visual – Assignment Bank

Significant Otter

View Assignment Details

This week, we’re really getting down and dirty with Visual Assignments. We have to complete 10 stars worth of assignments before the end of the week from the ds106 Assignment Bank. We get to choose which assignments to do, however the first one, Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge (worth 2 stars), is mandatory by everyone in order to compare ideas. The assignment was created by Sara last year. My cheezy caption on this card is more for mature audiences, but I couldn’t turn down the obvious opportunity.

To make the photo, I first downloaded a blank card from Sara’s Flickr set. I used Picasa to add the text I wanted, then I saved the photo, and uploaded it to Flickr. Finally, I publicized my blog post via Twitter.

#ds106 #ds106valentines #visualassignments My edited Valentine’s card and blog! ds106.larahampson.com/significant-ot… twitter.com/l_hampson23/st…

— Lara Hampson (@l_hampson23) February 12, 2013

View Assignment Details

Getting Cheesy up in here + a tutorial

View Assignment Details

It’s another new week of DS106! This week is about visuals and photography.

This week we start choosing our own assignments from the assignment bank. However, before delving into that, the whole class is starting off doing captions for Postcards a former ds106 student (Sara K) found in Urban Outfitters. They are a pack of pictures called “Unbridled Passion” by Franco Accornero.

I thought these pictures were too funny and ridiculous! But I ultimately decided upon the Superman and Wonder Woman Photo. I do not have photoshop of my computer, so I’ll share how I edited my photos– I guess you could call this a tutorial.

For my tutorial all you need is:

Paint program – MAC users– I downloaded this program and it works great

Picmonkey.com (It’s free)

Step 1: Get the photo off flickr. For me, I found it easiest to email myself the picture and then save the photo onto my desktop.

Click on “Save Image As.” Select the best place for you, I just find the desktop to be the most convenient.

Step 2: Open up the “paint” program and open up your picture in the program

Note your little “toolbox” to the left of the screen.

Step 3. Select the “eye dropper” tool to select the background color of the photo

Step 4: Select the “paint brush” tool to color over the words.

The words have disappeared!

Step 5: Save the file onto your desktop and open Picmonkey.com

Click on “Edit a Photo” and select your file.

Step 6: Click that little “P” on the left hand sidebar and that opens texts and fonts. Click the “Add Text” button.

Decide what you want to say, the font, color, position, size, etc. There are tons of fonts to choose from. The ones with the “crown” symbol are a part of the upgrade package, which costs money.

For this photo I used the “Bangers” font.

Step 7: Add more text if you chose. Click Save and upload to flickr!

Enjoy your newly created masterpiece!

Now I am sure there might be another quicker method that doesn’t use as many programs to get the desired effects complete. But without photoshop and knowledge of other programs, this is what I use. I hope it was easy to understand!

Additionally, I’m not sure kryptonic is a real word. But for this we will make it work

This is a 2 stars assignment!

View Assignment Details

“As You Wish …”

View Assignment Details

“So Long…” animated GIF by aforgrave, from The Princess Bride 600px at 32 colours,

This is one of my favourite moments from Rob Reiner’s classic, The Princess Bride, released in 1987. It comes right at the end, in an incredibly touching scene, when the Grandfather (wonderfully played by the late Peter Falk), uncomfortable with what to say as he is leaving, fumbles to make sure he has everything (is he checking for his glasses?) before departing. In the end, he just throws up his arm, already looking away, and says, “So long.”

What doesn’t show in the GIF is what comes immediately after, where, at the door, he pauses as his grandson (Fred Savage), initially dis-interested his grandfather at the beginning of the film, stops him to say, “Grandfather, you could come back, and read it to me again, sometime, if you want.”

The grandfather’s final words, so telling after we’ve just seen the story, are priceless.

“As you wish …”

I GIFfed this over a month ago, originally intending it to be part of a larger series of GIFs from the film. That will still happen, at some point, but other GIFs came along in the interim as a result.

