guy, but not for much longer.

When watching Twitch streams, you gain channel points from being there, being active in chat, and participating in a gambling feature. Streamers can set channel point rewards to be redeemed by viewers, giving a reason to want to gain more and putting pressure behind gambling points. One of the point rewards in Kurum’s channel is “active any emote you want,” which gave me an idea. Because the streamer ultimately came detached from the idea of the hat, drifting away from the idea of him wearing a hat and more towards me being the hat guy, I wanted to redirect things back on track a bit. To do this, I figured I could put the hat and blush from the frog onto Kurum instead and submit it as an emote, then claim the reward in the channel to enable it for everyone to use. As previously mentioned, it was perfect timing because of the nature of the assignments required for this week, so I decided to make an assignment out of it.

I started by taking the original image, peepoBlushHat, and loading it into GIMP to crop out the hat as best as possible. Then, I contemplated how I would get an image of Kurum smiling in a similar, very adorable manner. Unfortunately, at the time of creating, Kurum wasn’t in a great mood and was a bit mopey, so I was worried I couldn’t take my own screenshot and instead would have to find a generic picture of him online to use. Regardless, I decided to still take a shot and see if I could miraculously catch him mid-smile. Using a PC app called Gyazo, I highlighted a box around Kurum’s face cam and waiting to grab the screenshot. With some incredible stroke of luck, only seconds later someone in chat said the funniest thing all night and I was able to grab a picture of Kurum smiling very genuinely. This was perfect because I had a unique image that isn’t being used elsewhere and was able to get it quite easily.

Once I had this last element, it was just a matter of positioning and resizing the hat, editing out some of Kurum’s hair because it’s so tall, and applying a light pink brush to his cheeks to replicate the blush. This was the most difficult part, though, as I’m decently new to GIMP and was having trouble with layers, selection, and resizing. Thankfully, though, after a bit of time, a few tutorials and Google searches, and a decent bit of effort, I was able to complete the emote.

Though ultimately it wouldn’t be a tiny hat, which would be sticking true to the origins, there was a couple problems with that. For one, the only hat emote I could originally find to represent this tiny hat I wanted Kurum to wear was peepoBlushHat, which ironically features an average size hat. Thankfully, I was able to manipulate this concept enough to explain it like, “when it’s a tiny emote in chat, the hat is also tiny.” Secondly, shrinking the hat down to an actually tiny size would in turn make the hat so small that it may not be viewable on some monitors, or at least would be very difficult to make out. Regardless, I transferred the elements over from peepoBlushHat very well, kurumBlushHat was born, and chat LOVED it.

As soon as the emote was added, the chat started flooding with it, and as you can see, people instantly knew who made it and what it was made in relation to. Deathrider3’s comment, “finally tiny hat,” and lilkahuna directly addressing me in chat show that the tiny hat phenomenon has existed for a while. Now, I’ve finally been able to leave my mark on Twitch in a small way, but more specifically the community that I actively engage in most nights. This experience was incredible and I feel that much closer to fellow chatters. Hilariously, Kurum trash talked the emote calling it a “monstrosity” and an “abomination,” all the while laughing and enjoying that hundreds of viewers in chat were spamming it. After making those comments, people started saying things such as, “Bro, it’s literally a picture of you with a hat on blushing, so you’re an abomination?” Even though the streamer was joking, chat was very wholesome and supportive saying, “But he worked so hard on it >:(” and things of that nature.

The entire journey that this assignment has taken me on has been incredible and I really hope that current and future students have a similar connection with a Twitch community and are able to make something fun, at the very least. Making the emote was a great deal of fun, especially when things were really coming together, but the experience that followed was priceless. Because of this story and journey, I felt it appropriate in the assignment description to allow the assignment to be counted as 4 stars if someone else can have this experience.

One final thing I wanted to share to close out the blog post is another bit of feedback I received on the emote. When enabling it in Kurum’s channel, it was used a lot immediately, and some chatters really loved it and enabled it on their own streams as well. Other than myself and Kurum, 8 other streamers enabled the emote in for themselves and I’ve been able to use it in their channels as well. This means that it has spread past my initial hopes for it and is making an even bigger mark than I had originally anticipated.