Another assignment submitted by Tim Owens in ds106 is The Big Hip Hop where he says to:

“Take any photo from The Big Picture http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ and overlay it with lyrics from a Top 100 song.”

I grew up in Los Angeles, CA, greatly influenced by Hip Hop and Rap music; so I just HAD to do this assignment!
I quickly found the perfect picture from The Boston Globe of a Libyan Rebel holding a gun, acknowledging the people in victory. Here it is:

 

 
The lyrics are actually featured in two of my favorite rap songs, which both made the top 100s. The Original song is by Grand Master Flash and the Furious five, “The Message.” It’s such a good song with great lyrics and a good beat. It goes:
“Can’t walk through the park cuz is crazy after dark/
Keep my hand on my gun cuz they got me on the run.”

The second Top 100 song that featured those lyrics is Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dog’s “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” which embodies the West Coast gangster rap culture:

I grew up listening to a lot of this music and have always found it funny to place hardcore gangster rap lyrics in everyday things. I’ve said this quote when ever I got a gun in my hand! Tim Owens seems to share the same sense of humor!

The great @scottlo is back on the radio and doing some great things, one of them being timed #ds106 assignment. ~24 minutes where he plays a few songs and challenges you to finish an assignment. Don’t think, just make.

I saw it this morning and rose to the challenge, another Big Hip Hop picture. It’s a fun assignment to do and I’m glad I got the nudge from scottlo to do it.

For these last two design assignments I decided to do the “Iconic You” assignment and “The Big Hip Hop Assignment”. For the “Iconic You” assignment I made my icon an image of what you would use when making the template for a surfboard. Surfing is a big part of my life and I love doing it, and this summer I got into shaping boards by hand so I thought an image of a surfboard outline would be pretty well suited.

For the “The Big Hip Hop” assignment, I took this picture off of the boston big picture website (www.boston.com/bigpicture) of this at the Glastonbury music festival this summer. Then I went onto the Billboard top 100 music list, and saw that Katy Perry’s song Last Friday Night was up there so I thought that if I took this little lyric segment and put it in the picture it would be pretty fitting.

Sorry it took me a while to get these up, I got a new mac so I’ve been trying to figure out how to use it, because I had a PC before, as well as getting all the software I needed on it. I made both of these pictures with photoshop and it actually wasn’t as bad or as hard as I thought it would be. Enjoy!

Not the friendliest of quotes but I was just trying to find something that fit this pic since the lightning looked so intense. This is a quote from Eminem’s “Lighters” off a top 100 list I found while the pic features a volcano erupting in Chile during a lightning storm (take from The Big Picture: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/06/volcano_erupts_in_chile.html). I just thought the fisheye text warp option looked cool and made the word “lightning” stand out a little more since it ended up being centered and bigger than everything else, but then ended up changing the word around anyway to try to look at least a little bit like a lightning bolt while keeping the bold, white lettering on top of the dark funnel of ash from the volcano to make “lightning” stand out more in that way too.

Firefighters sleep between trucks at the incident command post for the Wallow fire, June 8, 2011 in Springerville (Eric Thayer/Getty Images)

For this assignment, i chose this picture of a firefighter taking a nap on a very stressful day. I picked lyrics from the lazy song by Bruno Mars to match.

One of my recommendations in the ds106 Toolbox for folks who can’t afford Photoshop (and don’t really need to) is a website called Aviary. Although I refer to it in terms of a photo editor, their suite of tools really does a whole lot more including vector editing and even an audio editor. I’ve decided to make it a personal challenge of mine that I will push the limits of these tools by using only these online web-based programs to complete as many ds106 assignments as possible. In the spirit of sharing and helping others I’m going to record some screencasts to show you the process as well. Hopefully you all will find this useful.

This first tutorial is based on the Big Hip Hop assignment where we use lyrics from a rap song or top 100 hit and lay them overtop a compelling image from The Big Picture. The end result looks a little something like this:

Apologies for the low sound, a combination of hesitancy to blast out my coworkers and a lack of a dedicated microphone here for the task. This has also been cross-posted to ds106.tv.

Doing the Visual assignment was a bit hard as I had to look for a good picture and then finding the lyrics to go with it. Once I found this picture I had to use one of my favorite songs. The lyrics are from Drakes song “Fireworks,” and as you can see from the lyrics, drake is true to his word and his rhymes. This perfectly displays one of my favorite lines from that song. I also used Adobe Photoshop to make the text for the lyrics.

I absolutely loved this assignment. I may have to do more.

I was looking through the photos on the first page of the site and this one really stood out to me. First of all- because they’re absolute psycho. Secondly- because that old man is definitely a beast. The next step was to look through some of the top songs and as soon as I started looking- I knew which lyric to choose. The original photo can be viewed here. The lyrics are to P!nk’s Raise Your Glass.

Last design assignment before we start what I think will be my favourite section of the class: audio.* It’s a mix of Tim Owen’s “The Big Caption” assignment and “The Big Hip Hop.” See, I did what I thought was “The Big Hip Hop” without reading through all the instructions. Instead of picking a song from the Top 100, I picked a song from my collection that I thought fit the photo.** So I’ve put this under both assignments because technically what I created doesn’t really fit either but is in the spirit of both. This was created at Picnik using a photo from the Big Picture. The song is “Canned Heat” by Jamiroquai from the Center Stage soundtrack.*** Enjoy!

*Three and a half years on the radio, 11 years playing the clarinet, singing since forever, and I’m a music major. There’s a reason I consider myself an audiophile.
**Though I’m sure I could find a Top 100 song that would fit the photo just as well if not better. In fact, from the Top 10, Katy Perry’s “Firework” would work (and I only know that song because of Glee don’t take my hipster accreditation away from me.)
***Before I realized I like chocolate and am always going to be 5’10″ I wanted to be a ballerina. Nine years of ballet classes prove that fact. And I still like that movie and I still really like the soundtrack.