However, this was one of the first GIFs I worked at reducing in size through the use of a mask. The file size, at 32 colours, when saved at 280 pixels wide, is on the order of 450 KB. This one, at 600 pixels wide, is larger. While the number of frames is high, that is intentional because each one highlights a decision point in Peter Falk’s movements — leaving out any one would make his movements seem less detailed, less absent-minded than he intended. About the only thing better than seeing this as a GIF, is seeing the actual clip, with his, ongoing utterances “alright, …. okay ……, alright, ….. okay, ….. so long…”

So good.

View Assignment Details

You’ve Come A Long Way, GIFby

View Assignment Details

Watch your step on the sidewalk of yesteryear’s Information Highway

I’m 99.9% convinced that the first time I saw and recognized and animated gif for what it was, it was something very much like one of these:

Maybe you have similar memories? (Hopefully they are not PTSD-induced flashbacks!) Clearly the image of website construction was influenced by the metaphor of building the Information Highway at the time.

2012 celebrated the 25th anniversary of the GIF, and provided many wonderful examples of how the venerable image format has matured into a platform for art, and as a source of ds106 Assignments. I was so pleased when Alan Levine selected the “man digging quickly” GIF to represent the new Animated GIF category in the Assignment Bank. Alan’s GIF icon fits right in above (second row, centre) doesn’t it?

After posting my Daily Create 386: Blue Screen of Death animated GIF yesterday (“Windoes has detect s aystem fluat”), I realized that I needed to tweak my blog theme theme (the standard-vanilla base Gantry theme, used with the versatile Gantry Framework plug-in) to allow for a full-page width image — a custom page layout that does not have sidebar. Normally, I can easily do this within this theme (I use it on a number of sites), but for some reason, the current installation on de•tri•tus is being problematic, and I’m going to need to go into Maintenance Mode and likely re-install a few things to sort it out. (I will likely switch to the WP-Maintenance Mode plugin at the same time.)

It was at this point that I then got distracted into thinking about a custom “Under Construction” animated GIF for de•tri•tis.

Let’s Bring the “Under Construction GIF” forward into this Century!

A search on FlickrStorm led me to a nice CC-licensed image from 2006 by Brandon Daniel (bdu on Flickr) , which I then re-worked into an animated GIF. I then personalized the GIF with my blog name and a nice subtle message about the site being in a maintenance situation, and wound up with this.

“System Maintenance Animated GIF (de•tri•tus 2013)” by aforgrave, on Flickr

This sounds like an ideal opportunity for a ds106 Assignment, yes?

I checked the existing assignment bank, and found 2 existing yet different enough animated-GIF assignments:

Visual Assignment, 590: DS106 Technical Difficulties
Design Assignment, 842: Rainbows and Unicorns in the Server Room

Neither one of these exactly captures the drive for a new, sophisticated “under construction” GIF for use on your own, personal web page or blog.

So, let’s make one!!

The Challenge

To honour this little progression of the animated GIF, and to provide all new and existing ds106 bloggers with a challenge, I’m suggesting a new Animated GIF Assignment 911: “Sophisticate Your Own, Personal ‘Under Construction’ GIF”. We all have blogs. We’re all working with GIFs. Make yourself your own, personal animated GIF to use when you are messing around with the gears, or the innards, or the unicorns, or with whatever keeps your site humming behind the scenes. And give yourself an extra bonus point if you find and use someone else’s CC-licenced image. You need to do the attribution and all that good stuff to claim the point. Model appropriate blog maintenance, great design aesthetics, and a conscientious web-citizenship sharing ethic all at once.

Got it? Are you up for it? Are you ready? Go! Be sure to share your result. We aren’t likely to actually see it in use — ’cause we keep our blogs up and running most of the time, right? – so make sure to show it to us now!

But wait!

