Alright, so maybe you won’t shit your pants, but you might pee a little–I did. (Plus, the poop reference is just too relevant to pass up.) The first time I saw Bridesmaids, I didn’t know what was happening to me. Seriously. I lost it. One of the funniest movies I have seen in a hot minute. And I love that it is women being this funny–especially the poop scene, and also the airplane scene. Kills me. Every time.
I was inspired to do this particular movie (for this assignment) because I caught it on TV last weekend when I went home (since I don’t have cable at my house here) and I was reminded about how much I love it. To get my picture to look like this, I, first, found a picture online in the handy, dandy Google images, and edited it with Picasa (yes, Google rules my world). I used the “retouch” tool to edit out the title in the original image, and then used the “text” tool to edit in the “truth.” This was the outcome. I like.
As always, feel free to leave me some constructive criticism. It’s always welcome!
This is 3 star design assignment 57, “Minimalist Travel Posters Based in Movies.” The instructions were “Create a minimalistic travel poster for a location in film, TV series, etc.”
I decided to create one for the North Pole. I love watching Christmas movies in the winter! Elf was my inspiration for this project. It was kind of hard coming up with a fake place for my poster, but I gave it some thought and decided why not the North Pole! The North Pole always looks like so much fun! I used to want to be an elf that worked in Santa’s workshop. (I was a weird kid, I know.) I used Paint to create this. The grey curvy area is suppose to be the frozen water for ice skating. I did my best to make it as simple as possible.
For the record, I love Moulin Rouge. Seriously. The flashy dances, the taboo life of a prostitute, and the music mash ups. Except the sad ending. I won’t ruin it for you, but you’ll cry if you have a heart. Anywho, I correctly changed the tag line from “No Laws. No Limits. One Rule. Never Fall In Love.” to “No Laws. No Limits. One Rule. Cry.” by using the paintbrush tool in Gimp and painting over the original in black to blend in and then using the text tool to “fix it”. I found the original poster here, and naturally, the assignment here.
I can never hear anyone talk about MOOCs without wanting to interject that the movement actually BEGAN IN CANADA, rather than being something Sebastian Thrun invented in breaks between lighting cuban cigars with $1,000 bundles of GoogleDollars. But that sounded like a monster-movie strapline so this poster happened, during a particularly hype-heavy session at a Social Media event in Glasgow.
I made it in powerpoint (yes really. Powerpoint is cool again. Like, hipster cool ironic) and the source image is a still from Monsters vs Aliens.
This assignment wasCreep on a Movie Scene. I used to have a poster of this scene in my dorm room and thought it’d be funny to edit myself in to it because of the nature of it and its age. Once again I used Gimp to edit myself in to gray scale as well as copy myself in to the scene.
Everything is free now
That’s what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn’t pay
— Gillian Welch, “Everything Is Free”
Don’t hate me, Gillian Welch.
Not that I’ve ripped off anything from you yet. But at the rate I’m going and since you’re one of my all-time faves — it can’t be long. In my first music remix for my DS106 radio segment, I “borrowed” work from a Karoke orchestra’s version of Summertime, Mamas and Pappas, and Pat Metheny.
I’ve always taken a hard line on copyright and fair use issues with my grad students, believing that they are the last defense for their students to learn to respect the intellectual property of others and their own. One memorable gray area was when Scott used the Beatles’ recording of “Eleanor Rigby” as the soundtrack for his video response (bookcast) to Laurie Halse Anderson’s Winter Girls. He really liked the connection he saw between the anorexic protagonist in Anderson’s novel and Eleanor’s loneliness.
But I thought that he was not using the song in a transformative manner, so advised against. Then he came back with his own rendition of the song that he played on his guitar and recorded. I still think he was wrong to use the piece; the song is not his intellectual property even if he plays it. And I don’t think it’s integral to his piece. Sometimes I worry that we take the easy way out and use popular songs because listeners tend to respond to those faster when we could do a better job if we used our craft to tell our story.
Yet, I’m a huge fan of Pogo of Perth with his unique style of remixing films (most famously, Disney and Pixar films), creating music using syllables, notes, chords, and sound effects only from the movies. His work is transformative, I would argue, and he adds a special value for the public that didn’t exist before.
So in creating my piece for my cabin’s DS106 radio show, I appropriated up to 30 seconds from the Mamas and the Papas’s “Dancing in the Streets” and Pat Metheny’s “Letters from Home” plus a few seconds from a Karoke version of “Summertime.” How do I feel? Surprisingly, confident that I did nothing wrong and I don’t think it’s rationalization.
The music was integral to the storytelling — not something I chose because it was pretty or I liked it. In each case, the music “chose” me because it was referred to by my those who participated in my inquiry. So is it transformative? You know, I actually think so because I do think I remix music and neuroscience research to share some pretty interesting findings.
Would my piece pass the YouTube test if I uploaded it there? Well, probably not. That’s why I think the work done by Larry Lessig and others in helping us understand that copyright laws need to change to reflect the “art” that we can create today using digital tools. It’s way past due. The only approved uses included in Section 107, US Copyright Law are those of “criticism, comment, news, reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.” Art that doesn’t fit in those categories is ignored. Tim Wu does a laudable job of helping us frame our questions for this digital era.
In the spirit that “learning should be free for all,” I’ve lobbied for all of the work I develop for online teaching to be free for all — those seeking accreditation pay while those interested in learning for learning’s sake pay nothing. So far, North Carolina State University and the professional associations I’ve developed online courses for have agreed.
