Jim Groom – Page 3 – Assignment Bank

The Tenets of Dudism

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I can’t pretend that I fully understand the deeper nuances of Jim Groom’s new Animated GIF assignment 972, “At Least It’s an Ethos,” (“…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 ….“) but I figured that Bill and Ted‘s continual use of “Dude” and “Party-on, Dude” constituted some kind of -ism, and the framing of Robert V. Barron as Abraham Lincoln was just too good not to GIF. The second GIF works wonderfully as a summative representation of the 87 “dude” utterances in the movie, and does, very concisely, represent their Dudism tenet. That, and the finger-wiggler was a dead-give-away smack-me-on-the-side-of-the-head-and-GIF-it-NOW image.

Abraham Lincoln Finger-Wiggler GIF by aforgrave

“Party-On, Dudes” Dudism GIF, by aforgrave

The “Big-Lebowski-Ethos-Dudism” Animated GIF, by aforgrave

You want more highbrow? Here are Bill and Ted, saying “Dude,” over and over again.

And if you enjoyed that, you may enjoy this video of Homer Simson saying “doh!”

Wonders never cease.

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All I Need Is a Tasty Ethos

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I think I get what Jim’s going after with this new animated GIF assignment, At Least It’s an Ethos. At first I thought I should just discover a well articulated life philosophy and Spicolli’s renouncing the material life is well, perfect. But then there was the thing about attaching an -ism to this ethos. So I did the best I could to find one.

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Waiting for “Waiting for Groomot”

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This post contains a link to my GIFestivus2012 submission for Ben Rimes’ “Hurry Up and Wait” Animated GIF Assignment 864. As soon as I read the description of his assignment, I knew I couldn’t wait to do it.

However, completing the GIF turned out to be an exercise in waiting.

Getting the GIF out of Photoshop turned out to be a bit of a pain. All told, the .psd file had 298 frames, made up of 39 layers — although a lot of most of the layers are primarily transparent. Photoshop kept giving me this bothersome (and very OLD looking!) error message whenever I tried to make the GIF via the Save for Web menu item.

I also saw some familiar, old-fashioned Mac wait-icons and behaviours during the failed export, making me think that Adobe STILL hasn’t got all of their code fully up to date. While the export continued to fail, it DID give me some new material that I decided to capture and add to my GIF. So there was that.

A bit of web research led to some web Q/A discussions where others ran into the same kind of GIF export limitations in Photoshop, likely due to the number of frames. The suggested solution was to split the photoshop file into two (or more) pieces — deleting the second half of the frames from the first file copy, say, and then deleting the first half of the frames from the second copy), do the partial Save for Web from each piece, and then reassemble them using an actual GIF editor. Seems simple enough.

All I needed was an actual GIF editor.

The ancient yet reigning Mac GIF editor GIF Builder only runs on Power PC or Rosetta-supporting Macs, and I’ve long since said goodbye to those old ways. I guess I could have downloaded it and booted up an older PPC Mac into an earlier version of Max OS X to run it, but that seemed like a lot of extra work, and wouldn’t give me a solution I could take forward into the future. Like if I run into it again tomorrow.

I remember GIF Builder from the mid-to-late nineties, when I was coding web pages using Macromedia’s Cold Fusion and tastefully added simple GIF animations to highlight important points. Ah, the old memories of OS 7, and 8, and 9 come flooding back…

Continuing the search, Ulead GIF Animator seemed to top the results on the web charts. However, Ulead has been purchased by Corel, and their GIF Animator software seems to have been absorbed invisibly into the collective. Nuts. A PC version was available, but for that I’d have to get a Parallels disk image set up. In the Age of the Cloud, I’ve stopped running PC software. I then downloaded something called ImageOptim from another location, as it showed up in my search — but, as the name would suggest, it simply optimizes images — including GIFs, – but doesn’t let you edit them.

Then, I lucked out and came across giftedmotion-1.20 – actually a Java executable, distributed as a .jar file – and it loaded up the two halves of my intended GIF and then spat them back out as one. It took a while (and gave me yet another version of a wait icon!) but finally my GIF was done. GiftedMotion provides a simple interface for ordering images, setting timings, and exporting to a GIF file. It nicely recognizes the frames in a previously existing imported GIF.

As I started to compose this post, I finally needed to confront the reality that the GIF was over 900 pixels wide. Fine, if I post without sidebars, etc — but the simple theme that I’ve been using for this blog includes wide margins/sidebars on both sides. Rather than continuing to live within this originally temporary (and plain, yes?) theme, I’ve decided to switch de•tri•tus over to the Gantry Framework/Theme from RocketTheme that I tend to use for other sites that I administer. It’s nicely customizable, and will provide all the flexibility that I’m likely to need for this blog. It’s about time that I put a little effort into the design of this space, anyway.