A Little Reflection

As I went to Google “under construction animated GIFs” on the web to use up at the top, I found the result page to be strangely quiet. (Try it!) Google Images turned up a page of construction images, but they were oddly static. So static, in fact, that I suspect the obnoxiousity of these have resulted in them being systematically purged from Google’s results in an attempt to avoid their resurgence. Not an entirely bad thing. Conspiracy theory aside (or maybe just judicious for-the-better-of-society editing), in the end I had to seek out that media-format of the 90s, the optical disk.

For the first time in years (as I think about it), I visited the shelf in my office cupboard where all of my CD/DVD-based software has been stored. That I didn’t stir up a layer of dust was surprising. I never used it any more. The Internet and things like iTunes and the App Store have changed how we get at our media. Heck, a lot of the apps we use are even web-based now.

However, I found the “Web Graphics” disk from a multi-disk set I purchased long ago (I think it has a quarter of a million graphics and photos distributed over maybe 13 optical disks) and on it was a directory with Animated GIFS. In there, I found a directory labeled “Construction,” and from there, I selected the representative samples shown above.

Knowing that I may likely never revisit this disk (though I think I may just copy the contents to my HD for future use), here is the list of categories provided on this disk, for posterity, and as a little snapshot of what was available in 1997.

Memory Lane: Animated GIF Collections on a 1997 optical disk
3D Balls Alphabet Anatomy Arrows Backflip Bouncers Bullets Buttons Computer Construction	Creatures Dividers Elements Entertainmant Flags Flamers Holidays Home LInks Machines	Mail Miscellaneous Money Music Notices People Plain 3D Planets Science Fiction Shapes	Signs Sports Statics Technology Time Transportation Wood Door

When I think about how we are using GIFs now, for telling and augmenting stories, there is no doubt that the GIF has come a long way, baby. And as a technology, it is far from dead. It’s just gotten a lot more sophisticated.

So let’s (carefully) bring back the “under construction GIF.” Sound like fun?

Now go make your GIF!

“Optical Disks Montage” by aforgrave, on Flickr.

View Assignment Details

It’s been a .GIFeriffic Kinda Week

View Assignment Details

This week brought .GIF’s, tears, and laughs. The tears and laughs were brought on by watching awful and some amazing movie scenes. It is hilarious how BAD some movies actually are!

Seriously, Gigli??? Max and Me??? Glitter??? Worst of the worst really. That said I decided to NOT do a .GIF of any of those. Period.

The assignment:

Say It Like the Peanut Butter

“Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.”

I made 4 .GIF”s this week. Some were more successful than others. You can see them HERE and HERE. I’m gonna share my 2 favorites right here.

I was a little concerned at the beginning of this week. I watched some tutorials, read some articles, and took a deep breath. After figuring out how to use Photoshop to import the videos I decided to use- I got down to business. Some of the scenes DID NOT WORK. Some of the scenes worked well. Some of the scenes would have worked if I was more proficient with Photoshop. (that will come with more practice and work.)

I was totally excited to be building these and hope like them.

The first .GIF is from Gone With the Wind. It is the scene where Scarlett and Rhett’s daughter, Bonnie dies.

Now this second one isn’t minimal at all. BUT! I love it. It is the scene from 200 Cigarettes where the cabbie is giving Cindy a life lesson.

Both of these were created with PwnYouTube, Photoshop CS6, and lots of patience.

The short and dirty of it:

1. Grab video from YouTube (PwnYouTube),

2. Import in frames to Photoshop CS6,

3. Edit down to as few frames as possible, I was shooting for between 3 and 6,

4. Set the frame times,

5. Close your eyes, cross your fingers, and hope for the best,

6. Save for the web (32 colors),

7. Post.

_________________________________________________________________________

Okay, now for my daily Creates! These are really fun. Next week I want to do more than just two, I loved all of the ideas this week, but I chose to do Got milk? Another favorite breakfast beverage? Make a picture. Make it art.

and Describe the sky in a single sentence without using any color words.

(This is a cropped screenshot of my submission.)

