Jim Groom – Assignment Bank

Triple (or Quadruple?) Twitter Troll WIRE106 Quote

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“Triple4 Twitter Troll Quote WIRE106 Major Willam Gibson Valchek” by Andrew Forgrave, on Flickr

This is my first attempt (I think) at the (Triple) Troll Quote assignment: Visual Assignment 24, by the responses to which I am frequently impressed. There is a simplicity to the technical execution of the assignment which emphasizes the connections that happen before the Art is made. While not a new Jim Groom Triple Troll Wire Epigraph (the text does not come from an episode epigraph), it does relate very nicely to The Wire and #wire106.

The inspiration for this piece came directly from the Twitter stream this morning. Roberto Greco replied to Audrey Watters‘ comments about the events in Ferguson, Missouri in August, 2014.

Twitter conversation between @rogre and @audreywatters

Roberto tweet mashes up quotes from author William Gibson (whose ground-breaking (and award-winning) cyberpunk novel Neuromancer was published in 1984) and George Orwell‘s character Major from Animal Farm. I figure it is a perfect setup for a Triple (or Quadruple?) Troll Quote WIRE106 assignment. Valchek (pictured) could very well quote the constitution or law, but he’s pretty much motivated use it to subvert others for his own personal and petty interests (the stained glass window, in season two).

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A Different View to Car 106

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“A Different View to Car 106″ animated GIF by aforgrave (dedicated to @JimGroom)

Yesterday Jim Groom (@jimgroom, on Twitter) was writing about Silicon Valley (End the Domination of Silicon Valley) and the 1985 Bond film, “A View to a Kill,” when he came across Car 106. Having long sought an image of a police car bearing the 106 number, he captured the image and posted it.

Now I see image captures of 106 frequently in @cogdog‘s photostream. He seems to have a sixth sense in operation and he finds them all the time. He has over 106 of them! Me, I look periodically, but really don’t have a lot of success. I likely need to look harder. Such images respond to Visual Assignment 35, “Cogdog’s Illustrate 106.”

But upon inspecting Jim’s image, I noticed that the number appeared to be a bit crudely positioned, and I wondered whether the image had been visited a Doctor (Oblivion). After all, creative juices are always flowing in the DS106 community, and a lot of Art gets made through the magic of image editing programs.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to go to the source, and a few moments later, determined a couple of things.

catching sight of police car numbers during chase scenes in movies is tricky business.
the numbers appearing on the cars in the film ARE crudely positioned — either hastily renumbered by the prop company, or just naturally messy.
the car on the bridge is indeed numbered 106.

Not only that, the car perched on the edge of the bridge was ripe for GIFfing.

And so, as a token apology to Jim for doubting him, I dedicate the above GIF of Car 106 to him. And thank him for creating the conditions for a little pause for creativity. (And more profusely thank him for creating the conditions for a much larger community for creativity!)

#ds106 #4life

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Pearls of Jim Groom Oyster Pictures

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“Groom Oyster Hat with MinniePearl,” by Talky Tina, on Flickr

Well I started with the best for first. Because that is the best of the Pearls of Jim Groom Oyster Pictures from the World that I have. I hope you enjoy it and appreciate the funny joke part of it. Plus, it is a True Art, I think.

By the way, these pictures are all for The Daily Create, April 14th, tdc827: @jimgroom the World is his Oyster.

Next, how about this one of UNCLE @jimgroom in an oyster on a beach. Plus, do you see how the moon is like a pearl up above the oyster. That is some of the Art of this one.

Groom Oyster Pearl,” by Talky Tina, on Flickr

Next, it is UNCLE @jimgroom from a Thunderbirds movie with him as the Evil Green Oyster Man.

Groom Oysterman Thunderbird.” by Talky Tina, on Flickr

Now, the Fisherman, UNCLE @jimgroom, outstanding in his sea.

“Groom Fisherman,” by Talky Tina, on Flickr

Then, LOOK!, it is little UNCLE @jimgroom and his Red Oyster with his babysitter.

“Groom Bella Luke Aquarium,” by Talky Tina, on Flickr

Finally, the finale of Dancing Around The Giant Pearl of the World UNCLE @jimgroom Dancing of it Animated GIF. It is another special rendition of Animated GIF Assignment 1001: Dancing Jim All Over the World. He is still dancing, which just goes to show!

“Dancing Groom Oyster and Pearl Fountain,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

I hope you liked all these Oyster pictures of UNCLE @jimgroom that I found for you. He is certainly famous when you look on the Google, and now, even more so!

Just in case you wanted to know where I found them, you can look at all these links.