~~So I’ll sort that out now.~~

Actually, it appears that I can display the full GIF on it’s own page if I link to the Attachment Page. Not sure if this is something newer in this theme or in WordPress 3.5, perhaps easier to navigate to? At any rate, without changing the theme, I can let you see “Waiting for Groomot” now.

~~View “Waiting for Groomot.”~~ EVEN BETTER, just view the GIF directly at full resolution.

Be sure to watch until the end. You’ll know when it arrives.

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Audio Assignment: DS106 Radio Bumper

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Audio Assignment: DS106 Radio Bumper

So this Assignment was really cool. We got to create promo Bumbers for DS106 Radio. I really enjoyed this assignment.

I instantly knew what music I wanted. Things They Do, By The Roots.This was a song from my childhood that inspired me to start writing music and prose myself. A decision that has brought me many great things in my life.

The idea of DS106 made me want to go inspirational, considering that’s what the class is all about. I figured whats more inspirational than Dr. Martin Luther King‘s, I Have A Dream speech. Though the whole speech is iconic I felt the first statement from Dr.King said it all.

My classmate Sean, pulled a good quote from the movie, Coach Carter, starring Samuel Jackson and we topped it off with a little Rocky. Inspiration for all Generations.

I did the voice over myself and had a pretty good time fulfilling one of my childhood dreams of being, “that deep voiced guy on the radio.”

All in all the assignment was really fun and i’m glad we got to do it.

“Now that we have a #ds106 radio up and running creating a 15 to 30 second bumper for the station. What is a bumper? It is a short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(broadcasting)). So for ds106 it should certainly include “DS106 Radio” and some sort of message about the station with voice over music.-Submitted by: Jim Groom

ds106 Radio Bumper 4 pack (cogdogblog.com)
ds106 Radio Rockumentary (cogdogblog.com)
DS106 Visual Assignment- Album Cover (mcds106.wordpress.com)
Visual Assignment-Unlikely Intersections (mcds106.wordpress.com)

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Jim Groom art bandwagon, just because!

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Everyone is having a blast with the Jim Groom art assignment, and I decided that I should crash that party.

I found the original gif here, and the clip is from an anime called Poyopoyo Kansatsu Nikki.

Jim Groom is pretty kawaii, don’t you think?

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Groom QR Code

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While doing a search for propaganda ideas, I found this site that celebrates all sorts of Star Wars fan art. There’s probably a few dozen pieces to inspire new ds106 assignments. One in particular caught my eye, as ready for some ds106 riffing, Darth Vader QR Code. It was apparently created by a Greek graphic designer/blogger and embroidered onto a pillow as well!

So here’s my effort at some Jim Groom Art, for the first time since I made some ds106radio art to celebrate the awesome NYC Jam this past summer.

I looked up some of the specs for QR Codes, but ultimately focused on using just the three orienting boxes that are iconically familiar. To create this, I made a 64 x 64 pixel image in Photoshop in bitmap mode, which restricts your palette to only two colors – black & white. In that space I drew the three boxes with the a two pixel width pencil tool.

Using Mikhail Gershovich’s Jim Groom head, I did some work converting to grayscale, then reducing the file size a lot. Using the Dodge (highlights) and Burn (shadows) tools I was able to contrast specific areas of the face I wanted to. Finally I brought the part of the head into the QR code space and did some more 2 pixel pencil tool work, erasing and drawing until happy.

Only bummer is that the QR Code is not scannable, that would have been a really cool hack! Of course I would have pointed the code to the Bava Blog.

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DS106 – Now Available on Blu-ray Disc!

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The overwhelming majority of individuals who are engaged in the DS106 course are doing so remotely. Today’s statistics indicate that there are 596 active DS106 members whereas less than a total 80 are in attendance in the two sections facilitated by Jim Groom and Alan Levine at the University of Mary Washington.

However, if you are part of the vast majority of off-campus DS106 participants, imagine if you could acquire a Blu-ray Disc which contained the following:

all DS106 lectures of both Jim Groom & Alan Levine
guest lecturers including Gardner Campbell & Zack Dowell (“the Noise Professor)
featured student reflections from past DS106 courses including the talented artist Giuila Forsythe, two of Saskatchewan’s most influential educators Dean Shareski & Alec Couros, and inspirational designer and DS106 facilitator Tim Owens
tips on how to acquire a personal domain and quick-start steps to setting up a WordPress blog & theme
time-saving tips on how to use GIMP and Photoshop
sample student and instructor progress conferences
top three assignments (voted by peers) for each of the eight assignment categories from past DS106 courses

How much would you be willing to pay for such a Blu-ray resource? I know that as a non-credit online “freeloader”, I may not have paid money to enroll in the DS106 course, but I would certainly pay handsomely for such a DVD if it saved me time and provided me with additional resources to improve my learning experience.

