State of the Net – Assignment Bank

Wiggle Stereoscopy: Valentine’s Edition

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Assignment: I chose to do the “Wiggle Stereoscopy” assignment. It’s a pretty fun assignment that mixes photography and GIF creation. You need to take two photos from very similar angles and then combine them into a single GIF.

Process: After taking the pictures with the app ‘Stereogram’ on my iPhone I emailed myself the picture and had to slice it up because the two images were put onto a single one. After that it was a simple process of putting the sliced pictures into layers and exported it as a gif with a 100ms delay.

Story: I did a stereogram previously, but decided to try again. My main goal was it make it more of a ‘left-right’ wiggle, but even this image came out weird. Apparently I’m just really bad at taking the pictures for these things The subject of this image, some fancy Valentine’s chocolates, were given to me by some students and I felt like immortalizing them in a DS106 assignment before I ate them. They were very pretty and tasted great too

PSA: There’s a really cool website that the New York Public Library created, a stereogram creator that draws on their collection of old stereographs from the 1900s. Go check it out!

Filling out the FEEDBACK FORM for this section made me realize that all of mine submissions were from the Visual category. Looks like I’ll be forced to branch out in the last half of the class, so hopefully I’ll find some fun non-Visual projects to try my hand at

- Paul

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Mashup: Children’s Book and The Pioneer

The Mad Tea Party.

Mashup Assignments: Mashedup Children’s Book

Mashup a children’s book based on another cultural artifact. For example, framing Dr. Who as a children’s book in the aesthetic of a Dr. Suess’s work. See example from College Humor here: http://www.collegehumor.com/article:181140

Since Scott asked us to have more variety of categories for our DS106, I wanted to do something in another category I still haven’t tried. A past blog post from the previous semester inspired to me to try this assignment. I think this assignment can also be under the design section.

How are people doing with their presentation preparation? Mid-term has started and we’re all having a hectic week. I’m suppose to be busy too, and I somehow spent a hour or two the other day just to search the right picture for this assignment. It’s my bad habit to go headlong at whatever I decided to do. First off, I couldn’t find the desirable CC-licensed image of children’s books. I could immediately think of some well-known books and I had plenty of ideas. “The Snowman” was one I wanted to use, but that plan had to be put away. Instead, I found an gif animation of the famous tea party scene from Lewis Caroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” which I replaced The Mad Hatter’s face with Engelbart’s.

Can you believe it? I’m still writing about a Pioneer after finishing the first section. A light bulb went off in my head when I saw the dormouse. I made a little association with the Pioneer and the mouse (dormouse – mouse – computer mouse…Engelbart?).

The creative process of this assignment became somewhat difficult, because I had taken a gif animation and played around with it. Although you can’t really tell Alice is actually holding a x-ray-ed computer mouse, which the sparkle erased from the image. Check out the twinkly animation version of the Tea Party on Flickr. I wish I had the animation working on here too…I don’t consider this piece as one of my best works.

Image: Alice in Wonderland (old illustration) :p by quicheisinsane - CC Licensed via Flickr
Image: Doug Engelbart :p by Rachel Smith – CC Licensed via Flickr
Image: BXP58194 :p by tpmartins – CC Licensed via Flickr

* I just realized now that I was goofing around checking out some dormouse pictures and videos (they’re too adorable to avoid). No wonder I took more time than I expected to complete this assignment.

An Album Cover: Like a Moon on the Tides / Sydney Weekender

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Visual Assignments: An Album Cover

So here’s something fun for everyone to do, should be quick and easy, but try to make it pretty. First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

There are more than forty people who have completed this album cover assignment. That’s a lot of participants and I thought I should be one of the bunch. One trivial memory from the creative process is that I had to reload quite a few times to find an image under the right license. All these impressive photos appeared, but sadly they said “All rights reserved”. The photo I finally found then was the base image for the album cover. Assuming from the photo title, the scenery happens to be somewhere in Paris, France. Despite the artist’s name “Sydney” weekender, the background image is of another continent.

I tried using GIMP this time and failed to create a proper cover art I initially intended to make. During my first try, I messed up the original picture so I had to restart from downloading the image again from Flickr. Then, I resorted to Pixlr which probably didn’t eat up my computer’s memory. I was slightly mad at myself after realizing while working on this article that I spelled the word “Sydney” wrong (Syndey? What?). Of course, I went back to Pixlr and it was fixed. There’s not many photo manipulations done to the base image. Instead I played around with the fonts. I noticed for the first time that Pixlr lets you use the fonts you already have in your computer. The fonts used in the cover art are free, by the way.

Image: 1081 Paris- Palais-Royal :p by I Am Not I – CC Licensed via Flickr