Barcelona Mash-Up: The remixed mash-up

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For this week’s DS106 Assignment, I totally embraced the idea of remix.  We were tasked with completing a “Mash-Up” Assignment, but I didn’t just pick a mash up and do it exactly like the description said.  I remixed it and made it my own.

The original assignment was to take a song that mentions a place and “mash it up” with a google map of that place.  The final product should have a song mentioning a place and a map of that place overlaid, basically to create a Music Mapped Video.

11073559_10155404568815093_438354921269255333_nFor my project, I chose a song by one of my current favorite artists, Barcelona by George Ezra.  Many of you already know that I was blessed enough to visit Barcelona, Spain last year, thanks to my dad being a BOSS at selling Hyundai Parts.  Even though Pops spent nearly the entire trip enjoying the view from the penthouse of the Hotel Arts (iconic if you’ve seen Barcelona) due to his blown out back, I explored so much of the beautiful city solo.  Traveling “solo” is something I didn’t think I’d enjoy, but I found it to be incredibly freeing and sort of exciting.

Anyway!  I didn’t think that a song+map mash up would do my beloved city justice.  So, I decided against the simple map idea.  I first took a few of my favorite collages I had posted to Instagram and made them into a quick Microsoft Photo Gallery SlideShow.   Then, I found the song on YouTube for my audio.  Since I wanted to include a map AND beautiful images, I thought, “Hey, why not have in some 360 views too?”  So, I also pulled up AirPano’s Barcelona page.  If you haven’t been to the site, do it!  It’s amazing.  I’m going to use it for mini “virtual field trips” for my students because it has thousands of cities, with street  and sky views, plus tons of information already embedded onto the page.  Finally, I used Screencast-O-Matic and their super simple, FREE downloaded program to record my screen.

To mash it all together, I recorded on my laptop, pressed play on the audio on my iPad (so that step wouldn’t be seen on screen), played the slid show in Photo Gallery, then simply played around on Air Pano till the end of the song.  Bonus, Air Pano also has embedded maps, so the map was still there.

Enjoy my remixed Mash-Up!  Oh, and if you’ve enjoyed my video editing attempts so far, please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE on YouTube!  I’m trying to boost my media cred.

Thanks!

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Reimagined Road Sign Tutorial

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I know we are past the visual assignments week in #ds106, but since I submitted the Reimagined Road Signs visual assignment, I should provide some how to. I am also using this post to submit my fourth visual assignment, which I didn’t finish yesterday because I was packing for a month in the UK.

The assignment description is:

Reimagine the scene in a road sign. What is going on outside the iconic depiction in the sign itself? Find a road sign image online or photograph it yourself. Redraw it to show the rest of the scene you imagine, and show us the before/after on your blog.

Before

After

after

Credit: To create the finished version I used Photoshop and Illustrator to create a mashup of my original photo plus Michael Jackson Silhouette by munchester2cool.

How To

Illustrator purists get annoyed with me for showing anyone how to use LiveTrace, but I don’t care, I think it’s a really useful alternative when you just need to get a quick and dirty vector image. I suggest you don’t rely on this technique as a crutch though, because you can make much cleaner paths by working with the Pen Tool, and it is well worth learning. Also, LiveTrace does not work well in all situations, but for this assignment it is nearly perfect.

Watching the YouTube version is your best bet; it should look good played at full screen (especially if you switch up to 720p). The QuickTime version is included for anyone who subscribes to my podcast via iTunes.

So, this tutorial should be useful for either the Reimagined Road Signs assignment or the Four Icon Challenge. Anytime you want to make an icon actually. And it covers:

  • Advanced image searches using Google (to find images licensed for reuse)
  • Illustrator: LiveTrace for pasted or placed pixel-based graphics, Rotate, Erase tool, working with Layers
  • Photoshop: Quick Select and Magic Wand tools, Threshhold adjustment, Transform (skew) tool
  • And much more!

I hope this has been useful. Your feedback on the tutorial would be awesome. Share and enjoy!

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