GIFs from the Road

Gotta feed the animated GIF bacteria that lives in my gut. I had a few sets of photos I have taken over the travel span that I took series of things in motion for the express purpose of making them animated. I did these in PhotoShop via the method blogged earlier – essentially importing files as a stack, setting frame sequences in he animation palette, and sometimes masking out to reduce the elements being animated. These will be tagged to end up in the Photo it Like Peanut Butter ds106 assignment.

First up, from the great state of New York, at the small town where I crossed the Hudspn River, I had just hopped out of the truck to take a photo of the bridge when the sound of a train grabbed my attention (I literally ran across the tracks to get the angle) – this one is 549k.

Next up, an animation from a single image. I had stopped to take a picture of Yet Another Crumbling Down Home. I really liked the look of this window and its composition, but it also looked good in black and white (same image, just converted). In this one, I masked just the inside of the frame to isolate a color change, and made the time it spent on the black and white frame about twice as long (and it is only 111k):

And for number three– this past weekend I stood on the place that is the southernmost point in Canada, a few hairs farther south than the California/Oregon border. As far south as Rome. While at Point Pelee, I was intrigued by the difference between the rough surf of the west side and the calmness of the East, but all of which is Lake Erie. I took a series of belly in the sandy photos of waves crashing over the rocks (the waves were about 12 inches high). This one has more frames than I usually like to use, but they work well, it comes in at 741k (I dropped the colors from 128 to 64 to help there).

Hmmm its a bit fast, might have to tweak the frame rate.

Those are Erie waves (not eerie ones).

Fun stuff them there GIFs.

Italian Adventure

Google Map Trip

“Use Google Maps to tell a story! It can be the story of a trip you took, a trip you would like to take, a strange occurrence, a war, anything you like!”


This is a story of the trip I took to Italy last Spring. I started by flying into “A” Munich International Airport. I went with a friend who had cousins there, so they picked us up from the airport and showed us around Munich. They lived about an hr outside the city in “B” Augsburg, Germany. We spent a day there then took the train to “C” Venice, Italy, where we were dyinggg to eat Italian food. The typical tourists we are, we went to the first restaurant we saw outside the train station and had the worst pizza I’ve had in my life.. You have to find the hole in a wall place where the townies go to get the real good stuff. After a day in Venice we took the train to “D” Florence. Our friend who was studying abroad in Rome surprised us when we got to our hostile and had taken the train up for the night! Supresa! He showed us around a little, I think the most awesome moment of Florence was walking past the Duemo on our way home from the bar that night. The phrase of the night was “This isn’t real life” hahaha. Florence is pretty small so we took day trips to “E” Tuscany, “F” San Gimignano (Named Medieval Manhattan) and “G” Pisa. Then we headed to “H” Rome, which is a HUGE city that takes 2 busses and a train to get anywhere, but obviously a can’t miss if you’re going to Italy, I would just suggest a guided tour. From Rome we were ready to fly home and plan our next adventure!

I made this story by typing all the cities into google maps, hitting get directions and taking screen shots!

Amelia Earhart, Facebook Edition

What They Might Have Done in Social Media

“Use theFakebook tool to make a Facebook profile for a historical figure and make a fake tweet for the same character using the Twister tool. “

Here are the screen shots of Amelia Earhart’s Facebook:

I love the idea of this assignment. Not being a history buff at all I see how using these fake social media sites could make it fun for younger children learning about not so interesting historical figures. I made my site by going to Fakebook.com, and inserting the information I found on this bio site about Amelia Earhart.

It is a bit scary how social media has taken over the world, I can tweet about Barack Obama and have it show up on the nightly news or in a political speech. History is being made on Facebook and Twitter, I wonder if our children will even need history textbooks, or just Twitter archives.

Storytelling in Storify: I Have a Secret

This week in ds106 we are returning to something we have not done since the Spring of 2011, the idea of telling stories within the web – you can find more information in this week’s assignment.

While we have been publishing stories on the web, in our blogs, these assignments are meant to get you thinking how you can have stories exist in the spaces of other web sites, or reshaping web sites to tell a snew story. It is stories not ON the web, but within it, tangled with it:

Over the next week we’ll be playing with storytelling within the web. What does this mean? Well, Martha Burtis lays out the idea nicely in this post here about the idea behind this assignment (read it!), but to briefly summarize: you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site (if you can), but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though you can photoshop particular images on the site.

Thus we have a small set of Web Assignments with the required one we want students to do is Storytelling Within the Web. IN this go around, we are having our students use the new Mozilla Hackasaurus tool, which is very elegant about using the browser as means to alter the content of existing web pages. The harder part is getting students to save the HTML as text, but as Martha discovered, the HTML can be direct uploaded yo WordPress, making it easy to link to it from a blog post.

But woah, I am straying from the topic. We’ve been trying to add a few more assignments to the mix. I’ve been liking Storify as a nice tool for aggregating content from various social media sites- it allows you to search in flickr, twitter, youtube, soundcloud, or just grab a URL, and drag and drop it into a timeline. You can re-order items, and even add text in between the segments. I really like the way Audrey Watters has been using this to take notes and mix in other media from conferences she attends.

Given the use of Story in Storify, I thought, we cannot we just make narrative out of the bits and clips and stuff of these spaces? Hence the Storify It assignment.

Storify is a tool that allows you to pick and chose content from multiple social media sites- flickr, facebook, youtube, soundcloud, instagram, or just from a URL — and to assemble it in a narrative. Often it is used to capture the highlights of an event, but there is no reason you could not use it to create a story constructed of bits that exist elsewhere on the net.

See if you can tell an original story (or re-tell a known one) in the Storify site, and then embed the results in your own web site.

So here is the second one I did.

