Search Results for “silly movie”

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Return of the (Almost ) Silent Mean Girls!

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I decided to do the Return to the Silent Era assignment. This is worth five stars. The gist of the assignment is to turn a movie trailer (I did the Mean Girls trailer) into a silent movie. For instance, you take the sound away, make it look dated and add “cue cards.” I looked at one about Nemo that was done extremely well as a “background” on what mine should look like. The color of this one was very well done, as is the telling of the plot. However, the best one I saw was Martha’s on Young Teen Wolf. Amazing! The idea for a real cue card is fantastic. The music sounds realistic.

I choose this assingmnet honestly because I already did the “pre-production” for it. I had a picture of what I wanted to happen before I did it and I wanted to make sure my video making went somewhat smoothly. The inspriation was a picture of what Victorian/roaring 20s Mean Girls looked like. Did they “know the rules of feminism”? Did they were pink dresses on Wednesdays and flapper dresses only once a week?

This is part of a story because of what Mean Girls is. Tina Fey, one of the writers, meant it to be a sarcastic joke on how young women act and how they act towards each other. She meant it as a “ha I know this is funny, but it needs to change in our society” (Fey is a big feminist). I feel just thinking about the history of how women have always been vindictive toward each other and how it hasn’t really changed. How would those roaring 20s Mean Girls compare to the ones we have today?

Also, this is just a really good movie.

The process was to use PwnYouTube to snag the Mean Girl trailer off of Youtube. After that took forever to download, I threw that down into iMovie. Just to be clear, this is my first time using iMovie seriously. Then I took it in sections and made it “aged” by using iMovie’s pre-set template. Then I added “cue cards”/text over top of it. This was the hardest part. I couldn’t get it to just be for a few seconds. I played with it and realized the “duration” was for the “cue card” not the clip. After I did that for the rest of the clips, I added in transitions between the clips (Note: it is extremely hard to include all the plot, so to someone who has never seen Mean Girls, this is not what it is about exactly…). Then I went and speed them up by 150%. I left the muting part to last.

This was a mistake.

There are bits and pieces for some reason that just didn’t mute. They were mute in iMovie, I promise. When I played it there, it was actually silent. Then I uploaded it to Youtube and there were little chipmunk voices on some parts!

I don’t get it. So then I went back and tried to find the silly bits that weren’t muted… And they all were. I have no clue. Plus, it was already uploaded and my computer was sounding like a race car, which is a terrible noise to hear from a relatively new Macbook (p.s. does any one have a solution for this? I only had Safari and iMovie open!).

Then I went and downloaded this lovely piano music. The original was way to slow so I popped that bad boy into Audacity and speed it up by like 33% and changed the pitch to like C#. I can’t tell if it sounds good/realistic or like an organ is dying.

Anywho, besides that whole muting snafu, which kind of defeats the purpose of “silent” movie, I learned a lot from this. I had no clue iMovie had all of those presets before, nor did I know it was so “powerful.” It was a really good experience!

Also, the font is tiny. Forgive me, many first time mistakes.

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Laughing in Italian

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Make ‘Em Laugh was a wee bit challenging, considering I don’t really know any languages other than Spanish and English. Trying to pronounciate words I wasn’t familiar with was so difficult. I chose to do a joke in Italian. I chose this joke because I’ve always wanted to learn italian and what better way to start than by learning silly jokes? I’m sure we are all familiar with the saying “If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.” This is a saying that I grew up hearing. To me it means that not everything will come when I want it, but I have to go out and work hard to get to where I want to be.

Italian Joke:
Se la montagna viene da te e tu non sei Maometto…
Corri, perchè è una frana!

English Translation:
If the mountain comes to you and you’re not Muhammad …
Run, because it’s a landslide!

I do wish I didn’t sound so monotone when telling the joke, but I felt like that was impossible for me because I was trying so hard to pronounce correctly. Once I’ll learn Italian I might be able to do it with a better flow.

Worth 2 stars

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Wrapping Up Week Six With A Bow

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As Design Week comes to a close I will have to say that this has been the most miserable week of my life. This brought up a lot of negativity from my Digital Approaches to Fine Arts class because of my constant use of Creative Suite 5 then, and even returning to work on CS6 and finding how much more amazing CS6 is from GIMP or Adobe PhotoShop Elements or Paint. Additionally, I can’t stand design work. I can tell you why something looks bad and point out the clutter and the elements that make up the poor design, but I have no idea how to make awesomeness from scratch.

