Terrible Lip Sync

For this Lip Sync Video Assignment we were supposed to choose a song that we like, and take a video of ourselves lip syncing part of the song. This assignment was fun, but it made me see that I have no talent at al lip syncing.

I thought Sam Hunts, take your time, would be fun to lip sync, but like I said I quickly found that that I should stick to my day job, but it was still a fun assignment. I had the song playing in the background on my computer, and then I took the video with my phone, I then uploaded everything onto YouTube and then uploaded it all here on WordPress.

Enjoy my attempt at Lip syncing. and also just realized that you can actually hear me in some instances, I was trying to lip sync most of it, and got lost in the moment. That’s part of recording, sometimes you don’t want to edit the mistakes because they are what make the video here.

 

The week in doggies! All thanks to a conversation on Twitter. An…

















The week in doggies! All thanks to a conversation on Twitter. An emergent DS106 assignment ‘Remix (in a dog appropriate manner) a Bond movie title and create a poster’. I learnt more about Photoshop from trying to do a good job of these ‘silly posters’ than I have in a long time. 

Starring: Daphne as Miss Doggy Galore, Gifadog as Colin Bond, Spike as E. Cowfield, Abby as the Digital Diva and Chewy as the werewolf puppy

‘Children and Daphne’ by Jim Groom ’Bones are forever’ by Viv Rolfe ‘Reeborn’ and ‘Cop Pup’ by Ron L the other posters by the DS106 Shrink.

Yes, I know the last 2 do not fit the Bond theme. The translation machine (me!) from Twitter to Google Plus was faulty and the assignment got re-interpreted there but Chewy is too cute not to include here. 

Who knows what else might get remixed. May be we can start #posterfight to complement #giffight ?

What fun to delete my least favourite Bond from the poster! More…



What fun to delete my least favourite Bond from the poster!

More Photoshop practice – I can’t stop now! Thanks to @cogdog for the film title and @gifadog for posing so beautifully.

Yes, I will blog my process if anyone wants me to. Just ask. It was long and involved lots of layers as usual.

Experimenting with a new toy by John Johnston: We are designing…



Experimenting with a new toy by John Johnston:

We are designing a new #DS106 Assignment and wanted to experiment with the tool. Here was the brief we discussed on the twitter:

Play the PechaGif once only and record video 
Think of a topic for a presentation
Improvise. 
Record and audio track of the ‘presentation’ 
Use the animated gifs you recorded as your slides to talk from!
Have fun!

The worst part of it is that I have been plagues with techno glitches today. It has taken forever to get the video on YT. I tried to upload to Tumblr and failed. I recorded the voiceover and it did not record. Blah!

All that said it should not take long to do. 

I set the delay in PechaGif to 5 seconds. Promised myself I would use the first take – no cheating. Used Quicktime Player to capture video. Imported to iMovie. Created the voiceover as an improvisation exercise – the idea was think of a topic and wing it using the animated gifs that appeared as your slides. Todd Conway made an awesome example. John Johnston kicked us off with this example, where he used the tool to explain the tool! Get him all meta meta :)

Awesome tool to engage our creative improvisational brain!

“Wake up! Use Pechagif the best tool there is for a DS106 assignment” says John. Thank you for making it, John. I do not think it is silly at all.

Those of us who understand the psychology of creativity know that the type of exercise this tool forces on us is a desirable difficulty if we want to keep our creative muscles toned. Improvisation is not joke, says CNN.

Laughing in Italian

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

Walmart, according to Paris

Part of our assignment for this week was to do multiple assignments from the visual assignment bank.  I choose to do King of the Meltdowns.  This assignment was worth 2 stars, and we had to find a picture of a celebrity and a quote that matches that picture.  I chose to use a picture of Paris Hiltonlooking confused, with the quote ” What’s Wal-Mart, do they sell like wall stuff?”

I thought that using a confused picture, with Paris asking what Wal-Mart was, was a perfect match!

Walmart according to Paris

I had a little bit of a struggle when I first made this assignment.  At first I tried to used to QuickMeme, it was very easy to upload the picture that I saw, and to add caption to it.  The only problem was that I was unable to actually embed the image to my blog; I would have had to put the link of the website with my meme on my blog, and people would have had to click it in order to see it.  No one wants to do that, so I figured out another way to do it.

Steps on how to do this assignment on PowerPoint.

1) Think about a celebrity that you want to use.
2) Find a funny quote that the celebrity has said, or someone else has said about them.  You can do this by going to Google and typing in the search engine.
3) After finding a funny quote – remember it, or write it down somewhere and go back to google and look for a funny picture of the celebrity you would like to use and save it to your computer.
4) Open up PowerPoint (if you don’t have PowerPoint you can get it here)
5) On PowerPoint go to Insert then click on Photo then choose “Picture from file” and look for the picture you want to use.
6) Feel free to fix the size of the picture or crop it as you please.
7) Under the picture use a text box to type in the quote.  Make sure that you align the quote under or above the picture.  You are also able to use put the words on top of the picture if you would like.
8) After you have everything the way you want, click on “File” then “Save as Pictures” – this will allow for flickr to recognize the image and upload it.
9) Upload it to flickr and crop the whole slide to just have the parts that you want
10) Save the changes and voila! You’re picture is amazingly beautiful.

:)  I hope this tutorial was helpful.  This assignment was fun to do specially spending my time looking for funny quotes from celebrities and looking for pictures to match it.  I liked that I was able to be resourceful and use PowerPoint in order to be able to embed the picture into my blog.  I love the way QuickMeme did my picture with my quote, but the inability to save the picture to my desktop and uploaded to Flickr made it impossible to embed.

my somewhat gif (hopefully)

I did two because I found the process a lot more fun than I thought I would. Jim Groom’s guide was beyond helpful to me. I downloaded mpeg streamclip and gimp and after the first time of following the directions, I was able to guide myself through the second one. I am not sure how to get the quality better in the top one (it looks kind of more like a painting with all the shading going on) but I will try to troubleshoot it this weekend.

I chose Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban because I love that movie and, because this movie really is the turning point in the whole series. Sirius is able to finally meet Harry again. This particular scene is where Buckbeak has been sentenced to death and Malfoy is behind it. Obviously, Hermione is not very pleased by this and takes matters into her own hands, first threatening Malfoy with a wand, backing off and then punching him.

For my second GIF, I did one from one of my all time favorite movies, Clue. Back in middle school, I could watch Clue over and over again for days on end. (what’s weird is how much I hate the game!). Anyway, there’s this scene where Mrs. White talks about how much she hated this woman, and describes it as “flames, flames, on the side of my face”. As an immature middle schooler, my friends and I would say that very line any chance we got. So, it was a no-brainer that this be one I used.

Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge for #ds106

I was in Urban Outfitters the other day and stumbled across a postcard pack labeled “Unbridled Passion” by Franco Accornero.

It’s a collection of 30 different postcards from an artist who has painted more than 5,000 romance novel covers (as well as westerns, thrillers and sci-fi books). The postcards are really ridiculous on their own, but I thought for this Valentine’s day I would make them even funnier but adding my own captions.

That’s where the 2012 Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge for #ds106 comes into play: I challenge you to  make your own captions for these postcards! Not only will you help make V-Day funny, but you will also be completing DesignAssignment61.

All of these postcards can be found un-altered on my flickr account (download them and get to work!)

 

Captioned by Megan Mc

captioned by Megan MC

captioned by Megan MC