The Assignment: I actually realized after completing this assignment that it was a design assignment, of which I have already done this section. But since I was inspired by Takuji and Yuka‘s posts, I did it anyway.
The instructions are as follows:
Take any person, thing, or animal and apply a cartoon character head to it. Be creative!
The Process/Story: I am a big fan of One Piece, and have always liked the character of Zoro (I even dressed up as him on Halloween when I was 17). His name is obviously based on the famous “Gentleman Thief” Swordman Zorro, so I thought it would be funny to combine the two for this assignment.
I started by looking for a good picture of Zoro. Apparently, there are threedifferent official Japanese websites for One Piece, and one official American one, but none of them had any good pictures of Zoro I could use.
So I headed to MiniTokyo, a site I often use for anime desktop wallpapers, where people scan anime and related pictures that appear in magazines and post them.
There, I found a really good picture of Zoro from a magazine article. (I would post the original MiniTokyo link, but you have to be a member to see it.) So I cut his head out using the polygonal lasso tools and drew in the rest of the sword that was cut off of the original image.
Next, I went looking for a good picture of Zorro. After a while of searching, I found this picture of a scene from the 2005 Legend of Zorro movie, which worked perfect for what I wanted it for.
To finish, all I did was take the head I had already cut out, shrunk it down to size with the Free Transform tools, then flipped the image horizontally so he was facing the same direction.
I like how it turned out, and think it looks very realistic. Well, as realistic as a human with a cartoon head can look, anyway.
The Assignment: I was looking through the different ds106 categories for something I hadn’t tried before, and came across this assignment. Since I’ve always loved cooking, and was once a first place winner in the Northwest high school culinary competition, I thought this would be really fun to do.
The assignment instructions say:
Do you love cooking? Why not make your favorite recipe in front of the camera? Host a cooking show in your own kitchen and show us how it’s done. We’re not all Jamie Oliver, but we can try (see how he does it)
The Process/Story: I pretty much told the story of why I chose the assignment above, and why I’m doing dorm room cooking in the video. As for the process, I filmed the whole video using the camera on my iPod touch (its 0.69 megapixel camera is why the video is so grainy.) I filmed and did everything at the same time, holding my iPod in one hand, and cooking with the other, occasionally switching hands.
After filming, I opened Adobe After Effects, a video editing program I am accustomed to through typesetting in fansubs. I imported them into the project through drag and drop, then created a new composition out of the main video.
I used the AE’s cut feature to edit out some of the parts that were unnecessary, then appended the 2nd video from the morning to the end of the the timeline.
Using the Time Warp filter that’s built into AE, I sped up one of the parts where I opened the bag of raisins, increasing the playback speed to 545%.
Next, I added some text boxes that emphasize particular points by creating a new shape layer, then adding a text layer above that. To get the fade effect, I parented the text layer to the shape layer, then added opacity keyframes towards the end of each bubble, fading out from 100% opacity to 0% opacity.
To top it all off, I added background music that fit the mood of what was happening in the video. I just went to the “Anime Soundtracks” playlist on my iPod touch, and found 7 songs I used because they perfectly matched the mood I was going for:
Wakare 2 (Separation 2) from Usagi Drop (Bunny Drop) — Chosen because it has a sad, tragic feel to comemerate the loss of my stolen food.
Daikichi to Rin (Daikichi and Rin) from Usagi Drop (Bunny Drop) — A nice, cheery mood to match talking about getting the free rice cooker.
Taiyou no Te ~Avant Title~ (Solar Hands ~Advance Title~) from Yakitate!! Japan (Freshly Baked!! Japanese Bread) — Has a triumphant sound, and is a nice lead in.
Yakitate!! Japan (Freshly Baked!! Japanese Bread) from the show with the same name — This song was designed to be played in the background of people cooking, so how could there be anything better?
Namaiki Butter Roll (Audacious Butter Roll) from Yakitate!! Japan (Freshly Baked!! Japanese Bread) — Also designed to be played during cooking, but has a different sort-of wind down feel to it.
Sunset ~Like Dawn~ from Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Boku-tachi wa Mada Shiranai (We Still Don’t Know the Name of the Flower We Saw that Day) — The sun is setting, the day is coming to an end, and it’s almost time for sleep.
Dedicated to the Birds from Amagami SS (Sweet Bite SS) — This has a very “Good Morning!!!” feel to me, and just sounds like a “start of a new day” song to me.
After that, I simply rendered the video out to an avi file using AE’s Composition>Pre-render option.
As for why I chose to make oatmeal for my video… No, oatmeal isn’t my favorite recipe (like the instructions say). I was originally going to show how to make my favorite type of cookies, World’s Best Cookies, but that is a secret family recipe and would be too hard to record even if it wasn’t. Then I noticed that Clio did this assignment too, but I thought that all that chocolate and sugar wasn’t a very healthy breakfast. So, I decided to show how to do something easier and healthier since I needed breakfast the next morning anyway.
Pick one word. Select one single typeface, and communicate your word. Do not use colors or any other graphical elements. The goal is to select a type face that represents the meaning of the word, and if needed manipulate the font using different sizes, bold, italics, counterform (spacing) etc to visualize the word.
The Process/Story: I got the idea for doing this assignment after seeing Yue and Paul‘s takes on it. I chose the word car because it was simple, and thought it would probably be easy to make a car picture out of the text.
All I did for this was open Photoshop, created a new image, and used the text tool to type the word CAR. The font I used is called “Hobo”. I didn’t really pick it for any particular reason, it just happened to be the font I used the last time I opened Photoshop.
After that, i just free-selected the letters, rotated them around in different directions, then positioned them so they were right next to each other.
I like how it turned out because it reminds me of the car in The Jetsons:
And I guess you can call this Wordshopping, since I worked with words instead of photos in Photoshop.
For the design assignment, I chose to do The Big Hip Hop by Tim Owens, which requires taking a photo from The Big Picture website and overlaying it with text from a Top 100 song. This photo was taken at a protest in Tunisia. The lyrics are from the song Lucky by Jason Mraz. I was drawn to this picture…I love how surrounded by anger, a woman is holding up the symbol for peace. I wanted the lyrics and the format of the text to be bold, like this woman’s statement.