Oysters

Jims

Minnie Pearl

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/lb/thumb/2/20/Minnie_Pearl_CD.jpg/220px-Minnie_Pearl_CD.jpg

Well, Bye!

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Monster Chiller Horror Theatre 3D Groom

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“Monster Chiller Horror Theatre 3D Groom” animated GIF by @aforgrave

What a great fortune that I just happened to be watching Jim Groom (@jimgroom) and Paul Bond (pbond ) talking about Mario Bava‘s Kill, Baby, Kill yesterday and had this little moment of Jim fresh in my mind when I read about @iamTalkyTina‘s Animated GIF Assignment: Monster Chiller Horror Theatre 3D GIF challenge.

It’s not really clear what Jim is mumbling about at this point (he may have been making a reference to someone getting pushed, possibly down some stairs), but this definitely counts as a Count Floyd Monster Chiller Horror Theatre 3D moment.

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It’s Subtle

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Our hero, just before the return journey

This shot is from George Melies‘s amazing La Voyage Dans la Lune, my absolute favorite movie from that very first age of cinema, known to some people as Early Cinema, but which I call Everything Sucks Except George Melies.

To answer your unspoken question, yes, I will be talking about this old cinema stuff all month long.

The most famous shot from the movie is the moon’s face, which seems to be one of the first closeups of a human face in cinema history, which is sort of hilarious, since it’s just personification. As in, they couldn’t think of a good reason to just look at a human face unless it was also a celestial body. Or whatever.

I don’t love everything about the framing of the animated gif. The dude on the right is just kind of standing there, but it’s the clearest shot I could get and still have the entire space bullet in the frame and the window into it completely unobstructed.

At first I didn’t like how small J.G. was, and then I remembered all that smack he talked about state schools and public education, and I was like, “What? Make him even smaller.”

Now I’m a day behind on giffing, but I have no no idea what to do for the DS106 poster prompt, so I’m gonna take a day. Bonne chance, mes amis (mes amies? maze amy’s?).

Here’s the original video if you want to watch it (it’s rad!):

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August 2013 GIF Challenge #3: DS106 Promo Poster

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Well, Friends.

The DS106 Community stepped up for the August 2013 Animated GIF Challenge #2 and got UNCLE @jimgroom animated in John Johnston’s Dancing Jim All Over the World assignment, with SEVEN new entries showing now as being syndicated through to the assignment page and at least two others seen in the wild and perhaps waiting in some queue to get indexed. (Be sure to tag your assignments with both the AnimatedGIFAssignments tag and the AnimatedGIFAssignmentsXXXX numbered tag so that it gets onto the assignment page.)

It was so fun to see Jim dancing here and there, and I just had to have another go at making him dance before I went to sleep. Both @dogtrax and @Rockylou22 had Jim dancing on top of the world, and I was inspired by their work to riff-a-GIF and show all the different Jims dancing on the world at the same time like a UNICEF logo.

In the end, my little enthusiasm pushed me through the sleepiness (and ds106rad.io is great middle-of-the-night company!) and I wound up with a DS106 Promotion Poster, and a new Animated GIF Assignment 1183: Tell the World About DS106 GIF

Since we are in the GIFfing weeks leading up to the next session (Fall 2013 #headless13, starting August 26th), it seems appropriate to have everyone make a DS106 Promo Poster GIF to get the word out to the great uninformed masses. Perhaps we can draw in some newcomers who need to see the DS106 light. There must still be a few out there. LOL.

NOTE: Click on the GIF to hear the music that all the Jim Grooms are dancing to. (Thanks, John!)

“All These Jim Grooms Can’t Be Wrong” animated GIF DS106 Promo Poster by @iamTalkyTina

The MIDI version of “It’s a Small World” was found at Willie Wonkas Free MIDI Music Factory Downloads. The site is glorious in its application of old-style GIF animation and hand-built HTML, and is worth a click through for the sake of nostalgia.

Since this GIF also made use of yesterday’s Dancing Jim Groom theme, I also tagged it for the Animated GIF Assignment 1001. So it’s a two-fer.

Okay — get out and promote your favourite aspect of DS106 to the world with a special GIF!

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Animated GIF Movie Trading Cards: To Serve Man

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“Katamit Trading Card, animated” animated GIF, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”

From Movie Trading Cards, to Animated Movie Trading Cards

Last night I worked on the Movie Trading Card assignment, creating a Trading Card aesthetic and then placing the Intruder and the Alien Woman within the template I had created. This was part of my attempt to work on some non-GIF assignments and get my 10 stars for The Intruders.

