umwsp13 – Assignment Bank

Ordinary Girl

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For my other mashup assignment, I chose to do Actor Transformation {****}. You always see actors/actresses on television and movies that you say “wow, they have really grown up”. When I was reading this assignment’s details, one actress came to my mind. Miley Cyrus.

I wanted my transformation video of Miley to have clips, pictures, and songs. I mean this is a mashup assignment! I got my video clips and pictures from when she was on Big Fish {2003}, Hannah Montana {2006}, The Last Song {2010}, and recent pictures of her {2012-13}. The song {Ordinary Girl} is from her show Hannah Montana. I thought the song fit just right :)

I got the clips from YouTube and converted it through KeepVid. Doing this made the clips easy to open in my Windows Movie Maker. I ordered the clips/pictures from young Miley to older Miley. You can clearly see how this young lady has changed – it’s kind of scary!

The reason I put a then and now picture was because I wanted the viewer to be able to look at her young and look at her now in order to compare the two. She looks a little scary now, what with bleach blond hair and all. I wanted to remind the viewer of the sweet, young, innocent Miley they saw at the beginning of this video. They might have forgotten because Miley looks so ~~crazy~~ ~~psycho~~ different.

The reason this is a mashup assignment is because I took the audio from a recent interview and played it when I was showing the pictures of her recently. This aspect changes what she is trying to say. She is saying that her parents were strict and that’s ok because she grew up fine but the pictures show otherwise. I thought that this mashup would add a bit of comedy to this video.

Blog post song title: Ordinary Girl – Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus - it doesn’t matter. It’s the same person.

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Whistle While You Work

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We had to create two assignments for digital storytelling. I was really excited to do this! I could create an assignment and pick my favorite topic to create one in! Obviously, I picked visual! LOVE visual!!!!

My assignment is called Putting Disney into Focus. I gave this assignment a rating of two stars. In this assignment, you had to pick a famous object from a Disney movie and take a picture of it. Putting in focus meant making the color pop out or blurring the area around it. Being creative!!! Here is my picture:

I chose an apple from the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The apple symbolizes the queen’s jealousy for Snow White. The queen wanted to be prettier and nicer than Snow White so she wanted to get rid of her. I picked to put the apple into focus because it is a very important element in this story. Without the apple, the queen would have kept being jealous and…well…I don’t really know what would happen. That’s how important the apple is to this story.

A lot of Disney movies have one important element that if it didn’t exist in the story, there would be no story. For example: the glass slipper in Cinderella, the rose in Beauty and the Beast, the magic lamp in Aladdin - just to name a few! This is why I chose to create this assignment, I thought it would be fun for students to think about Disney movies and I thought that it would make students think about how certain elements are important and vital in a story.

I took a picture of an apple and used my ColorEffects app on my phone. With this app, I made the background black and white and the apple stayed green. This way, the apple was the main focus. I also used Instagram to blur the black and white background. So now only is the apple the only thing that has color to it, but it also is the only thing that is not blurry. I felt that by doing these two things, I was really putting the apple into focus. Of course my Instagram friends were wondering why I posted a picture of an apple…hehe whoops :)

Song blog post title: Whistle While You Work – Snow White

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I Put a Spell On You

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Ok. This post fits into a lot of categories. First of all, I created it. Secondly, I am using it for my final project. And lastly, I had to add the tags for it. Whoah! How cool is that??

The assignment is called Connected Clips. I rated this assignment as two stars. The assignment is simply to find related clips from your favorite show and put them together. I wanted to have a collection of clips that were related for my final project but there was no assignment like that so I just created one!

Here is my video:

This is the blackmail video that Libby is going to use with Sabrina. I know I haven’t gone into too much about my final project, so that will come later! {The due dates for the assignments we submitted is before our week alotted to work on our final project}. DON’T WORRY, you will read more about this later! I will add to this blog post!!! I don’t want to give too much away without introducing the characters first.

I got the clips from various episodes of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch from YouTube. I was specifically looking for clips of Sabrina doing magic in public places – where someone could easily see and blackmail her! I converted the clips to MP4 clips through KeepVid {which is an amazing site and a definite lifesaver!} I saved the clips and imported them into my Windows Movie Maker. I cut the clips using the trim tool because I only needed the little bit where she does the magic. Most of the clips were full episodes or half of an episode.

I uploaded my video to Vimeo and submitted the assignment! I will be excited and nervous to see if people like it. I hope they do!!! :)

Blog post song title: I Put a Spell On You – Hocus Pocus

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Dakota Fanning through the years

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This week we had to complete 6 stars worth of Mashup Assignments.

The first assignment I chose was “Growing up with Drew Barrymore.” It is a 4-star assignment and the purpose was to find a real actor/actress that has been in many movies over the course of their life time and to “mash” them together and show growth in the actor/actress over time and different movies. We had two use a minimum of 4 different clips and the video had to be at least 2 minutes long

For my movie, I chose Dakota Fanning. I looked at both IMBd and Wikipedia to find out what movies she had been in. Of course, I’d seen her in a couple movies and new who she was, but I didn’t know all that she was involved with. I found that here roles were very diverse and across the board. I’m not sure if they really show the “growth” that the assignment asks for. But I do think that it shows how talented Dakota is and how she is able to really express herself and fully commit to the character she is portraying.

