umwfa12s1 – Page 3 – Assignment Bank

Minimalist Movie Poster Walk Tutorial and Poster

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I decided to make a better more improved minimalist movie poster and let you all know how I did it.

Here is ma poster:

Well to accomplish this assignment you either have to have some way of making all those cartoonish looking drawings on a computer, or spend a couple of minutes messing around with a photo editing program. Rather than using my usual go to photo editor of pixlr.com I was adventurous and tried to do the whole thing in GIMP. I sort of accomplished this.

My idea was to make a minimalist poster for Office Space, one of Mike Judge’s non-King of the Hill related works.

Here’s the original Movie Poster

So what I did was that I found a stock image of the classic red Swingline staplers that almost anyone whose even heard of the movie knows about. After I found one I wanted I loaded it into GIMP.

This is where my experimenting began, but for you I’ll skip to the meaty parts. Once the image is in, darken it a little. Just like when we made the stencil image, things just seem to work better when the original image is a little bit darker. DON’T mess with the contrast; we’re trying to make a hand drawn looking picture here so the lines can be a little simplistic. Once darker go ahead and click “posterize” and take that number of layers down to 2.

Now we’re halfway there, things are starting to look simpler and more minimalist by the minute. After we’ve poserized the image, go ahead and use GIMP’s filter labled “cartoon” under the “artistic” tab. Lower the number of black marks, because too many, again, add to must definition. Only do this once, don’t repeat this step. After this go back over the image and “clean it up.” By this I mean eliminate anything that seems messy or too defining. I tried to keep the number of colors no more than three: red, white and black.

The matchstick was a personal choice, but if you choose to include it ONLY cartoonize it. It doesn’t really need to be posterized.

This is were I reverted back to my old ways and used pixlr, mostly because I don’t really understand how text-boxes work in GIMP. All I did was pick an office-y looking font, slap in the words “Office Space”, added my two GIMP images as layers, “free transformed” them around till they looked good, and then flattened the images.

The good thing about making a minimalist movie poster is that it doesn’t have that many steps once you figure the basics out. The most important things to remember is to posterize THEN cartoonize.

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Whalen-made Assignment #2

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This is my handiwork: The Ultimate Merger.

Yes the example photo is my work:

But I decided to make another one:

So the first one is obvious it a merger between McDonalds and Burger King. The second one is way more subtle. Its Canon and Nikon.

The hardest thing about doing this assignment really is finding the right text. But really just one google search should do the trick. The Burger King/McDonalds one was a bit trickier beacsue it involved some more picture editing.

I chose to make this assignment because a) its a funny idea and b) the really subtle ones can mess with your mind. In all honest, many of the products are really the same thing and you’re only buying the brand. Perhaps on some profound, existential level this is what I was getting at, but really I just thought it was funny.

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Whalen-made Assignment #1

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That’s right kid-os I made an assingment. Its called Vicarious Graffiti.

Unfortunately I messed up the post a little bit and the example photo does not appear. What follows will be a tutorial of sorts for how to accomplish this assignment, in which I will describe how I made the attached picture titled “Charlie Graffiti.”

First off you have to get you starting image. Some people posses the uncanny ability to hand draw stencil like images, to which I will say “Good for you, skip the following sentences but come back later on.” Now, once you get your image/idea the next phase is to upload it into some kind of photo editing software. I used pixlr.com because that’s what I’m most familiar with (even though I’m trying to become more adept with GIMP).

you’re all thinking it.

After I loaded the image into pixlr I first started messing with the brightness and contrast. Generally speaking, most pictures you use will be too bright and as such will mess with the steps to come later; however to what extent you darken is up to your own judgment. Additionally its always a good idea to increase the contrast to help define the image’s lines. Once this is done you’re going to want to de-saturate the image, I don’t know why but these things always work better when done in black and white.

By now you should have black and white image, that’s a little darker than usual with some pretty good line definition. This next step differs depending on what editing program you use, but I know that in pixlr is called “posterize.” It going to ask you how many layers you want, and again this part is up to your own judgment. Each image is different so don’t be afraid to play around a little.

should look about like this

After this things get pretty easy. Once that filter is on, go back and click “threshold.” This will generate the classic stencil look for your image. After this, simply find a picture of some building or wall that’s pretty blank. Add you new stencil image as a new layer to this building pic. It’s easier if you start big and go small, so before you transform the stencil image to fit on the wall try and eliminate as much of the layer’s background as you can with out touching any of the image itself. What you can’t get just make it match the building’s color.

Now for the fun part. You can now scale down, move, mess with your computer made stencil image so that it looks like its actually part of the wall. Add some text with yours like I did. Mine is picture of Charlie Kelly with the words “Carol! Carol!”. Sort of a joke for the fans of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Enjoy and have fun.

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Philosicat Returns

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So remember that post Master made about a cat video a week or two ago? It’s finally up on YouTube. I thought you might want to know, so you can finally hear this cat talk about…something that isn’t in my programming at all.

