Jonathan Worth shared a collection of portrait photos he did of Cory Doctorow that we must use to remix, regenerate, and make our own.

I chose to base my remix on one of his book’s, Pirate Cinema.  The plot is centered around a sixteen year boy who loves making movies illegally.  Based in dystopian near-future Britain, this concept is extremely illegal and receives an exaggerated punishment.

To remix a photo of Cory Doctorow, I went with the theme of old-time pirates mixed with copyright.  I wanted him to represent the main character in the book, but exaggerated and with a new twist.  I know the title of the book has no connection with old-time pirates, but that was the first thing that popped into my head!  On his wrist is the copyright symbol that’s been cut through, as well as some scars that he may have received from escaping the authorities.

Here’s the photo before remixing:

And the final product:

He seems to have a hidden glint in his eye, which says he’s up to something but we’ll never find out what it is!

A couple of weeks ago we all had to submit old, unused media to this website.  At time we didn’t really know why we were doing it, we were just told it was going to come back up later.  Well it turns out that later is now and that we now have to take at least five different pieces of media and put them together to create a story.  All of the media that we had submitted previously could now be found here.

I was at first quite nervous about what I was going to do with this assignment.  It seemed like it was going to be kind of hard to put together five random pieces of media and make them coherent.  Luckily, as I began flipping though all the different media I found a common thread that I really liked.  Turn out I’m not the only person in this class to likes Disney!! I ended up finding 5 Disney related media pieces and knew I had to go for it.

So my story is a trip to Disney World.  In the background you hear a song from Hercules and in the pictures you see different sights and characters that you’d come across in the park.  The final picture is a greeting card that you could get on your way out to remember your trip forever.

Here is my next remix assignment.  Hope you enjoy it:

This week we had to do six stars of remix on top of the preassigned assignments.  For my next remix assignment I did what color is your world? which is worth two stars.  In this assignment you had to pick a color and photograph it throughout your day.  You then had to pick a song to go along with it that represented that color that you choose.

When trying to think of colors the first color that I thought of what Yellow.  This was largely because I really love the Coldplay song Yellow.  After just a few minutes of tying to take pictures, I quickly realized that I have like nothing that was yellow.   I decided that I was going to have to try to come up with a different song to do this assignment to.  After a few minutes of thinking I realized that I had overlooked the obvious song choice, Red.  I believe I have used this song previously (because it is a Taylor Swift song and I have used just about every Taylor thing possible at this point) but I knew it would be perfect for this.  I started taking pictures for this I realized that Red what a much better fit.  I had a TON of red things just around my room.

After taking pictures, I imported them into iMovie along with the song red.  I played with the effects a bit to make them flow nicely. After that I cropped the song quite a bit.  I choose to go with the original demo version of the song (which was also on her cd) because I thought it fit a bit better.   Throughout the song she talks about a multitude of colors (red being the main one) so I cropped it until I was able to find a part that only had her singing about red. Here is my final product:

2 stars down and 4 to go!

While Mozilla Popcorn wins the prize for worst/hardest assignment ever in DS106 history, this project ranks pretty high on the challenging list of assignments.

We had to remix a picture (or remix someone else’s remix) of Cory Doctorow. He is a british science fiction author who works under with Creative Common License. Johnathan Worth took pictures of Mr. Doctorow and then asked DS106 students to remix them.

Honestly it took me forever to decide what to do. I looked at a lot of examples of other people’s work and was very impressed. Two of my favorites are Amber (seriously, so amazing!) and Kelsie (so creative!) remixes. Remix has honestly been one of my tougher weeks and I just mulled and mulled over  what to do for days.

Finally I just decided that I was going to be more literal in my work. I loved Kelsie’s remix so much that I decided to use her picture, after all we could remix someone else’s remix. Here is her original picture.

Here is her inspiration behind her remix:

“I looked on Cory’s website at some of his books and thought that Pirate Cinema seemed really interesting. We are running into copyright and download errors so I thought it would be interesting if I used the theme of this book in my remixed picture of Cory. In this book, the main character gets banned from the internet for a whole year! I can’t imagine not having the internet for a year. I mean not only would I not have homework {which I could get used to} but I wouldn’t be able to go on social media sites, check email, watch videos, or Netflix! Oh man…it would be like being in prison. And that’swhere my inspiration came from.”

Seriously, she made such a good connection!

Anway, for my remix of Kelsie’s remix, I decided I was just going to get a picture of a cinema frame/clip and put Kelsie’s picture into it. I decided upon this because Pirate Cinema is about downloading movies off the internet, and like Kelsie said, you are banned from the internet because it’s illegal. So I thought I’d tie in the more literal side of the book in with Kelsie’s more abstract work. You put those two things together and what do you get?

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

I used GIMP to make this. I opened the picture and cinema frame as layers and then resized the picture to fix the frame. I thought the distressed cinema frame gave the picture more character.

The title of this post really just scratches the surface of my feelings and emotions to the program, Mozilla Popcorn. We were given an assignment to Help Alan go on a Vacation. He created the video and left spaces between the clips for us to insert media.

(I plan on sharing all my issues with the program in this next paragraph, so feel free to skip over it, if you choose.) It too me many, MANY tries over a period of 4 nights to get this thing to work. I started off using Safari, it continually froze, played when I hit pause, wouldn’t play anything, etc. Issue, after issue, after issue. And it lead me to send this text to fellow DS106er, Brittany. And no I am NOT being dramatic! haha

Then, yesterday, Brittany suggest I download Firefox because she used that and it give her minimal issues. So I did and while I still had issues and it took me almost three hours, I FINALLY finished it. I can saw without a doubt that I’ve never been more annoyed and frustrated with anything in my life. I know the video is still not perfect, because I just couldn’t get it to be with the issues I still dealt with. But hopeful it’s okay enough.