The second media assignment I did for my novel was the Poetry Playlist assignment for 3 stars. I’m a sucker for all assignments involving playlists because I love music and creating playlists that evoke certain feelings or have more meaning than just a list of songs. I also love poetry so this was a no brainer for me! Below you can check out the poem I created for Sea of Rust.

I originally made my playlist in iTunes but I realized with the new layout, you wouldn’t be able to read the titles all in a row in a seamless fashion so I moved it to Spotify. First I went through my entire iTunes library and picked out songs that reminded me of different aspects of Sea of Rust. I started to get a solid concept in mind because I found phrases that really fit in well. I decided to focus on Two’s role as a sacrifice to be spare parts for Rebekah, as well as Brittle and other bots’ loss of sanity when they start to break down. My favorite parts of my poem are definitely the “green light” part, because I was happy to find something reminiscent of the “green flash” in the novel, and the fact that I was able to get some rhyming in the poem with fitting lines.

If I have time in the coming weeks, I’d love to remix this assignment with an audio one and make some kind of mash up with my poetry songs! Let me know if you recognize any of the songs or share your own playlist poem.

My Favorite photo by far

Some may claim it’s pronounced Jif but Graphics Interface Format files, or Gifs will always be Gifs with a hard ‘g’ to me! This week we were given the task to make our own gifs using the apocalyptic film we chose to watch. I watched Train to Busan, a zombie film that follows the journey of Seok-Woo and his daughter, Su-An, as they… you guessed it, take a train to Busan to visit his estranged wife and the mother of his child. Little do they know, a bio-chemical leak at one of his own facilities has created a zombie infection that has reached the train via a bitten woman jumping on at the last minute. The rest of the film follows the passengers of the train as they struggle to survive on a moving death trap full of hungry zombies while they search for a city where they can find sanctuary.

I absolutely loved this movie. I’m not a huge horror or thriller fan so the gorey parts of the film and the jump scares weren’t pleasant but the way they developed each character and made you care about them (or hate them) was wonderful. I became attached to the motley crew of survivors and I dreaded the moments that they would die because it’s a zombie movie and I knew where it was headed. There were conscious choices in music, shots and writing that endeared you to certain characters. For the two fathers, having a child, born or not, gave them a plot device that could show their vulnerability and different aspects of their personalities. Other characters like Young-guk, a baseball player riding the train with his team and crush, and In-gil, an old woman riding with his sister, had a similar effect with their emotional counterparts. By giving certain characters “weak spots” and emotional connections, you could see how they treated others and add emotionality to the moments where they have to face crisis involving their emotional counterparts. The writing, for me, really added to the effect of the movie and the movement of the narrative. The emotionality built up by this writing was furthered by a lot of close up shots on expressions. You can say a lot with just a shot of someone’s face!

One of the best characterizations within the film was of Sanghwa, the dad-to-be who had a gruff exterior but a soft side when it came to his pregnant wife. When you first saw him, he seemed almost rude with the way he addressed Seok-Woo’s daughter and joked bluntly with his wife. But as the film went on, you could see from the small actions he did like making sure his wife had somewhere to sit and paying attention to Su-An that he put others before himself. This is something he expresses himself and he criticizes Seok-Woo for only thinking about himself when he has a young daughter and others depending on him. SPOILERS AHEAD HERE: Unfortunately, Sanghwa dies in the struggle to get to a safe train car but the way he died was perfectly symbolic of his selfless strength so I wanted to gif that moment. Even as he transforms into a zombie and you see the human life leave his eyes, he continues to fight against it and stand in between the pack of zombies and his wife and fellow survivors until the last second. This moment was full of tears for me and I captured it in the gif below.