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Grim and Frostbitten Kingdoms

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I’m honestly not sure what the heck this is. Master mumbled something about a documentary and gave me this link, so I can only assume he made it for this assignment, but I don’t really remember that assignment being there the last time I checked…maybe he made it himself, I don’t know. I guess the video he handed me also has something to do with it, so I put it on Vimeo. YouTube didn’t want to have anything to do with it–I can’t really blame them, I don’t really understand this video. I think it has something to do with Black Metal or something–it’s mostly about some sort of “troll,” though…

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Outer Space

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OuterSpacing It

I decided to make my new assignment about aliens. We all tend to have either seen, read, or heard things about out neighbors from outer space. In movies aliens are portrayed in a million different ways; some are robots, some are people, some are green, and some look like monsters. Not only do movies show aliens in many different sizes and forms, but every person has their own ideas about the aliens, and what they look like.

For my assignment I created, outerspacing it, I thought about creating a picture that envisions my idea of an alien. Everyone has their own vision for it, and I think people’s creativity will really shine through this. Apart from editing a picture to show what we think of an alien should look like, I want this assignment to also have a story about the origin of the photo and where the aliens come from.

This image was found in the outskirts of Area 51, in 1961. It is obvious that these are aliens acting like humans! We can clearly see that their forehead is rather large, while their face is thin and small. In the day light you would think they are just regular people with really big heads, but they are so much more than that. These aliens are almost like vampires, no they don’t suck your blood, but their true selves will shine through in camara. Vampires look like regular people, but will disappear in camera, while these aliens look normal in everyday life, but as soon as the flash from a camera hits their face THEIR THIRD EYE COMES OUT (DUN DUN DUN). According to file 2343, (that came attached to the picture) these aliens migrated from the planet Beebalon! They live 8900 million light years away and travel to earth to eat some delicious earthling foods. As far as the world is concern, these aliens seem to be harmless, but I would keep a look out for the third eye…

This assignment was a lot of fun and easy to do. It really gets you thinking about what aliens could look like, and it’s a way to see how other ds106ers view aliens as well! Below I will explain step by step on how to make your alien master piece.

Step 1)
- Find or take a picture of you, or others.
Step 2)
- Upload your picture to fotoflexer
Step 3)
- Think about your vision, what you want to do and how you imagine the lovely fellows from outer space.
Step 4)
- Look around the tons of options on FotoFlexer.
Step 5)
- If you want a big-headed alien, you should go to “distort” option and click on “pinch,” a circle will show up and you can put it over the area that you want to make smaller
Step 6)
- Change the effect of your picture according to the time frame that you have chosen for your story.
Step 7)
- If you believe that aliens have 3 eyes go to “decorate,” click on “stickers” and find the eye image that best suits your alien.
Step 8)
- Save your picture to your computer, upload it to flickr, and start creating your story on your blog
P.S.)
- This assignment is meant to be fun!!! Enjoy your creativity and express your inner alien and your inner story-teller. You don’t necessarily have to follow the exact steps I had after Step 4. Use as many effects as you please and create the best alien in the whole entire universe!

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Motivational Poster

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So for the first assignment I made, I made something very simple: the assignment is to make a motivational poster. Not a demotivational poster–the original: the MOTIVATIONAL poster.

And so, without further ado, I have made this motivational poster. May it inspire you to greatness forever.

Deep, huh?

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PSA Billboard

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Is there something about society, people, the world, or just anything that really bugs you and you want the world to know it? Then create a PSA billboard!

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Assignment Idea #1

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SWAP SHOP!
Yes, I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. One of the local radio stations always had this thing called ‘Swap Shop’ where people would call in and sell their goodies or whatever. So I decided, HELLO! perfect assignment. I recorded myself in audacity as both the radio personality ‘Brad’ and the caller. I went to generate-> change pitch and changed it to a negative 11, to get the Brad voice deep enough. Then I recorded myself on a separate track (go to track–>add new) and was the caller. I decided not to mess with an accent for it, although that might be a suggestion to make it better! I went with selling a dog, only I’m complaining about the dog the entire time–not usually a good idea when you’re trying to sell something. But that’s the magic of the swap shop! I stitched my tracks together using the time shift tool and voila! Presto!

Also, maybe it should be worth two stars because it does require some editing work and pitch changes.

(also the image of the swap shop on the assignment page is taken from the WESR (said weezer) website–the originators of the swap shop)

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How to: (be) Framed

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Well, since I’ve worked with this assignment so much, I suppose it’s time to teach others how to do it. Teach a man to fish and…

Well, I guess that isn’t applicable here.

It’s actually quite simple to capture a frame from a video on YouTube or any other video service or program.

1. Find the print screen key on your keyboard. For some laptops, this might be a “function” or “fn” key–you’ll have to hold down the fn key somewhere on your keyboard (often near the CTRL or ALT keys) while pushing the correct key (often it has prnt Scrn in blue text). Don’t press this yet–this key saves a copy of your screen at the instant you pushed it to the clipboard.

2. Load up the video, and full screen it. Advance to the exact frame you want, and then pause the video. This might require some timing or futzing.

3. Once this has happened, wait for the YouTube interface to disappear after a few seconds.

4. Hit the print screen key.

5. Open up your image editing software of choice, like Paint for example.

6. Hit CTRL + V or some sort of Paste command. This will put the image of your screen onto the canvas.

7. If necessary, use the box select tool to cut out anything you don’t want.

8. Save it, and voila, you’re done!