When I was considering enrolling in this course, I was impressed by what Jim Groom stated in his welcoming post entitled “ds106: We’re open and you’re invited“.

… what made it amazing was that anyone can do as much or as little as they wanted as part of the open, online section and leave the rest. We don’t accept apologies and we don’t believe in guilt, there is no sorry in ds106. Simply come prepared to make some art, have some fun, give some feedback, and leave when you want.

This important statement “there is no sorry in ds106” resonated with me. True, it provided me with a guilt-free opportunity to learn. However, this quote was also quite similar to an important line and theme from the 1970 movie “Love Story” staring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. In fact, it was this quote that motivated me to consider designing the following Blu-ray Disc cover as part of the “Animated Movie Poster“.

In that most participants in this DS106 course were likely born after 1970, and may not be familiar with the original movie, I thought that I would share the following original image:

I realize that my attempt to animate this image is somewhat elementary when compared with my colleagues’ more sophisticated submissions. However, I am just learning to use Photoshop Elements and I hope, in time, to eventually improve on the animation process using this application.

In the meantime, I chose to use a free, Windows tool called Ulead’s Gif Animator Lite (GALE). I concentrated on the word “STORY” because the focus of DS106 should be on the STORY (and not the software). Unfortunately for me, I am spending many hours becoming familiar with the intricacies of the Photoshop Elements software and I can assure you that I do have a story to tell about my learning experiences.

To animate a word, I knew that I would need to save several copies of this Blu-ray Disc cover, each with the word “STORY” in a different color. I began by changing the black “STORY” in the original “Love Story” font to red and learned that one does not want to have to change the letter colors pixel by pixel. This discovery only took me 2 hours! I then decided to replace the original black “STORY” with a similar font in Photoshop Elements where I could highlight all 5 letters and select a new color. Since only .BMP and .JPG images can be loaded into GALE, each Blu-ray image, with its own “STORY” color, was saved in a .JPG format.

In GALE, one selects the “Layer > Add Images” menu items which allows selection of the prepared colored “STORY” .JPG images using this important technique. Each of the individual color images were then set to display for half a second. By clicking the “Start Preview” button, one can determine if there needs to be any changes in the respective color time delays. Once the animation test looks reasonable, one can click the “File > Save As” menu items and save the result as an animated GIF.

In summary, there is no doubt in my mind that my engaged learning within the DS106 community is indeed a “Love Story” of sorts. My only concern, is that I have not added too much friction, with this Blu-ray fiction.

Take care & keep smiling

Fair Use Educational Image Credits:

“Love Story” Blu-ray Disc cover -
http://www.starpulse.com/news/Paramount/2011/12/26/love_story_debuts_on_bluray_february_7
Alan Levine photo – http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6318291537/
Jim Groom photo –
http://www.colecamplese.com/2008/11/the-revolution-is-in-full-swing/

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Gleneagle Radio Bumpers

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Though I’ve been something of a stranger in the DS106iverse this time around so far, I have been thinking about the brilliant evolution of the course design – which Jim tells me is (at least part of) the genius of Martha Burtis. Specifically, I think the Assignment Repository is a glimpse of open classroom learning that simply establishes a framework for student/participant-choice and teacher/peer-facilitation that (much like the ds106.us site architecture and aggregation that I’ve written and spoke about before) I am eager to incorporate in my own classroom(s).

Which is where this post finds me, sharing not only my effort to produce a few Gleneagle Radio bumpers, but also a glimpse of the setup in this semester’s group of guitar students, who are able to fulfill their course work by choosing from a variety of assignments across several categories (and, if they don’t like what they find: go ahead and create their own). In addition to documenting their goals, and completed work on individual wiki pages attached to the class site, they are also encouraged to add their work to the corresponding Assignment page to create a repository of exemplars of the various projects, recordings and videos.

As we’ve made a habit of broadcasting from Gleneagle concerts, classrooms and other events, I hope that our school’s three guitar classes create ample fodder for our upcoming shows.