I ended up watching things in reverse order and ended with La Jetée. I had already heard a bit about what to expect with this film; there would be no real movement, only a sequence of photographs that furthered the story. This was an interesting approach and I was actually shocked when at one point, they did have what appeared to be normal motion or animation when the woman blinked her eyes. The choice to include more fluid animation there then appeared significant to me. When filmmakers are very selective about what they don’t include (i.e. moving video), the moments where they do include it (the blinking) then stand out and appear as a clear artistic choice. As a whole, I didn’t subjectively enjoy the movie that much because the narrative seemed to move slowly due to the same photos sitting on screen for a long period of time. I actually ended up turning the speed up to watch it in 2x speed which made it more palatable to me.

Objectively, I thought the movie was a nicely done example of an alternative way to tell a story. With just a small amount of pictures, it was easy to understand what was going on, although you needed the narration to help piece it together. If you watched the pictures alone without it, it would become a confusing mess simply because it uses abstract concepts and a dream world that travels through time. That’s not easy to show through pictures alone, especially at the time it was created. I would say it is not quite as effective as movies, but that is not the fault of the method but rather the actors. The expressions in the photos were not always easily readable or believable. Even when the man was supposed to be in pain while being experimented on, it didn’t seem agonizing. Would this be fixed simply by having it filmed rather than photographed? Possibly but it was really the people in it rather than the medium. In the end, I think that a story told through pictures is very possible and I can only wonder if it could be done even more successfully with today’s minds and technology.

Ok Ok Now!! So I figured out how to make a GIF thanks to Jen you rock. So let get this started with La Jette, that movie definitely gave me the creeps a bit. I thought the pictures would start moving and pop out and scare me. But for the time it was made it had some pretty far out concepts about the apocalypse. The whole higher power see into the future thing was pretty crazy. But even with the subtitles it was hard to follow but the pictures were amazing. The film took advantage of using contrast a lot in the pictures for sure.

Now onto The Road, I thought it was a great movie. But it made me sad at times, when the boy wanted to talk about his mom but the dad sadi just forget it. It broke my heart. I almost had a heart attack when they were in that house where the people were chained up to be eaten and the owners came back. I said to myself “if this little boy gets eaten im done forever with this movie” Throughout the movie the father narrates the movie talking about how the boy wants to meet other children and all, but little did they know a super nice family was following them the whole time! Towards the end of the movies the fathers dies, then the little boy is confronted by a man with 2 kids a wife and a dog. So that movie gave me hope that the world will be ok.

Below I attached a gif from my favorite scene! The boy is trying a soda for the first time, and he love its and say wow its so bubbly. Reminded me of me when i was kid drinking soda thinking how great life is.

For my second visual assignment (1 1/2 Stars to add to the 5 of my barcode assignment), I chose the 106 Horror! assignment. The instructions were: create or modify an image of the number 106 that is in the genre of a horror movie. Make 106 seem scary and ominous. This one caught my eye not only because it had a low amount of stars to finish up my 6 total stars but also because it left a lot of opportunity for creativity. This assignment is also easily tied into the apocalyptic genre and although my photo doesn’t explicitly do that, it can be read as the result of some apocalyptic violence. When I read the prompt, I instantly knew what I wanted to do. Blood is always a huge visual for horror films and I knew we had a heavy supply of ketchup. My first thought was to place the bloody number on a plate for the ease of cleaning it off and for a stark white background but it ended up going nicely with the knife I added in the end. I added some food coloring to get a brighter red because before it looked like straight up ketchup and that’s just not scary. The most challenging part was taking the photo with one hand while I put my messy, knife-wielding hand in the shot. I liked how the light gleamed off of the knife and created shadows so that was the shot I ultimately chose. Finally, I added the Clarendon filter on Instagram because I liked the 80’s kind of color scheme it brought out. I hope my image doesn’t give you nightmares!

Train to Busan, only $9.99 at your local apocalyptic retail!