Design Safari

Going on a Safari was weird. It made me step back and really think about the kinds of photos I was taking because I was looking for letters; I never photograph letters and words. Whenever I photograph letters or words it’s so that I can remember things easier when I’m going on travels around various parts of the city. I always thought about advertisements especially after learning about Matt Siber, so it was interesting to have to kind of replicate the things that he does, but I’m not going in digitally and editing things.

Daily Create One
October 2, 20120 | tdc268
Imagine your own personal font (typeface) and draw the letters in your name.

I thought that this assignment was so much fun. I used to sit in my high school classes and doodle out some new fonts, always dreaming to someday sell them. I lost sight of that and stopped my font-doodles and am sticking more to doodles that are more in the manner of The Gube, so this assignment was a nice way to get back in touch with my teenage self.

Daily Create Two
October 4, 2012 | tdc270
From memory, draw the floor plan of the house you grew up in.

This assignment made me homesick. This house was being built during the first year of my life and I have lived there ever since. The floor plan also reminded me of how every year in elementary school I would run upstairs when I got home and try to bribe my dad to draw the floor plan of the house for me for the fire safety packet I brought home. He would draw it on a separate paper for me to use as a guide and I would grab the fattest crayon I could and scribble down our floor plan and then our escape route in red.

Daily Create Three
October 5, 2012 | tdc271
Show us a classic title from your bookshelf and tell us why you treasure it.

So this is the video I shot kind of late. Whoops. I woke up in a panic at five this morning, read the daily create prompt on my phone, snapped a picture, uploaded, and heaved back to sleep. Halfway through my day I was going through the daily creates and realized I had to do a video instead. Whoops.

Daily Create Four
October 6, 2012 | tdc272
Add crazy sound effecs to your favorite song! e.g. as if performed by visitors from outer space.

I started off with Deep Enough to Dream by Chris Rice and then added farm sounds. I used cows by reinsamba, horse snorts by ERH, and a montage of geese and friends by sinatra314. I layered sounds, changed the pitches on some and had a lot of differentiation in volume.

1 STAR
I just had to do this one, I couldn’t sneak away from it. I created this tapestry with a tapestry builder and had so much fun. I think at one point I tried to tell a story with all the options available, but it was far too crowded. Maybe if I made a real tapestry I would have put everyone on there at least four times!

2 STAR (times three equals 6)

I started off with my melting family and that was a neat experience because I was back in CS6. It wasn’t the easiest subjects to work with and it definitely could have been better, but it still ended up how I wanted it to. I then moved on to my lackadaisical typographic depiction. I liked this one a lot more and because I was using CS6 again the layers were easier to manipulate and alter. The finished product was a lot cleaner than some of the other ones I created. Of my two star assignments I liked my minimalized philosophy the best. I created this one on paint and used Impact as my font. It’s a great font.

3 STAR (times two equals 6)

I started with creating a four icon story. This was probably my favorite one that I had done up to this point. I drew with my mouse (not my favorite, but it is effective) in black and then filled all my excess negative space with black. I was also really excited about this because I had just watched it for the first time a weekend ago as part of my movie education.

My other assignment was creating my own album covers. This was also something that reminded me of high school when I signed up for a class in my freshman year of high school that was desktop publishing. We had outdated computers with limited technology but were still designing covers for our “Greatest Hits” album. All my classmates went crazy with color and I stayed simple. Now, using GIMP I went crazy with color and creating silly little titles.

4 STAR

I am pleased with this assignment. I created my own Top Gun card using GIMP and images from the internet.