For my part, here are my first forays into the Bumper-business:

Gleneagle Radio Bumper #1 by Bryanjack

Gleneagle Radio Bumper #2 by Bryanjack

Live Presentation from @GleneagleMusic – Radio Bumper by Bryanjack

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Hard Boiled #3 – Animated Comic Cover

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Ever since Jim Groom pointed to the amazing animated comic covers created by Kerry Callen, I’ve been jonsing to make one. I loved the simplicity of the animation in each of the four GIFs he created, particularly the Spiderman and Ironman GIFs which each clock in at only three frames each. There is so much time and love for the comic and the story that goes into each one.

It took me a while to figure out which cover to do, but I finally settled on the cover for the third and final installment of Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled title published in the early 1990s. Miller was well know for his work during the 80s on Ronin and Batman: The Dark Knight. Both were part of an emerging trend in comics to write for more adult audiences (it dawned on the comic book industry that pre-teens weren’t buying comics anymore, it was the hardcore 20-40 somethings). Alan Moore‘s and Dave Gibbons‘ DC miniseries Watchmen was published the same year as The Dark Knight and both were hugely successful critically and financially, largely due to their more complex characterizations of heros and heroism. They’re both just great pieces of storytelling that happen to include both writing and pictures.

Due to these successes the Hard Boiled project was highly anticipated and Miller decided to not pencil the series instead turning to relative newcomer Geof Darrow to do the artwork for Hard Boiled. Darrow’s work is ridiculously detailed, rendering unimaginable amounts of story into a single page. Miller I imagine must have responded to this as there is very little dialogue throughout the series.

Hard Boiled is a dystopian future filled with violence and cyborgs. Darrow’s ultra-violent and erotic pictures were considered shocking at the time for a “mainstream” book. My first experience with Darrow’s work was actually with a later title, The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. The relentless detail with which Darrow draws is unbelievable, actually compulsive. He seems to just want to eek out more and more story with every extra bit included in a drawing. Here’s a frame from Hard Boiled #1, where Nixon the cyborg is undergoing repairs:

Darrow went on to become a creative consultant for the Wachowski Brothers for their Matrix series. You can likely see the resemblance to Nero’s awaking in the image above – an endless number of tubes and machines connected to tissue.

On the technical side, making this GIF was quite a long process. I spent a lot of time in Photoshop pulling apart the original cover image to create the six frames for this animation (there’s actually 53 frames needed for the timing, but only six unique ones). I used the pen tool a bunch to make paths around the titles and other parts to create very accurate selections. Also there’s a lot of use of the motion blur tool to create the three frames of the head being blown up.

But my favorite new tool is the new “Puppet Warp” tool which allowed me to animate the gore on the inside of the skull. It’s new to CS5 and takes advantage of some crazy algorithms that allow you to distort portions of a selection based on defined pivot points. It’s really, really cool. Here’s a little screen grab of the tool in action:

Here’s a look at just the gory parts animated, I hope you like the GIF, even if it’s a bit gross!

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Survey the World- DS106 Radio Poster

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As with most of the assignments I end up doing, they happen because I get distracted with my original idea with another idea, or a few more ideas. (ADD much? Or just inspired by greatness? O.o?)

So how did I end up making this poster for DS106 Radio?

DS106 Radio

Well it started with Patrick’s blog post about the assignment he created for creating your own album cover. Check it out for step by step details.

I loved the photo he ended up using because it’s the Santa Monica pier which I grew up near when I lived in California and because of this I decided I should create my own album cover. I did the Wikipedia article randomizer to come up with the band name and after refreshing a few times (the article titles I first got were really bad. And I mean REALLY BAD) it came up with: Casper Jørgensen (Casper is a Danish professional racing cyclist FYI)

Then I used the random quote generator and ended up with the phrase: “Survey the World”

Now for the photo, I tried using what Patrick suggested for getting photos from Flickr, but I kept getting “All Rights Reserved” photos, so I headed to the Commons. The photo I ended up with wasn’t so random because I kind of scrolled through the photos, but I thought this was the funniest. Love that it’s part of an Australian war memorial and that the cat looks like it’s “surveying the world”

Now that I had my three ingredients for the album cover it was time for photoshopping. I was putting all of this together when I suddenly had a flash: Instead of putting Carl Jørgensen on this album cover, why not make a poster for DS106 radio? It would be more fitting for our class and all the radio lovers would go nuts for it.

So now instead of having another visual assignment under my belt, I have a design assignment done, woo woo!

Unlike

The Tenets of Dudism

All I Need Is a Tasty Ethos

Waiting for “Waiting for Groomot”

Audio Assignment: DS106 Radio Bumper

Related articles

Jim Groom art bandwagon, just because!

Groom QR Code

DS106 – Now Available on Blu-ray Disc!

Gleneagle Radio Bumpers

Hard Boiled #3 – Animated Comic Cover

Survey the World- DS106 Radio Poster