______________________________________________________________________________________

Building the site has gone pretty well. The one snag I’ve hit is part of the template isn’t properly supported in Firefox. All of the posts are supposed to have a circle on the front page, but in Firefox the posts with pictures that are the featured image (no way to get rid of this) the circle doesn’t appear unless you hover above it. It just looks like a blank space unless the mouse is over it. Annoying. I am still trying to figure out how to change this…in the CSS?…because I have seen this template in a few other places and it looks perfect. I am working on this piece of the puzzle.

I really think the site looks like ME. Style-wise. Simple, clean and fun at the same time. LOVE.

I have made a welcome site, the header on the right connects it to this site.

I am going to start putting my daily creates in one post a week I think, I need to get them organized in some fashion or another.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Time for me to get down to business.

View Assignment Details

Bootcamp: Crushed!

View Assignment Details

So this week was pretty stressful for me because of many outside factors but surprisingly enough bootcamp this week wasn’t that difficult. Maybe it was because the actual blog was already set up or I don’t really know what but this week seemed so much simpler than last week. I guess I also managed my time a bit better than last too. Making the email address was a no brainer, so no energy was wasted creating [email protected] and then having all the emails forwarded to my gmail account.

Save The Pandas is linked with the Main Flow of the ds106 blog, all thanks to Professor Levine.

I also took a look at the other student blogs and everyone else seems to have survived bootcamp too! It is actually really cool learning how to do all the things we see on the internet and (that I ) take advantage of.

I didn’t actually change the theme of my blog because for right now I like the simplicity of it. The point of my blog is to send a message, which I will hopefully be getting to soon now that I’ve learned the basics of blogging, so I want to keep it simple. That will probably change as I get more acquainted with the widgets and other themes that incorporate many different aspects of the Internet. With that said, I did learn how to change the theme for when I want to and it is honestly the simplest process in the world. I’m actually really upset I didn’t learn earlier when I had my study abroad blog because I kept complaining about how I hated the theme but never managed to do anything about it. The biggest godsend that WordPress created was Akismet. Right after I posted my blogs last week I kept getting ENDLESS emails about so-and-so commenting on my blog, all of which were spam. I was so happy that adding this plugin was a requirement because I honestly could not take it anymore.

With all that said, I want my blog to reflect my ideas and thoughts as an environmentalist and the projects I take on at Greenpeace; as the weeks go on I really hope to gather many different articles, videos, images, etc. that will be able to portray my views and send the message I want: to protect the environment. I want my blog to be a space that I can express myself and my views as easily and creatively as possible. I need to explore more widgets so that I can add various feeds from different environmental news sources such as Greenpeace, HuffPost Green, Sierra Club and many others that I follow and constantly retweet. They always have informative and interesting articles that I think everyone would enjoy and I would like to share them.

My welcome page gives people an overall view of me and my plans for the website and I hope to make this space as useful and creative as I can. Since I made the mistake last week of registering my site as savethepandas.net and not ds106.savethepandas.net I just linked my ds106 blog to the website and talked about my plans (kind of like what I’m doing here) for the site. I am planning on changing the theme to incorporate many pictures and links to different environmental campaigns, websites and anything else I think is important but for now I’ll keep it simple while I’m getting the hang of things. I would rather have a simple site than one that is a bit ugly because I haven’t learned everything just yet.

The Daily Creates for this week were very interesting and I chose two that I thought reflected a part of my everyday life (a bit like last week’s assignment). The first one I chose to do was of one thing you must do every single day so I chose to upload a picture of chia seeds to flickr. Chia seeds are an Aztec seed that provides a ton of protein, omega-3s, fiber, and antioxidants. They have no taste and I just sprinkle a tablespoon or two on everything I eat. I stay full all day and it helps me to stay healthy, and since I can put them on anything I have no excuse not to use them. I encourage everyone to go out and buy them and use them all the time! They are super cheap (2 lb. bag for $10 at Costco) and are super good for you! *end promotional rant*