Dakota has had a very successful career for such a young actress, she was on many TV shows, prior to the start of her movie career at 7 years old. She has also been nominated for any awards.

Here are the movies I chose to play in the mashup:

To make the mashup I downloaded all the clips from youtube using KeepVid and used MPEG StreamClip to cut a couple down. I then uploaded everything into iMovie, added a title and credit slide and added titles to each movie clip. I did some minor adjusting and added a transition slide at the end. I know the first clip from I Am Sam is a bit long. But this was Dakota’s very first movie and perhaps her best. Dakota is very skilled, as you will see in the mashup video. She goes from the daughter of a man who is mentally ill, to an upper east side “snob” to a southern preteen in the 1960s, to a vampire, and then a terminally ill patient. Clearly this girl nows how to be an actress.

Here are a few screenshots of my work in iMovie

I hope you like the film!

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“Paralyze Me Out” (Vocal Instrumental Mashup ***)

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I swear I’m gonna be swimming in copyright strikes by the end of this course. This is a mashup of the 2 songs “Paralyzer” by Finger Eleven and “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand. This was made for the Vocal Instrumental Mashup assignment where the task was to take the vocals of 1 song and mash them up with the instrumental of another song. For this, I had the vocals of Paralyzer sync with the background music of Take Me Out.

First I downloaded the instrumental of Take Me Out then the vocals of Paralyzer. To make this, I used Garageband to edit the 2 tracks to match one another. The hard part was trying to match up the beats of both songs so they’d sound well together. The reason I specifically picked these songs was because not only did they sound similar, but they had similar beats per minute (bpm.) The bpm of Paralyzer is between 128 and 135 while Take me out was 123. Because of this small difference, I had to chop up the Paralyzer vocals to make them fit within the 2/2 time signature (meaning 2 beats in every measure.) You can sort of hear these gaps in the song.

In the picture, the bottom track has the music part, while the top track is the chopped up vocals.

These 2 songs work so well together that you cant really tell it’s a mashup!

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Yellow

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For one of my mashup assignments, I wanted to do the What Color is Your World {**}. I always feel like the color yellow is a color that is forever in my life. Also, yellow is proven to make people happier. I don’t know how it’s proven or where the evidence is. But I can buy that. I mean, I am a happy person. And you’ll be happy too once you watch this video/song mashup of how the color yellow is in my world.

I set Friday {4/19} aside to take pictures of my day and my encounters with the color yellow. Looking back at the pictures, I realized that Friday was not special. Everything that I encountered that was yellow is something that I encounter everyday. So, yellow truly is the color of my world.

I already had the song {link at the bottom of this post} that I wanted to have play in the background so I inserted it right in my Windows Movie Maker. I also inserted the pictures from my iPhone into my movie maker. Then, it was time to get editing! I ordered the pictures from the start of my day to the end of it. I thought that doing this would fully tell my whole day in a story.

Here is my yellow world:

I used effects like zoom in, zoom out, pan left, pan right, and tilt to intensify each picture. Each of the pictures special effects was purposefully chosen. For example, the Splenda picture tilts so you can better read the label on the sugar packet :)

So, are you happier now??

Blog post song title: Yellow – Coldplay

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Death Note Album Cover (Remix an Album Cover***)

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What do you get when you cross a Japanese cartoon with an English band? You get a remixed album cover!

This cover was created for the Remix an Album Cover remix assignment. This image is a parody of the Gorillaz Demon Days album cover which features all four of the Gorillaz members on a white background facing the same direction. Instead of Murdoc, 2D, Noodle and Russel, I replaced them with Light, L, Misa, and Ryuk from the anime called Death Note. I changed the title of the album from “Demon Days” to “The New World” because in the show, Light and Misa are trying their hardest to create a perfect world free of crime by bringing the criminals to a deadly justice. (Seriously, I love this show!)

I made this album cover in GIMP by taking the original Gorillaz cover and erasing the text and characters. After that I went through a bunch of Death Note clips to find the 4 main characters with a side view, to make it match the original album as much as possible. This was what took me so long because they were always facing the camera straight on in the shot. I fuzzy erased the backgrounds they were in and pasted them in their respective white squares. Hm, I would love to see these 4 in a band, too bad they couldn’t work together since they’d be fighting all the time.

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Reuse and Recycle

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A couple weeks ago we were required to submit a few pieces of media that we had no used for a specific ds106 assignment. However, since this week is Remix week we were told to take these old media pieces and create a story out of them.

All the unused media was found at this website. Additionally, there is actually a Mashup assignment attached to this project, it’s called “Recycle the media.”

We had to use at least 5 pieces of media, and 2 different media forms (visual, audio, etc). All the pictures came from the website. Unfortunately all the audio files just said “loading” and wouldn’t play except for one which made crashing noises and did not fit with my story. So instead, I included a song that I had, “Brighter than the Sun” by Colbie Calliet.

Before I share the video, here is the story:

It’s a beautiful Spring Monday Morning and it’s time for Serena to get ready for class. She wake up and pours herself a big cup of coffee in her favorite coffee cup! Once the caffeine kicks in, it’s time to get dressed and decide which heels will match her outfit perfectly (God Bless her for walking around campus in those high heels!!). Serena has 5 minutes to get to class, good thing her dorm is right next to the building her class is in. Down the steps she goes, she can’t be late! Along the way, she sees all the gorgeous spring flowers in full bloom, it’s her favorite season. Oh there’s Chandler, the academic building that her business class is in. Serena made it to class with a minute to spare! Good thing this is the last week of classes, waking up for an 8am class is not an easy task.

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Artificial Intelligence

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In an age where artificial intelligence is becoming more and more prominent, we must become weary of those who walk among us. Who is real, and who is a machine? As the decades go by, it will become more difficult to answer this question. Your best friend could be a cyborg and you would never know.

(My blog makes the image seem like it’s squished together. Right click it and choose “View Image” to see the right proportions.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This activity was done for the “For the Remix” assignment. I made this image using a portrait from Jonathan Worth’s website, Creative Commons images of a metal skull and bar code, and GIMP. First I turned the whole image’s color to a silvery-blue to try to mimic the dramatic lighting found in a Terminator movie or something. Then I selected half of his face, cut it away, and pasted it as a new layer. Making it a new layer allowed me to freely rotate the piece without messing up the rest of the face. When I rotated it, I wanted it to look like half of his face was breaking open like a pinata to reveal his metal skull.

The skull was another layer in itself and it was was moved to fit directly under the face layer. The problem I had with this was that the skull was an image that faced directly forward while the face was turned at an angle. I tried to fix this by slightly warping the skull to turn it a bit. The red eye inside the skull was done with a series of fuzzy brushes and Gaussian blurs (to add the glow) Meanwhile the other eye was red to show that there was also a red light behind that part of the face too. Finally, I added the bar code to his forehead to show that he is just a product; an android that could be bought at an AI industry. (this layer’s opacity had to be turned down to make it look like it was naturally printed into is forehead.)

I had ALOT of fun making this and I was impressed with how it turned out. My first idea was to open his head and inside there was going to be the inside of an apple, symbolizing knowledge. But that would’ve been too easy and I went with something much cooler. I mean, would you rather have a fruit for a brain or an advanced piece of technology that could grant you the power to do unimaginable things? Yeah, I thought so.

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How Do You Think Yoda Got So Wise?

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Why he read all of the ancient and modern parables of the Wise One, especially borrowing attributes of those who took on Empires, like Jedi Yallow, for later training. He than sought out The Boing Boing Being in the deep depths of Hainault Forest, spending weeks at his feet, taking notes on his iPad.

This is a quick remix example for an exciting ds106 project, where our students are among the first to get a crack at remixing the portrait photos of Cory Doctorow that Jonathan Worth is sharing with the world for open remixing. Jonathan described it for us

and as well visited with me and my students during this week’s ds106 show. To be a base for the site, and knowing the flood of action once Cory announces this on Boing Boing, I suggesting hanging the web site on wordpress.com- with the name borrowed from internet speak and one of Cory’s books — For The Remix

The first set of photos is available at http://fortheremix.wordpress.com/photos licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (please no license debates, ok?). The original high resolution images (as large as 50 Mb) are stored on Amazon’s cloud.

For now, our method of collecting remixes is embarrassingly simple- we want people to write up their entries ds106 style, and add a link in the comments to our HOW page.

For my students, they have a ds106 Mashup assignment they have to do for this last segment of the course.

And that’s where I want your help. We want to have a good variety of examples of remixes before we take the project to the wide open web. We are hoping people di more than simple images, like I did here, but actually think about making stuff. I’ll be nagging a lot of you ds106ers to do this. You have been warned.

Okay, for my remix above, the original image or Cory sitting on his chair reminded me a bit of Yoda:

I found an image of the scene where Yoda is teaching Like in the woods in a post from Death Star PR A Chronological List of Things Yoda Tried (and Completely Failed) To Do:

I was thinking at first that I would replace Yoda, maybe with a flip horizontal to match the angle Cory is sitting at. I took both into PhotoShop, and used the magnetic lasso to select around Cory’s shape and remove the background. When I started moving and resizing over the Star Wats scene, I realized hw was a better match to replace Luke, and the concept made sense- Yoda learning from Cory Doctorow.

I had to do a bit of clone brushing on the original layer to wipe out Luke’s foot, but it fit pretty good. Once I had Cory’s photo in place, I used Images -> Adjustments -> Hue Saturation checking the “COlorize” box to try and match the green hue of the star wars scene. Not too bad, eh?

I left a copy of my PSD file for anyone who cares to fiddle. Since the start wars image was low quality, I did te sloppy thing and up-sampled, which I know is not good, but sue me. I made a 300dpi version PNG at 3600X2842 px (7 Mb).

I just wanted to have one quick example out the door first! My next one is going to be an animated GIF..