Yikes, I had to dig deep in the archives to find the last time I did a DS106 Assignment. I would like to think there is one in there about making an excuse for not doing them.

Well there was one in 2020 when I made a DS106 Assignment for NetNarr, then the assignment timeline machine goes back February 2016, but the last ones I was doing in earnest (or west of Earnest) was around then, the last time I was tried to teaching a version was for Western 106. So my chops are not exactly rusty, just a bit, well maybe they are.

I was inspired this week via a tweet by Paul Bond, who has been the soul at the helm of the teaching ds106 vessel the last? 10 years?

And I had to read his post (very true to DS106 of documenting the back story) which introduces the very fun concept of the Walk of Life Project. And also in good tradition, Paul produced a few movie endings edited to end with the Dire Straits song. Then in DS106 tradition, it was added as an assignment.

For a day or two I mulled over what movie I would pick, my first hunch of Planet of the Apes was already done on the W.O.L site.

So since I had this previous bent for Westerns, I reached for the Sergio Leone epic The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly which rings even more spaghetti like as Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo so I Google Translated a suffix of “il cammino della vita”:

Like Paul wrote in his post, one might ponder the placement of the Walk of Life Music. I went for fading out Tuco’s scream (and drastically lowering the movie soundtrack). It might hit the beats for the Ugly, Bad, Good signage, but to me it works… cause I made it.

The thing about DS106 stuff is it need not be perfect, especially as a free roaming open participant. This was an iMovie quickie edit. I probably did not go for the best clip on searching for the end sequence, I got one of those MovieClips ones where the superimpose a logo and other cruft at the end. But I used my trick of importing a black solid rectangle image, putting it in the top video track, and using the Picture in Picture mode to create a shape that blocked out the logo.

Then it was a matter of getting The Dire Straits song as an audio file, cutting it before the singing came in, and a bit of audio level futzing to get a smooth entrance and exit.

I put the command line YouTube download youtube-dl to work, it just feels so geeky right to do this. For the video, I used:

youtube-dl -f best https://youtu.be/o36m-2TPwck

For nabbing the Dire Straits audio, I use the rick of getting all the available file formats

youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58TexsppsSU

This returns all of the video/audio files/formats available, look for the m4a one and make note of the code column (it usually seems to be 140, I can just try guessing). This then becomes par of the command to get the audio file of the Knopfler crew:

Downloading that file is then:

youtube-dl -f 140 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58TexsppsSU

And that is how I got the media needed to send th 3 gents on a Walk of Life remix.

That’s it, and the for ds106 style, I remember to use my ds106 tag which tells the mother site I am finally blogging and this post should be syndicated, and as well, for the Do the Walk of Life assignment, I add two more tags, VideoAssignments and VideoAssignments2810 which identify first that this is an assignment bank response — that’s the genius of the syndication created originally by Martha Burtis, the assignment bank actually gets feeds from the main DS106 site, including http://ds106.us/category/VideoAssignments/feed/ so it grabs posts based on the first tag, and the second tag associates it with the assignment.

Check back on the Do the Walk of Life assignment and you should see this post listed as a response.

It’s rather impressive, eh, that this RSS feed syndication system developed around 2011 still works like a champ. I have a future post about the condition of the Syndication Bus in 2022.

Looking for something to do in DS106? Try the random assignment spinner – who knows what you will get for a prompt.

As they say, DS106 still and always is #4Life

Featured Image: Still experimenting with using Openverse within WordPress, not much goodness for “walk life” “dire straits” so the classic Monument Valley scenery works for “western movie” – no spaghetti in sight!

Yikes, I had to dig deep in the archives to find the last time I did a DS106 Assignment. I would like to think there is one in there about making an excuse for not doing them.

Well there was one in 2020 when I made a DS106 Assignment for NetNarr, then the assignment timeline machine goes back February 2016, but the last ones I was doing in earnest (or west of Earnest) was around then, the last time I was tried to teaching a version was for Western 106. So my chops are not exactly rusty, just a bit, well maybe they are.

I was inspired this week via a tweet by Paul Bond, who has been the soul at the helm of the teaching ds106 vessel the last? 10 years?

And I had to read his post (very true to DS106 of documenting the back story) which introduces the very fun concept of the Walk of Life Project. And also in good tradition, Paul produced a few movie endings edited to end with the Dire Straits song. Then in DS106 tradition, it was added as an assignment.

For a day or two I mulled over what movie I would pick, my first hunch of Planet of the Apes was already done on the W.O.L site.

So since I had this previous bent for Westerns, I reached for the Sergio Leone epic The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly which rings even more spaghetti like as Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo so I Google Translated a suffix of “il cammino della vita”:

Like Paul wrote in his post, one might ponder the placement of the Walk of Life Music. I went for fading out Tuco’s scream (and drastically lowering the movie soundtrack). It might hit the beats for the Ugly, Bad, Good signage, but to me it works… cause I made it.

The thing about DS106 stuff is it need not be perfect, especially as a free roaming open participant. This was an iMovie quickie edit. I probably did not go for the best clip on searching for the end sequence, I got one of those MovieClips ones where the superimpose a logo and other cruft at the end. But I used my trick of importing a black solid rectangle image, putting it in the top video track, and using the Picture in Picture mode to create a shape that blocked out the logo.

Then it was a matter of getting The Dire Straits song as an audio file, cutting it before the singing came in, and a bit of audio level futzing to get a smooth entrance and exit.

I put the command line YouTube download youtube-dl to work, it just feels so geeky right to do this. For the video, I used:

youtube-dl -f best https://youtu.be/o36m-2TPwck

For nabbing the Dire Straits audio, I use the rick of getting all the available file formats

youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58TexsppsSU

This returns all of the video/audio files/formats available, look for the m4a one and make note of the code column (it usually seems to be 140, I can just try guessing). This then becomes par of the command to get the audio file of the Knopfler crew:

Downloading that file is then:

youtube-dl -f 140 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58TexsppsSU

And that is how I got the media needed to send th 3 gents on a Walk of Life remix.

That’s it, and the for ds106 style, I remember to use my ds106 tag which tells the mother site I am finally blogging and this post should be syndicated, and as well, for the Do the Walk of Life assignment, I add two more tags, VideoAssignments and VideoAssignments2810 which identify first that this is an assignment bank response — that’s the genius of the syndication created originally by Martha Burtis, the assignment bank actually gets feeds from the main DS106 site, including http://ds106.us/category/VideoAssignments/feed/ so it grabs posts based on the first tag, and the second tag associates it with the assignment.

Check back on the Do the Walk of Life assignment and you should see this post listed as a response.

It’s rather impressive, eh, that this RSS feed syndication system developed around 2011 still works like a champ. I have a future post about the condition of the Syndication Bus in 2022.

Looking for something to do in DS106? Try the random assignment spinner – who knows what you will get for a prompt.

As they say, DS106 still and always is #4Life

Featured Image: Still experimenting with using Openverse within WordPress, not much goodness for “walk life” “dire straits” so the classic Monument Valley scenery works for “western movie” – no spaghetti in sight!