But as a free-lancer, I still grapple with how to license the work that I do that is not commissioned. Stories like Alec Couros’s encourage me that there may be good reason to opt for the CC-NC-SA. Ultimately, I’m with Gillian — I’m going to create anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.
I was inspired to create a poster to highlight the Open Educational Resources (OER) and Creative Commons connection. It was the first time I’d attempted to use GIMP to cut and insert objects so I learned a lot. I’ve still much to learn about being precise and smoothing the edges after cutting. I also explored the use of multiple typefaces which has always seemed pretty scary to me. It’s sort of like matching plaids and florals — tricky but effective when done well. In this case, I followed the advice I’d read and used a sans serif title and a serif message that reflected the roundness of the Creative Commons typeface. Would love any feedback on whether or not it works.
The Assignment: Looking through the great list of ds106 audio assignments, I was drawn to Taking Back Spam. We are supposed to read a piece of spam aloud either trying to make sense of it or rendering it even more absurd with the one caveat that we own it.
The Process: The piece of spam I selected was from left as a reply to a comment by Alan on my Flippin’ Out post from last month. The spam comment, quoted in full below, was striking in that it includes ideas and names of people that are related to the sort of stuff that Alan writes about and the EdTEch scene in which he operates. Doing this assignment has led me to wonder how and why such spam is generated and what the creators hope to accomplish in spreading it. The entire comment, with spruced up syntax and grammar, appears after the jump:
It’s not that open education must be free – it ought to be just open.The Open Course that Alec teaches is not free – students at Regina University pay tuition that supports the institution, helps pay Alec’s salary, heat the buildings etc. They are paying for that sanctioned education that you describe. They are paying for a proximity to Alec that we dont get as the openly participating audience. But he teaches his course openly, so others can not only learn but also contribute to his paying student’s learning experience.I think David Wiley has written well about this; its not quite binary- open versus closed – its a spectrum of practice.
After I cleaned up the text a bit in FocusWriter, I read it aloud into the SoundCloud app on my iPhone and then uploaded it to SoundCloud. Though I’m told from time to time that my voice has a distinctive timbre, I lack the skill or confidence to speak as a character or imitate other voices. I did give it a try in this reading though I don’t think my Welsh accent is very authentic. I was trying for an over-the-top Burtonian vibe in this assignment.
The poster image at the top of the post was done for fun. The idea of using Mark as Spam as a title came the moment I decided to do the assignment. In thinking about a Mark or Marc to use in an image, my first thought was Marlon Brando as Marc Anthony in Julias Caesar. But when Google image search presented Dick and Liz at the banquet, the choice of image became a no-brainer.  I also thought about using the original bass player from Van Halen until I realized his Christian name is Michael and not Marc.
The Story: It seems like each day this blog receives a dozen or so pieces of comment spam (I’ve disabled comments on all posts more than one month old or it would be a far higher total). The ratio of spam comments to legitimate comments is on the order of 25:1 and I believe I’m using a WordPress plugin that is supposed to address this. I continually wonder what is gained by this practice.
Though I’m not at all satisfied with my Richard Burton imitation in this reading, I am inspired to learn how to do other voices. Any level of success I’m able to reach in that endeavor will all be attributed to, of all things, a piece of comment of spam. Isn’t the internet neat?
School’s out for the summer.* I’ve dedicated at least part of today to ds106 work, finally. I’m working on a Creative Commons poster, but I’m stuck trying to put the CC icon on there. I haven’t given up yet but I did decide to take a break.
Instead I did the One Story/Four Icons assignment. I’ve enjoyed seeing the work of others on this assignment and it seemed doable. I may try some other movies soon as well. The Noun Project made this pretty simple.
*The kids are done but I still have three days next week of meetings and packing up.
I tried my hand poorly a few weeks ago at the ds106 Kinetic Typography assignment. There is a reason maybe only 3 or 4 people have braved this one.
Kinetic typography (“moving text”) is an animation technique that allows a creative entrepreneur to mix text and motion. Your job is to take a speech or bit of dialog (try audiobooks, movies, TV shows, etc.) and animate it like this example from Sherlock Holmes. Consider how you could visually enforce the speech’s underlying themes… or subvert them. Be creative!
Without too much fanfare, and a nood to my fellow ds106ers who dig Cool Hand Luke, the classic line by Strother Martin’s aptly named character “Captain”, but more with the lines around it. The whole thing of putting people in their perceived places? What we have here…
I got hooked on thie film a year ago, and did a minimalist posteras well as a Macguffin. It’s just a classic on many fronts, and not just for Paul Newman’s larger than life performance, but many others in the mix. “A night in the box”?
I really fumbled around with this in Adobe After Affects. I swore I had the full version on my old Mac, since I had the CSS 5 full suite, but apparently in some fit of file cleaning, I sapped some key files, and it would not load. So I went for the student approach, the 30 day trial run.
While I ought to give a full blown process run down. I watched a few tutorials, and got the key tip on control scrubbing the audio to match the word entrance. After Effects is not for the feint of software. There are so many settings, effects (duh) and ways you can put key frames and ween things. I did not get as far as playing with the typing effects or the camera effects, so it was pretty much popping the words up in sync with the sound. I did a few position tweens, some with a box blur effect.
It was alos a fumble fest with rendering it. But I bulled through it, and now have some awareness of when I might reach for this large hammer again.
Some men you just can’t reach.
Maybe because they are fiddling with key frames or lost in renderland.