As soon as I had that done and posted, I gave myself permission to GIF, and placed three frames from my animated GIF Katamit within the Trading Card. The Katamit still finds humans awfully boring.

And then …

—- and then decided to place some other Twilight Zone GIFs-in-need-of-a-home within the Trading Card as well. I started, got 2 done, but then sleep called and I left them in progress. Those GIFs will appear in a future post.

However, today, while I was away from the computer, Jim Groom jumped in, and extended his Movie Trading Card assignment to include Animated GIFs, and placed his animated Intruder within a similar Trading Card format. He created a landscape formatted card, which I immediately realized would be better to fit in movie scenes which are landscape in nature. Thanks for that Jim! I’m pretty good now at remembering to turn my iPhone into landscape mode when shooting a movie, but had used a character focus last night for my cards and so had designed them in portrait mode. Therefore, this evening, I set about to update my Trading Card to support a scene-based, landscape formatted card. Once that was done, it was easy to select a still from To Serve Man, and place it within the landscape frame.

“Good News for Earth ??” scene-based Trading Card, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”

Of course, having done the “good news” moment from the episode, it made perfect sense to do the “bad news” moment as well — and as I looked to select one frame, I got caught up trying to GIF it. The problem was the lady in the background who in the scene moves as much as Penny. Mega-distraction. I spent over an hour trying three different approaches to deal with her (layering over her with an unmoving image, layering changing background images over top of the changing image, and placing a static image at the bottom of the stack and erasing her and the background from all of the changing images) — and in the end went back to the first approach, compromising in the end order to get the GIF done and into the scene-based Trading Card framework:

“Nope. Bad News for Earth, Worse for Chambers” scene-based Trading Card, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”

As fate would have it, I finally got the card posted — with the lady still demonstrating some bizarre neck aberrations, when I noticed that all of the text was jumping on one frame and there was a blinky gap at the bottom for most of the frames. So I revisited the .psd Photoshop file, managed to resolve the text issues, and took another run at fixing the lady in the background, too. In the end, it works pretty well. Tidied up nicely.

Sharing is Caring CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

@cogdog (Alan Levine) suggested that I make the .psd files available for folks to use in making their own ds106zone Movie Trading Cards — they could be either static or animated — and so I share the two files below.

A couple notes:

Paste your intended image into the .psd file and drag it to the bottom of the layers stack — it will show through the transparent space in the artwork layer. Once in place you can use the Move tool to reposition it. I

Layers for the Scene-based ds106zone Trading Card

find that the Edit >>> Transform >>> Scale is invaluable, together with the Move tool, to getting the image properly framed. Depending on the dimensions of your original image, you may need to do some cropping.
There are three editable text layers in the Character card, and four editable text layers in the Scene card. For consistency, I would suggest that you do not change either the fonts or the font sizes unless you are looking to take the file and transform it into a completely different (non Twilight Zone) theme.

Reduce during Save for Web

Once you have finished placing the image and edited the text layers, you are ready to use the File >>> Save for Web … The workfiles have dimensions that are designed to be reduced upon output. While the image sizes are 752×1128 pixels (and 1128×752 pixels), they are designed to be saved out at 300×450 — just change the dimensions in the Save for Web … dialogue — I normally set the smaller dimension to 300 px, and the link keeps the ratio constant and changes the other to 450 px.
You can do what you like, but I have been saving the files as ds106zoneTradingCard_Scene_EPISODE_SceneName.gif and ds106zoneTradingCard_Character_EPISODE_CharacterName.gif — just helps me keep them organized.

Reduce during Save for Web

And so, without further ado, I present the following two files for your use and enjoyment:

File	ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_scene.psd CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0	ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_character.psdCC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
Looks Like

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This Week on ds106zone: The Invaders

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“This Week on ds106zone: The Invaders” animatedGIF promo, by aforgrave

So Jim is calling for 10 Stars worth of Visual and Design Assignments for “The Invaders” and a total of 30 stars altogether. Hmmmm. That’s a lotta stars.

"Laser Beam Hole" animatedGIF from The Twilight Zone Episode 2.7, "The Invaders"

“Laser Beam Hole” animatedGIF from The Twilight Zone Episode 2.15, “The Invaders”

This started out as an attempt at a poster for the episode-of-the-week, where I envisioned Agnes Moorehead’s character standing flush against the wall holding her ax as the tiny Invader creature menaced her from the laser-beamed mousehole at floor level. For a while, I had a cropped copy of the hole in place in the lower right, but the dark lighting made it difficult to make out. (See the little GIF to the right.) As it would turn out, I couldn’t find an appropriate full-body still of her that I could work with, and this particular shot of her cowering up on a chair or something had to suffice.

