This assignment is quite interesting, its cool to see all the different things everyone carries around with them throughout the day. As for me, I carry a pad of paper in case notes or anything needs to be recorded. The pencils and pens come along with that as well as the lead for the pencils. For when I am outdoors I have a stick of Sports sunscreen and some Chap Stick to get me through the day, also some napkins never hurt anyone. An HDMI cable in case I find myself hooking something up to a TV. My portable phone charger in emergency situations where I need some more battery life as well as keys for my house and a memory stick to hold useful information.

For this assignment I was supposed to create a poster for the camp I wish I attended as a kid. So I thought “what did I do as a kid?” I played a lot of video games, so I went with that. I chose an N64 image since that’s the system I mostly played when I was younger.

For the camp itself, well it’s a camp, with video games. So it’s sort of like Video Game High School, where video games replace traditional activities. So they’ve got pizza and soda and tournaments and whatnot. Oh, and did I mention video games? Because video games.

For the poster, I was once again able to get away with using Paint. Similar to the previous assignment, I found a picture, posted it on paint, and added text boxes.

This assignment was to create a warning sign of whatever we wanted to.  I liked the idea of it because that meant I could be as ridiculous as I wanted to be.  So I decided to make a warning sign warning people to look out for falling whales and if you haven’t figured out the reference that I’m making here then you are making it very difficult for me to like.  Well for those of you that don’t know, I’m make a reference to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is also a movie but it is not as good as the book.

I think I’m going to stick with my answer of why stuff like this are a key part of digital storytelling, the pictures themselves tell the story and seeing that you probably won’t find a warning sign warning people about falling whales makes it unique to the digital part of things.  This assignment in particle also shows how a bit of the story from the person who created it.  Take mine for example, if you are able to see the reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy then you might conclude that that book may be one of my favorite books, which it is.  Now you know a bit of my story, granted only that I like a certain book but it is still more than you previously knew about me.  So to remember beware of falling whales and if you haven’t read the book I suggest you do, it’s quite funny.

Below you will find my picture and a link to the original assignment.

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/create-a-warning-poster/

This was a fairly simple assignment, to create a new type of animal by combining two or more animals and/or plants together.  I decided to create an animal like a Pegasus, or in simple terms a horse with wings, but I thought that was not enough so I also added an eagle’s head to my Pegasus to make it more unique.  Now let me tell you a bit about my animal, it likes long walks on the beach and if you get between it and its favorite meal, fish so you know, it just may start pecking your head until you leave.  And no I was not trying to create the hippogriff from Harry Potter, it just turned out to be along those lines.

I already said it in my past posts but I will say it again because it relates to this picture as well.  All pictures can tell their own story, depending on the imagination of the individual though.  And this picture does that as well, like why is that animal on the beach or why is it not flying and from there a story can come into existence.  Pictures like this can only come into existence through the use of digital media which strengthen its ties to the digital part of digital storytelling.

Below you will find my picture and a link to the original assignment.

Enjoy!

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/hybrid/

When I was going though the visual assignment bank, I was looking for something I could have fun with.  Then I came across this assignment, it was to take a picture of a cat and a Shakespearean quote and put them together.  I’m not a big cat person, but I thought I could make something that would be funny and who doesn’t like a good laugh.  So first off I looked though some quotes and once I found one that I could use I looked for a picture that would go well with the quote.  And thus, this Shakespearean cat picture was born.

This assignment goes long the same lines as my “Picture with a twist” post goes.  Where this picture tells a story, a fictional story of course because I don’t know any cats quoting Shakespeare but a story anyways.  The story that one person sees in it could be different than the story that some else sees.  That is one of the wonders of pictures, a single picture could hold thousands of different stories within itself.

Below is my picture and a link to the original assignment.

Enjoy!

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/shakespearean-lolcat/

This was my first assignment for ds106.  For this we were suppose to take a photo of ourselves and added a word bubble playing off of the picture.  However, I don’t have many photos that I’m actually in so that made things interesting.  I just ended up grabbing an ordinary picture and added a classic saying.  The saying may seem unoriginal, but who can truly argue with a classic like “So, who are you people?”.

Taking a picture and making it even more unique with a goal of showing some type of emotion to others was what this assignment was all about.  You could say something like this is the heart or definition of digital storytelling because the point is to tell a story, a story about a single instance.  The picture itself tells its own story where as the speech bubble adds a twist on that story.

Below you can find my picture and a link to the original assignment page.

Enjoy!

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/your-very-own-spubble/

This snake-rabbit was created for this visual assignment. I thought the premise of this assignment was really cool. I always jump at the opportunity to make funky images in Photoshop, so this assignment was probably the most fun I have had in the class so far!

For the source images I used the website called public domain pictures so I wouldn’t have to worry about any copyright infringement! I was quite pleased with the website and will probably keep coming back there through the remainder of this semester.

As for the overall process of creating the image it was pretty tricky. It took a lot of googling to get exactly what I wanted. The first thing I googled was “how to map a texture onto another texture in Photoshop”, this came up with a whole bunch of results. They all sort of worked to help me in achieving the final effect I was looking for.

The first step was cropping the Rabbit out of its background, this was easy using the magic wand tool. After that I used the selection menu to reduce the selected area by 5 pixels as to remove the boarder around the rabbit. After this I created a mask that was the shape of the rabbit excluding the eyes, because I didn’t want to map the snake texture onto the rabbits eyes. After that I spent some time getting the snake image to tile perfectly. Then I applied the mask over the snake scales so they only fit the image, then I set the layer to overlay, this made it kind of wrap around the rabbit. I added some selective blurring as to make the rabbit look a little less cut out! Voilà!

For this assignment I was supposed to create some type of warning poster. So I thought to myself, “what menace to society should I warn my fellow citizens about?” The garden variety hipster seemed like a good choice. The type of person who judges you for daring to listen to music people have actually heard of.

Imagine this: you’re the proud owner of a coffee shop, brew pub, used book store, or any other place these strange individuals tend to flock. You have a problem, a fedora wearing individual will not shut up about some weird sounding band nobody’s ever heard of. Worse yet, your costumers keep talking to them! Well no more! With this poster, you can be rid of this problem for good.

The creation of the poster was actually quite simple. I just found a picture, copy and pasted it into Paint, and added text boxes for the words. That’s it. I didn’t even need a fancy graphics editing program. Honestly, I’m not even sure why this assignment is worth three stars but hey, I’m not complaining.

This visual assignment tasked me with taking a picture and changing the look of it by changing its color scheme. I decided to use a vacation photo of a Yellowstone hot spring. I thought that by giving it more of a red hue, I could make it look like the surface of an alien planet. I’m not sure how successful I was, but it sure looks a lot different now.

Maybe you could imagine it as a post-apocalyptic version of Yellowstone. Nuclear waste has changed to color of the water. Toxic fumes fill the air. Very morbid. I think it fits with the theme I seemed to have created.

For the actual process, I took the image and edited it in GIMP. From there, I played around with the color settings. This was my first time using the program, so I kind of just stumbled around the menus until I happened upon something that looks decent. For reference, here’s the original picture:

What is the main difference between these photos?

This is my interpretation of this assignment.

It took me along while to come up with a nice idea for what I could do that would be subtle, yet easy enough to spot. When creating this piece I was constrained to items on my desk. I thought it would be pretty cool to use the wood pen holder I have, because it kind of looks like a tree trunk if you can’t see the top (which has the holes for the pens). This assignment took me a lot longer than I thought it would, just because I kept fiddling with all of the different positions of the items on my desk, trying to make it look good. Looking back on this assignment, I wish I had gone outside and tried to do this with something more natural, maybe trees or something along those lines. It would have been interesting to perhaps remove a branch in the back of a small tree, or something along those lines. Although this would have been probably impracticable.

The answer to the puzzle: The cap on the left has been rotated to the extent that the text inside the cap is visible.