It really started with just a title. I wanted to see if I can get most of the dialogue from tweets- it is kind of hit and miss, but after some stabs I got a lot fo the lines I wanted, but then some of them led to a YouTube clip that a 12 year old did as a trailer for a book! (Bigger than a Breadbox) — it pretty much evolved as I went. Maybe I will see if you can figure it out- Here it is embedded:

I kind of enjoyed doing this organically and not sure which way it would go. I wanted it to not be literal.

The first time around I played with this, well, I was stuck. So I thought of seeing if I could retell something that was already a story. SO I searched on “parables” and ended up on a list of Aesop’s Fables and after clicking through a few, decided to take on Lion in Love- it is short, lends itself to media, and definitely has a moral at the end.

I am not sure if this is any more interesting to doa literal story. The fun part is seeing what you can find to represent the story elements. I used the text to insert the story in between.

Yes, Love can tame the wildest — or only a cat would be dumb enough to give up its attributes for a chick? Who knows.

Anyhow, there we go. Two examples in one post

Hacking Away…

I thought this assignment was going to be very difficult and decided to take it on at the beginning of the week. Like most things about this class, I was wrong. Hackasaurus makes it so simple to do!

I got the inspiration for this ad during a halloween costume search. I came across the cutest dog dressed up in a dinosaur costume and couldn’t stop laughing. It popped back in my head when I saw the website was hackaSAURUS. I decided that was the obvious thing for me to do. I found the two picture of the Boston Terriers using google images and just changed some of the information on a Craigslist ad.

 

Craigslist Ad—–WORKING WEBPAGE

 

 

 

Back in Time: UMW style

I love the idea of looking back in time and seeing how things have progressed (or turned for the worst). The assignment Way Back in Time embraces this idea with the web. I decided to use the Mary Washington homepage website. I am quite a legacy at this school. My mother, grandma, aunt, many cousins, and close family friends have all attended this University. Some even attended with the school was all girls or called Mary Washington College.

Using the Way Back in Time Machine website I collected many screen shots of how the webpage has progressed through the years starting in 2004. It has changed many times since then. It even changed from 2011 to this year! I also noticed very small changes in design. In 2008 I took two screen shots because the Centennial celebration logo changed within a few months.

I think the biggest change was in the design. It started off very simple, not giving many links or options and then developed into a lot for a webpage. I love all of the options it gives now, but at some point it can get overwhelming. The colors of the page also started off as just white and blue, then developed into adding yellow and different shades of blue, then back to blue and white, and this year it has more of a grey and white theme.

I believe the website has changed for the better, however if too many more things are added it could be for the worst. It started off simple (probably a bit harder to find things) and developed into having more options on the front page. This probably developed due to the increasing student population. More students means more activities and things going on that people want information on. These days, the first place people go to get information is the internet. A working simple to use website is key for a University. UMW has done a great job with modifying the webpage to embrace the changing times.

2005

2004

November 2008

March 2008

2007

2009

2010

2011

2012

 

Macbeth Act 1 Scene 1

This is an extremely amazing rendition of Macbeth’s opening scene. It’s was so good, my parents were laughing in the other room and my dog didn’t even bother to look up. I was asked to do this by the One-Man Play assignment. I had to act out a scene from a play, and play all the parts by myself. I used the program Audacity to record, and to record over myself to give the part where all three witches are talking its affect. I then uploaded it to SoundCloud toooooooooo share it with youuuuuuu!

May I take your order?! Wait…. WHAT?! 2 Stars

The link for this crazy little assignment is right here! http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/may-i-take-your-order/

To start this assignment off, I found a clip of a woman saying “May I take your order?” from this website: http://soundbible.com/tags-drive-thru.html , which was a super helpful kickoff to help me make this sound realistic. I also took a white noise clip from this website: http://whitenoisemp3s.com/turbine-hall.html . I used the Turbine Hall clip, which was super helpful to layer under my voice.

I basically just recorded myself in Audacity using the most obnoxious Southern accent that I could muster, and just went off on this poor, fictional drive-thru attendant. I’ll take every opportunity to act like a fool and be difficult, so this was my chance to do it, and therefore, my inspiration ;)

Mainstream Chipmunk’d: One Direction Style- 3 Stars

Link is here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/mainstream-chipmunkd/

One Thing by One Direction here…. Redone! Chipmunk Style! This really isn’t too terribly difficult to do. The first thing I did was to make sure I had the One Thing file on my computer so that I could import it into Audacity. Audacity is a pretty cool audio editing software, which I’m sure many of you used for your Radio shows! Anyways after making sure it was on my computer, I opened it up by clicking “File” and then going down to “Import” where I then chose the file I desired. After you do this it opens the track up in Audacity as just a one level track. In order to get a Chipmunk effect I highlighted the entire song and then went to “Effects”. If you look through the list you should see things like “Change Pitch”, “Change Tempo”, “Change Speed” etc, etc. I wanted to change my pitch to make it higher, which is how I got them to sound like Chipmunks.
I always enjoyed here Alvin and the gang so I thought, why not try my hand at this. I really have taken a liking to Audacity even though it can be a bugger at times. This was a good opportunity to use the software for a new purpose, which I really enjoyed.

Seuss’in it Up! “The Butter Battle” 3 Stars

Here is the link for this fun, fun assignment created by past- ds106er Lindsay Cutler!  http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/suess-it/

Ohh, “The Butter Battle”. This book sure is a mouthful, but was always one that I really enjoyed by Dr. Seuss. This assignment was a great opportunity to read to all of you fine folks in a way that I like to do it. I love reading Seuss with different pitches and with accentuations on words. This is how he meant for people to read it, and really makes a lot of sense. The man was really a genius with words and influenced so many people around him. I tried to stay strong and not falter with his tongue-twisters, and I feel that I did a pretty darn good job! Enjoy listening and comment!