In the end, I completely erased the laser-beam hole and the wall, and simply copied the layer with the tiny laser beam of light to a second location to create the fanciful illustration of both aliens attacking simultaneously. This is not actually what happens at the instant captured in this photo. And so it turned into a GIFfed poster.

I’ve never tried counting stars before (probably just as good, as I gather my cumulative totals would be low), but after my first The Invaders GIF, I guess this second GIF now gives me another two stars towards the ten, for a total of four so far. And maybe another one point for the little “Laser Beam Hole” GIF. Or are we allowed to do the same assignment more than once?

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#ds106zone ? Where is Everybody?

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Okay! So Jim Groom has posted a bit more about the upcoming summer session of #ds106 Digital Storytelling, this incarnation titled #ds106zone – flavoured with The Twilight Zone. Not that anyone needs an excuse to watch old episodes of the series, but I’ve been looking forward to this all the same. Who knows, the series is on Netflix, and could make for a nice nostalgic summer of binge viewing. (Or not.)

However, looking to start at the beginning (so says Inigo, quoting Vizzini), I dialed up the very first episode from October 2, 1959, entitled “Where is Everybody?” Starring the instantly recognized Earl Holliman, the episode was released about two and half years before I was born, and focuses on the effects of isolation on the mind of an air force pilot who (as we discover at the end) is training for a mission to the moon. Kennedy’s Moon speech took place on May 25, 1961, and I was born just nine months later. Coincidence? (Ya, probably!)

Anway, it’s nice to see that the first episode was pretty much based on a topical and very realistic question for the time. And a nice complement to emphasize how far we have come, given that today marks the day that @Cmdr_Hadfield returns to earth after five months aboard the International Space Station. Yes, he had a couple of other astronauts there to keep him company, but then again, he had most of the known Twitter universe in touch with him, too. Did you see his cover of Bowie’s Space Oddity? (Maybe you have, it’s had over 1.8 million views since I saw it last night.) But I digress.

Let the GIFfing begin!

"Walk ... Wait .... Stop," animated GIF by aforgrave from The Twilight Zone, Season1 Episode 1, "Where is Everybody?"

“Walk … Wait ….Caution” animated GIF by aforgrave from The Twilight Zone, Season1 Episode 1, “Where is Everybody?”

I watched this episode with an eye out for GIFfable moments — the stoplights above was a natural, and easily done.

This shot from the movie theatre was nice to try ….

“Look Out, it’s a Mirror …” animatedGIF by aforgrave, from The Twilight Zone, Season1 Episode 1, “Where is Everybody?”

… as the mirror makes for a very interesting shock to the viewers. I would have thought he would have seen the other guy running right at him though. But I guess he was spooked.

This one is a bit larger than I’d like (at 2.5 MB), but those glittery lights on the marquee are reminiscent of those early under construction GIFs, and I didn’t want to leave them out. I used some masking, but the camera man was successful with his pull focus on this shot, and it made masking the whole scene difficult. As it is, it makes for a slight jump when the GIF loops. Oh well, better that he got it right for his art, I guess.

“Run Back to Your Box!” animatedGIF by aforgrave, from The Twilight Zone, Season1 Episode 1, “Where is Everybody?”

And with that, I release my first submission for the #ds106zone — just a little to whet the appetite. Apparently things don’t officially start until May 20th, but Jim said something about Donkey Kong, so I think that means we can start.

Also, submitted to @iamTalkyTina‘s AnimatedGIF Assignment 920: From the Twilight Zone and Beyond.

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The Girl’s Amazing Eyes

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I spent some time this evening watching the first half of Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (this weeks entry in Jim Groom’s BavaFestival) , and I just had to stop watching and make a GIF. I was moved to start GIFfing by number of wonderful bits in fairly rapid succession, and I wanted to get started more than I wanted the film to end.

This one used up all of my available time this evening for GIFfing (I have a couple other sequences of stills captured for another day), but I’m quite satisfied with it. I had to deal with the sub-titles that appear in the bottom third of the screen, but I think the masking worked out well enough. This one goes straight into the ds106 Animated GIF assignment 865: GIF Me Again About My Eyes, too.

“The Amazing Eyes” of Nora Davis (played by Letícia Román), animated GIF by aforgrave, from Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963)

I’m definitely enjoying the visual aesthetic of this entry — the black and white film, together with the lighting produces some amazing shadows that certainly heighten the effect of the film. Although I’m certain I’ve never seen this one, watching it reminds me of the films that used to be on our single-channel black-and-white television when I was a very young child. You know, back in the sixties.

Definitely, a nice nostalgia happening.