End total of stars is 17. I think the coolest part of all of this is that I actually attempted a design challenge from every star level. Another thing that I took into consideration when choosing the assignments to do, with the exception of the four icon and philosophy, that I tried to do things with a handful of completions. The lesser the besser (German for better). A lot of the assignments corresponded to the things that I had recently seen and have been learning about. Design week was a pain but still a lot of fun. And because I said I would wrap it up with a bow:

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The Sounds of the Infamous Chase

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I have been dreading doing these sound assignments all week. The thought of having to download and learn how to use new software made me cringe. I finally got the guts to take a hack at one of the projects. I’m so glad I did! It was so simple! I feel so silly for worrying about it all along. It just took a few downloads of sounds and uploading it onto Audacity and rearranging the sounds and Wahla I have a sound story. Of course my influence came from animals. I had a hard time trying to think of what 5 sounds I could use for this. I knew I wanted to use a dog barking, but wasn’t sure what story I could tell. Somehow, the thought of a dog chasing a cat came into my head. I used a dog sniffing out the cat, the cat meows, the dog barks, the cat hisses, and off they go. In the end, while they are running, I incorporated the angry cat (still the same clip as the hiss so it is still in the rule of 5 sounds) and another dog bark at the end to make it seem more realistic. Overall, It was extremely effort free and turned out pretty cool!

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What makes me laugh 2 stars

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There is very few movies that can actually make me laugh are much less put a smile on my face. But everytime I watch this scene from scary movie 2 it always makes me laugh no matter what. I have always been a fan of the wayne brothers and this is the most silliest, pointless screne but its so silly because its actullay picking fun at the old basketball commercials they use to broadcast on television enjoy.

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Blogger love

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When I started this class, I was very worried. For one I had never started my own blog, nor had I read them regularly. Suer I jumped the wagon on Myspace and Facebook, and still linger, but just because I know it, it is comfortable. Like the diner with the terrible food, but you go anyway because its comfortable and predictable. That being said I had not used many things like Twitter, or even half of the sites we are using now, I never even used my Gmail until now!! But something that I had not realized, was that I had always read blogs. I may not have known it but I loved a blog called “Plastic Bamboo” I discovered it when i was 14 years old, in middle school. It is long gone, and I do not even know the person who operated it, but in essence it was a blog about fun trinkets and facts from Asia. Being from Colorado, in the middle of nowhere, like cows and corn, it was a teenage-energy fueled hobby. So in tribute to that site, “Plastic Bamboo” I will always love you! I dedicate my next DS106 assignment to whomever was the up-dater of PB Thank you for keeping my middle-school years interesting.

Because of the loss of my beloved Plastic Bamboo, I will instead write about my newest favorite “tokyomango” A blog that I have faithfully followed for the last 4 years:

Tokyo Mango, is done by a woman named Lisa Katayama, I believe she is half-American and half Japanese. She writes some amazing articles, she usually tries to tie together American and Japanese cultures. I believe she is located in California, and she is very active in terms of writing (she has published a book) and she also is a news correspondent for things like the Tsunami and other events that may appear on the news. The reason that I follow her blog, and have followed her blog for so many years is because of the powerful, professional and profound images and videos that she posts. All of the best videos that I have seen have been on this site, and I often re-post them on my own Facebook Page. She does everything from silly toys like the “Otamatone” a ladle like toy that makes for an interesting instrument, to advertising for upcoming films about the tsunami. She is also working on a movie, called “We are all Radioactive” about the people and the effects of the power-plant on their bodies over time. Not just current things, Lisa also does articles about artists, and they are always amazing! The only way for me to convey my full love for her and all of her hard work, is to ask everyone to look at her blog. Tell me what you think! Do you agree that she is a incredible blogger that deserves to be paid for her site? I do!

Happy surfing~

Oh and here is a questionnaire about Lisa: incase you fall in love with her blogging like I did~

I may have misunderstood the assignment, I guess a fanfic, is to do something pretending that I am that person. It will be hard to achieve the greatness that is Lisa Katayama, but also the problem is that all the cool gadgets and movies that I see come from her blog!! I will do my best to find something equivalent~

In Japan this week, gatherers in Kawasaki assemble to show their respect to the penis. Yes you read that right, the penis. Here is what Wki has to say about the topic:

The Shinto Kanamara Matsuri (?????? “Festival of the Steel Phallus”) is held each spring at the Kanayama shrine (????) in Kawasaki, Japan. The exact dates vary: the main festivities fall on the first Sunday in April. The penis, as the central theme of the event – is reflected in illustrations, candy, carved vegetables, decorations, and a mikoshi parade.