This week I chose Train to Busan as my apocalyptic film to watch and although my reaction to it will come in a later post, I’ll tell you right now that this movie gave me a lot of feelings. I loved it and have been thinking about it since I watched it so I decided to use it to turn into a barcode for the Create a Movie Barcode assignment. This assignment was cool for a lot of reasons. First off, it allows you to get a visually representation of an apocalyptic color scheme and aesthetic. Looking at the barcode for this movie and you can tell right away it’s not a comedy or children’s movie. It has gritty, muted colors and not much variation in palette. There’s mostly blues, grays and the occasional yellow or white. This assignment also made me think of the Kurt Vonnegut video on the shape of stories. Just like the process he used there, it’s possible to see the different ‘waves’ and arcs of the story in this visual after you’ve seen it once. I can pinpoint certain points of the film and through the colors trace different “movements” of it. It’s not a stagnant line of color or a huge kaleidoscope of rapidly shifting colors but a narrative of them.

After completing this assignment, I can see why it got 5 stars! Although it used a lot of programs that did the work for me, I had a hard time figuring out just how to accomplish what I wanted. Now I think that finding safe downloads and researching websites can count as a skill because it was difficult for me to find a place where I could download the full length of this movie without expecting a virus. It ended up being in Spanish but for the purpose of this assignment, it didn’t matter. Then I downloaded the MPEG-Stream program like the assignment page instructed and I came to a complete standstill. I’d never used this program before and even on the tutorials it didn’t include what to do when you uploaded your video to the program. Luckily, Jenn helped me out with a handy dandy tutorial and I had my images in a folder ready to go! Until… more technology fails. I uploaded my images to the Imj generator multiple times on both Chrome and Safari, even using the folder of images option and the selecting images option. The generator kept creating blank images. I shot the creator of the generator, Zach Whalen a message about this but decided to give it one more go with the option for smoothness off. It worked! And although my picture is not smooth and all and is a little ugly, it came out for me to share with you guys today. I’ll update it later if I can manage to create a smoother version.

It was a typical winter everything was peaceful , it was the night before christmas and we were all excited for the new year. But on Christmas morning all the snow and ice melted away overnight. The weather man didn’t say this would he said it would be below 30 degrees. But now it feels like the 70’s.

So we took joy in the unseasonably warm weather, we all went swimming at the beach it was great best unexpected Christmas surprise yet. Or so we thought it kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter. Wildfires started out of nowhere we didn’t know what this happened.

The fires kept growing and growing we had to get out of there.

So we hopped in the RV and hit the road for the caverns to escape the rising heat. We didn’t know if we were going to make it intime we just kept driving on the back roads to avoid the madness. And to avoid all the deaths that were happening.

It keeps getting hotter and hotter and i don’t think Ill make it I dont think I can stand this heat any longer or that terrible smell that comes with it. Oh my god that terrible smell is me ouch ouch im getting burned from the air I just want to..

This is a DS106 visual assignment that challenges us to remix an existing corporate logo with a bad font (or an improved font). At 4 stars, I think the difficulty rating is somewhat inflated. Granted, I’ve been doing this kind of work for a while, but this assignment only took me 5 minutes to complete. It is taking me longer to create and publish a post about it.

My process used was simple. I did a Google image search for the “John Deere Logo.” Then I downloaded the image and placed it into Adobe Illustrator. I used a clipping mask to remove the old John Deere Text. Then I used the text tool to reset the type in the over-used Papyrus font. I then saved the image as a PNG graphic and uploaded to this website. Boom- done! My rating for the assignment difficulty was a 1 star. For a beginner with no graphic-making experience, it might take a little longer, but certainly no more than 2 or 2.5 stars.

So to take it up a notch, I followed Paul Bond’s lead and put the Papyrus font onto a John Deer product. This took more time than the original assignment. I had to find a tractor using Google once again. Then I used the clone tool of Photoshop to remove the original John Deer lettering. I tried using Photoshop to add the lettering back in, but I wasn’t pleased with how it turned out, so I saved the edited photo as a JPG and brought it back into Illustrator, where I used the text tool to set the type. I then saved the photo as a web ready JPG image. Here is the result: