I happened upon the Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life” by accident. Our #ds106zone class has a Twilight Zone theme so I was hunting around watching episodes I hadn’t seen before and I’m glad I chose this one. I really enjoyed it. Towards the end of the episode, Anthony starts to make it snow. I got a kick out of that scene and thought, wouldn’t it be cool (pun intended) if someone could make it snow in the summer.
Then I stumbled across this ds106 assignment: Winterize It!
Take a picture from summer and winterize it! Using photoshop or an online photo editor such as picmonkey.com lighten the color to make the temperature appear cooler, add scarves, snow flakes, or even a snowman! Use your imagination and take a photo from another season and turn it into a winter theme to prepare for the winter season ahead.
Perfect! Now…what photo should I start with…I had an awesome photo of the Golden Temple in Kyoto Japan taken in the summer. It’s a great looking building so I photoshopped it to make it look like it was colder and snowing. I added snow the roofs, tried to emulate some snow drifts/irregular patterns caused by the wind. I adjusted the colors to match a more desaturated winter look.
I’m pretty happy with how this turned out over all.
I happened upon the Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life” by accident. Our #ds106zone class has a Twilight Zone theme so I was hunting around watching episodes I hadn’t seen before and I’m glad I chose this one. I really enjoyed it. Towards the end of the episode, Anthony starts to make it snow. I got a kick out of that scene and thought, wouldn’t it be cool (pun intended) if someone could make it snow in the summer.
Then I stumbled across this ds106 assignment: Winterize It!
Take a picture from summer and winterize it! Using photoshop or an online photo editor such as picmonkey.com lighten the color to make the temperature appear cooler, add scarves, snow flakes, or even a snowman! Use your imagination and take a photo from another season and turn it into a winter theme to prepare for the winter season ahead.
Perfect! Now…what photo should I start with…I had an awesome photo of the Golden Temple in Kyoto Japan taken in the summer. It’s a great looking building so I photoshopped it to make it look like it was colder and snowing. I added snow the roofs, tried to emulate some snow drifts/irregular patterns caused by the wind. I adjusted the colors to match a more desaturated winter look.
I’m pretty happy with how this turned out over all.
Hello. I am Talky Tina. When I was young, in the early years of television, a lot of my friends worked in televions programs that pushed the boundaries of imagination, sight, sound, perception, identity, belonging. The time was fueled by the paranoias and fears of the fifties, sixties, and the cold war. Oh, it was grand to play with my childhood friends back then!! Spurred on by advances in sciences and technologies brought with the advent of nuclear power and the space race (we had such great toys!), programs like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits provided wonderful experiences, and insights into humanity (and friends!).
Somehow, as a child of that era, I have found that I can only see in black and white. But that’s okay, because a black-and-white sequence makes for a smaller GIF anyway! Can you help me relive my childhood (and perhaps your childhood, or that of your parents?) with some nice, friendly b&w animated GIFs From The Twilight Zone and Beyond? Try to capture all of the really nice childhood moments! You know the really, really best and funnest parts!
I will be watching to see your assignments, so don’t let me down, friend.
What better memory to relive than the arrival of an old friend?!
Now down to business. This scene is from the Twilight Zone episode “The Invaders” (imdb) and has to be my favorite moment. I love the build up of suspense and drama until the reveal of the invader. Design wise I love the (now) retro sci fi look. I’m hoping for a revival of these styles in the sci fi genre…maybe that’s my new mission in life…but I digress…
Technically, creation of the gif was pretty simple. Screen capture the shot with quicktime (I processed it a little in after effects – mostly resizing and I also posterized the time to 8 frames per second) then export the frames to photoshop and finally exported the gif.
I think this moment appeals to me for the same reason I work in visual effects. These are the moments that really help to sell a story to an audience…continue the suspension of disbelief…and subsequently engage with a story emotionally. Interesting camera work, visual/special effects, etc just for the sake of being cool that do not serve the story have no place being included. All hail the All Mighty Story.
I think this shot serves the story of the invaders to solidify the relentlessness of the invasion and put the viewer in the same emotional state of the protagonist.
The font is called Ringbearer (free on dafont.com). An alternative you might like is called twylite-zone (free on fontspace.com). I used a screen capture of the star field from the opening of The Twilight Zone television program as the background, and fiddled with a combination of upper and lower case (you get caps regardless, but varying sizes) as well as layering some letters individually and scaling them based solely on what I thought looked good.
This is a square version, mimicking the original layout of The Twilight Zone title.
And, just because Flickr has decided to fiddle around with its aesthetic today and is taking some serious flak for not consulting with its long-standing users in advance, …
The color is back in my life. I am not sure why are how. Perhaps it will always be a mystery…
I could not remember how to make a gif when I started my work on the Muppet GIFs assignment and was struggling when I decided to take a look at the post I made about gifs earlier in the semester. I used that as a guide, downloading this video with KeepVid, trimming it with MPG Streamclip and creating the gif in Adobe Image Ready, choosing roughly 12 frames and setting them to display at a rate of 0.1 seconds per frame.
I forgot that I needed to adjust the timing and just saved the gif using the default speed in Image Ready of 0.03 seconds per frame, which is much too fast for this assignment.
After doing Color Splashearlier in the semester, I really wanted to revisit it for this assignment.To do this, I opened up Gimp and imported my photo. I then created a new layer which was a copy of my photo and changed the saturation on that layer to 0%. This made my top layer grayscale. I then took my eraser tool, made it as small as I could and carefully erased around the inside edge of what I wanted in color. Once I was satisfied, I finished erasing the inside edge of my top layer so that the only part of my photos in color were one object in each photo.
I also modified the instagram page of the original photo with Hackasarus for fun even though it was not part of the assignment since I wanted to give the photo some context.
Nine and a half years ago I was adopted by an adorable, loving yet sometimes aloof puppy, Harper, Mr. Friendly, Harper-Harper-Bo-Barper, my Handsome Boy. Yesterday he died. With him, a piece of my heart and soul feel like they died too.
When I walked into the home of the family that had been fostering Harper, I met a few really nice dogs, but one was so sweet, calm, and confident, even at 12 weeks old, that I knew he was the dog I had been looking for.
Let me tell you something only a few people know. I got a dog (actually 2, but that’s a story for another day) to use as a tool. Yes, a tool.
I was depressed, pretty severely, in counseling, but refusing medication. If I wasn’t working I would stay in bed all day and all night, or just mope around the house; I was a terror for my roommate, making her life a living hell. I didn’t care about anything, my friends, my house, myself. I just wanted it all to end. I wanted to NOT FEEL LIKE CRAP every day. I could see no way out.
I decided that instead of self-medicating, I should figure out a way to change things. After thinking about it, I thought to myself, “What is going to make me get out of bed?” The one and only thing that came to my mind was a dog. A dog? Well this is going to sound strange, but I knew I wouldn’t want a dog peeing on me, my bed or the floors and to combat that, I. WOULD. HAVE. TO. GET. OUT. OF. BED. I got a dog so that I could mentally/emotionally/physically get out of bed. Actually, I brought home two.
The boys (what everyone who knows them, calls them), Harper and his brother, made it okay for me to walk around the neighborhood again, smile at strangers again, make new friends, hold my head high, and laugh again.
I have been lucky to be surrounded by a loving family and have married a wonderfully supportive husband, but sometimes, just sometimes, I can tick them off; that’s expected, we’re all human. What Harper gave me was permission to be me again, nothing I ever did or said could make him upset with me, angry at me, or even cold towards me. While we had dogs growing up, and they were fun, I never experienced that special unconditional love for a dog and from a dog, until Harper.
So, yesterday morning, after a tough surgery the day before, a good nights rest, and fighting the good fight, his body said enough is enough.
Enough will never be enough for me, but I realize that if this life we live is a delicate balance between black and white, yin and yang, birth and death, summer and winter, wanting and needing; the proof of the immense pleasure he and I shared can be found in the heartache I am feeling because of his passing.
Okay, so this assignment was pretty simple. First, I found an image on Google of Mulan and her man. Even though it’s from Mulan 2 (which is god awful, don’t watch it!), I still thought it was the best image I could find. Here it is:
Next, I went on my favourite image editing site, Pixlr, and edited the image on there. All I really did was add in some of my favourite lyrics (can you guess which song I picked?) Here’s the finished product:
Yep, it’s another Taylor Swift song! “Love Story” to be precise (: I guess even to the final week of ds106, T.Swift has stayed strong in my heart <3
For the fourth piece of the story, I chose to do the Say it Like Peanut Butter {***} visual assignment. For this assignment, you had to take a clip from a movie or show and turn it into an animated GIF. This assignment is going to show Sabrina’s revenge on Libby. In the fourth assignment, you saw that Sabrina planned and plotted her revenge but now, you can actually see what happened.
I used MPEG Streamclip to trim the clip and get exactly the section that I wanted to use and GIMP for actually creating the GIF. I remember doing these GIFs wayy back in Boot Camp but I still had to refer back to the handbook page on creating GIFs. I forgot exactly how big and how to export the file as a GIF. I kept on clicking “save as” and you need to click “export” to correctly save the file.
Even though this is the end of the semester, I still had to watch this video because I needed help with embedding my GIF into WordPress. That tutorial video is super helpful and simple.