The Kanamara Matsuri is centered around a local penis-venerating shrine once popular among prostitutes who wished to pray for protection from sexually transmitted diseases. It is said that there are also divine protections for business prosperity and for the clan’s prosperity; and for easy delivery, marriage, and married-couple harmony. There is also a legend of a sharp-toothed demon (vagina dentata) that hid inside the vagina of a young woman and castrated two young men on their wedding nights. As a result, the young woman sought help from a blacksmith, who fashioned an iron phallus to break the demon’s teeth, which lead to the enshrinement of the item.

Today, the festival has become something of a tourist attraction and is used to raise money for HIV research

I think that it is great that something as spooky as sexualy transmitted diseases can be opened to the public like this, and some festival that may seem silly, really has a great message for health and awareness for HIV. I am afraid to say that I missed the festival myself, but I wonder if some of you made it? Did you hear the story about the teethed vaginas? Did you have a penis lollipop? I will share a picture that I found of the festival, looks great I hope that I can go next year!

I think this is the type of article that you can find on the Tokyo Mango site mentioned above. She has a great eye for art and talented people. GIve her a look it is worth it!

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Blogger love

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Because of the loss of my beloved Plastic Bamboo, I will instead write about my newest favorite “tokyomango” A blog that I have faithfully followed for the last 4 years:

Happy surfing~

Oh and here is a questionnaire about Lisa: incase you fall in love with her blogging like I did~

In Japan this week, gatherers in Kawasaki assemble to show their respect to the penis. Yes you read that right, the penis. Here is what Wki has to say about the topic:

The Shinto Kanamara Matsuri (?????? “Festival of the Steel Phallus”) is held each spring at the Kanayama shrine (????) in Kawasaki, Japan. The exact dates vary: the main festivities fall on the first Sunday in April. The penis, as the central theme of the event – is reflected in illustrations, candy, carved vegetables, decorations, and a mikoshi parade.

The Kanamara Matsuri is centered around a local penis-venerating shrine once popular among prostitutes who wished to pray for protection from sexually transmitted diseases. It is said that there are also divine protections for business prosperity and for the clan’s prosperity; and for easy delivery, marriage, and married-couple harmony. There is also a legend of a sharp-toothed demon (vagina dentata) that hid inside the vagina of a young woman and castrated two young men on their wedding nights. As a result, the young woman sought help from a blacksmith, who fashioned an iron phallus to break the demon’s teeth, which lead to the enshrinement of the item.

Today, the festival has become something of a tourist attraction and is used to raise money for HIV research

I think this is the type of article that you can find on the Tokyo Mango site mentioned above. She has a great eye for art and talented people. GIve her a look it is worth it!

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Blogger love

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Because of the loss of my beloved Plastic Bamboo, I will instead write about my newest favorite “tokyomango” A blog that I have faithfully followed for the last 4 years:

Happy surfing~

Oh and here is a questionnaire about Lisa: incase you fall in love with her blogging like I did~

In Japan this week, gatherers in Kawasaki assemble to show their respect to the penis. Yes you read that right, the penis. Here is what Wki has to say about the topic:

The Shinto Kanamara Matsuri (?????? “Festival of the Steel Phallus”) is held each spring at the Kanayama shrine (????) in Kawasaki, Japan. The exact dates vary: the main festivities fall on the first Sunday in April. The penis, as the central theme of the event – is reflected in illustrations, candy, carved vegetables, decorations, and a mikoshi parade.

The Kanamara Matsuri is centered around a local penis-venerating shrine once popular among prostitutes who wished to pray for protection from sexually transmitted diseases. It is said that there are also divine protections for business prosperity and for the clan’s prosperity; and for easy delivery, marriage, and married-couple harmony. There is also a legend of a sharp-toothed demon (vagina dentata) that hid inside the vagina of a young woman and castrated two young men on their wedding nights. As a result, the young woman sought help from a blacksmith, who fashioned an iron phallus to break the demon’s teeth, which lead to the enshrinement of the item.

Today, the festival has become something of a tourist attraction and is used to raise money for HIV research

I think this is the type of article that you can find on the Tokyo Mango site mentioned above. She has a great eye for art and talented people. GIve her a look it is worth it!

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May I Take Your Order?

