Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.
Note this is a classic and historic DS106 assignment, the second one ever created. It has been resurrected from the tomb of lost assignments.
There’s an awesome Tumblr blog created by That Design Bastard filled with animated GIFs of Batman and Robin Running away from sh*t. The cool thing is the site posts a PSD file of Batman and Robin running with a transparent background so you can make your own. He even encourages you to submit your GIF to him for consideration. Time to get those two caped crusaders running scared!
Since 1985, the American Library Association (ALA) has tried to sell reading books as cool by showing celebrities reading their favorite books. You can read about the history of this promotional campaign here. Experiment with this tradition, introduce a celebrity with a book who hasn’t been recognized yet, but should be. Or use the poster you create to poke fun at a public figure, or do something else all together. have fun.
Take the line from the film The Big Lebowski “Say what you will about National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” and change National Socialism to a different -ism, like, for example, [[Veganism]]. Here is the GIF for you to use as a template to change National Socialism to a different -ism. Now here’s the trick, after that you need a GIF to setup the punchline. So Walter Sobchack is referring to Nihilism in the scene we are quoting when defining National Socialism as an ethos, my idea for this (now convoluted) assignment came from Tom Woodward’s unsettling animated GIF of me eating Roy Rogers chicken, which could only lead me to the following punchline…
Take a well-known kids book and recast it as a computer book. Look for inspiration here:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/childfriendly-computer-books.php
Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies. Check out an example here: http://www.michaelbransonsmith.net/blog/2012/03/26/dollhouse-of-nerd-girls/
Using your best accent (whether it be Australian, British or southern, ect), pretend you are at McDondalds and order something off of their menu. Be picky! For example, a coke with no ice.
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars.
One of the best sources for music is Incompetech or the Internet Archive. For the title cards, try a google image search
Take a title of a well-known book and re-design the cover to suggest something entirely different. For example, the book cover for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (an apocalyptic novel about a father and son facing the end of the world) is reframed as a feel-good book about effective parenting (see image). Original idea found through this design contest on Book Ninja in 2008.
Image credit: Ingrid Paulson’s reimagining of The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This idea was first suggested by Tom Woodward and has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment.
The assignment is to reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them. Write your blog post up but do not give away the answer, let people guess! The challenge is to find the icons that suggest the story, but do not make it so easy. For icons a great resource is The Noun Project.