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The Story:

I chose to do the May I Take Your Order Ds106 assignment because I thought it would be fun trying to speak in a different accent. At first, I tried to sound like a chinese immigrant in America but that seemed like it was fake so I trashed it, then I tried to sound like I was french and that was even worse. After the first two different attempts I felt like giving up, thinking it was just silly. But giving up is harder than trying and I thought why not use a british or Australian accent? So I tried that… NOPE!!! sounded fake! Finally I said screw it and I went for the southern american accent and I think it was the closest I could do to immitate an accent.

The Process:

I used the mac lab on the 5th floor of TUJ where there is a sound proof room, I recorded my voice with out a script the first few times but I found that writing a script and practicing the script would make it sound better after a few attempts. I uploaded it on sound cloud and TADA, my southern accent was born!

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Circling ‘Round Teacher Created Learning Resources

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How often do we feel like our work will never be done in education?

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to escape the circular reasoning behind the notion that “teachers don’t have time to create their own learning resources.” I believe that notion to be completely false, yet walk into any school building and you’ll easily find a good majority of teachers that claim they’re too busy to worry about “one more thing”. Perhaps….but what if the reason they feel so overwhelmed is that the time they do have has been structured to be inefficient and cluttered with a lot of “small chores” that never seem to be done?

This past Saturday morning I woke up to 17 inches of fresh snow. It was quite a shock, and after suiting up in my winter gear and shoveling a path to the driveway, I got the snow blower warmed up and started to clear off the driveway. It was extremely slow going, and thanks to a very narrow band of lake effect snow fall, the sticky white flakes continued to blanket the ground the entire time I was working. By the time I was halfway done with the driveway, I had to go back and re-do what I had already cleared off.

I found myself slightly miffed at having to do the same work over again, and was downright annoyed when I realized that I would most likely have to come back out later in the day to clear out the end of the driveway again after the road plows came through, burying us yet again. I carried out my frosty chore though, because I knew that tackling the “big chore” would make it easier to clear off the driveway again later in the day. I could have just as easily gone back inside and waited for the snow to stop and the plows to clear the road, or even waited until the middle of this week when the weather would be warm enough to melt a lot of the snow, but that would have made things exceptionally difficult for me. Which of course is when my brain switched over into “let’s learn from this” mode (a setting that I would all too often love to be able to turn off voluntarily).

17 inches of snow at the end of my driveway.

Teachers constantly prepare for the lessons of the week. Copies of handouts are made, activities are setup, trips to the computer lab are scheduled, and just about every other detail that would require some foresight is taken care of. Teachers regularly “bite off” a big chunk of tasks at the start of the work week, or before a large unit, so that they can spend more time working with students and enjoying the learning environment, rather than having to slog through the proverbial 17 inches of snow that would be menial tasks that get in the way without proper preparation.

So why do many look at developing their own resources, especially those created with technology, any differently? Rather than get out there and tackle the “big chore” (creating an iMovie, making some animated GIFs, assembling some graphic organizers with a word processor), educators spend a lot of time searching for the perfect resources that may or may not exist, to fit within their units. Many use excuses of “why bother reinventing the wheel” or “it takes so much time!”. Which of course to me is a bit silly. You don’t have the same students as you did last year, maybe they might need slightly tweaked resources, and if you spent some dedicated time at the start of a unit playing with a piece of technology (perhaps even alongside your students) you might discover you have a knack for a particular task (making animated GIFs to illustrate learning objectives with humor or motion).

Instead, often is the case in which teachers wait until after all the learning is done, or when they have 3 hours to sit down and dedicate themselves during a professional development day. I know what I say next may not be popular, but you have to play! And you have to do it sooner than you would like or think, forcing yourself to start creating something that is yours, not just taken off the shelf (or at the very least, something you’ve taken, but have tweaked to your own purposes). I had to force myself out into the cold last Saturday morning to snow blow that driveway, even though I knew I could have waited out the snow fall; but I would have been hindered by the snow to say the least, and it would have made driving in and out of the garage difficult (to say the least). So I sacrificed time with my family and relaxing in a warm chair on a weekend morning to clear off my driveway for almost 2 hours.

We may feel like our work may never be done in education, especially if we start sacrificing other opportunities to start producing our own learning resources, but what opportunities would that afford us in the future? By regularly clearing off my driveway I don’t have to worry about ice, getting my car stuck, or blocking others from visiting. By creating my own resources (even something as simple as my own writing prompts and graphic organizers), what could you allow your students to accomplish?