The second TDC that I chose to do was to describe the sky in one sentence without using any color words. I liked this one a lot because I had to call upon my English skills from back in the day. Though it didn’t take me long to come up with a sentence to describe the sky, it did take me a few times to do it without using colors. The first time I was obviously just thinking of the color blue, but then I tried to use white and gray to describe things IN the sky, completely forgetting that those were colors too. In the end this is what I came up with:

By far the most difficult thing about this week was creating a GIF. When I first researched everything I came across a bunch of create-your-own-gif websites like GIFsoup and imgflip but then I realized that things had to be a bit more complicated than that…and boy were they! I used the ds106 handbook and learned how to make a GIF from scratch. Looking back on it, it wasn’t actually that complicated it just took a lot of steps. I first had to download a video from youtube, and then trim the section of the video I wanted. That was all pretty simple, it just took me a while to find a video from Kung Fu Panda (which I thought was appropriate because 1. it’s a great movie and 2. I am totally like Po the Panda when it comes to eating). Now here comes the hard part: downloading and using GIMP editor. For some reason I ended up downloading a bunch of other stuff onto my computer (which I now have to remove) because I guess I wasn’t paying attention. After I finally settled everything out I opened the image as layers and saved everything to my computer, I even figured out how to crop and remove the black bars that used to be above and below Po. I was really proud of myself when I was finished because I created a gif using open source software from scratch! The only thing I was disappointed with was the speed of the gif but I think I needed to change that while I was trimming the video, but I still think it looks good!

This gif represents how Po used his own special skills to become a great warrior. Since he was so used to eating all the time his master used food to coax him into learning the various moves he needed to master. As you can see there are dumplings that Po really wants but they keep getting away from him, in order to eat them he has to complete the task! It’s pretty much the same idea with me so I thought this was a good scene

Overall the ds106 experience has been really fun and I’m so happy to be learning all these new things (while simultaneously impressing my friends)! I loved setting up a website and learning how to use it and embedding various images and videos. Looking back on it bootcamp wasn’t all that bad especially since I learned to manage my time in week 2. I am really excited to learn new things and get even cooler things going on my website. This class has already taught me so much that I will be able to use in the future and I am actually thinking of creating a website after graduation and continuing to blog. Ds106 has really brought out my creativity (which is pretty dormant most of the time) and allowing me to create things that I can share with everyone who uses the Internet, it is a really exciting experience!

As an end to bootcamp I will leave you with pandas in their own kind of bootcamp! Looking forward to the upcoming week!

View Assignment Details

Girl, Interrupted GIF

View Assignment Details

Angelina Jolie as Lisa in “Girl, Interrupted.”

“Just don’t point your fuckin’ finger at crazy people!”

View Assignment Details

Deleted Scene from “Reçette Pas Nécessaire” Later Shows Up in “The Shining”

View Assignment Details

“Deleted Scene from “Reçette Pas Nécessaire” (print damaged during processing) by aforgrave, on Flickr

A poorly developed film negative (see above) resulted in this scene being edited out of the final cut of the third film in Julia Child’s “Le Chef de la mort” action trilogy, “Reçette Pas Nécessaire.”

You can get some sense of the original drama in this animated GIF assembled from two frames salvaged from the scene:

“Deleted Scene from “Reçette Pas Nécessaire” (restored as animated GIF) by aforgrave, on Flickr

As her fans know, Child was often heard exclaiming, “Why use just one knife, when a cleaver and a handful of knives can do such a better job?”

It is commonly agreed upon in Hollywood by people in the know that due to the unfortunate mishandling of the original negatives for this scene in “Reçette Pas Nécessaire,” when the effect was again attempted many later by the same cinematographer while working on The Shining, it was the latter film that benefited from the first exposure of the effect to theatre-going audiences.

A GIF from The Shining, commonly agreed to be derivative of the original (but damaged) scene from the much earlier Julia Child film “Reçette Pas Nécessaire.”

Most agree that, despite the improved technology used in the later film (better lenses, larger film stock, and most notably, colour), the use of a single knife and the absence of a corpse within the shot diminishes the effect from that of the Child original. There is no doubt that the later entry is clearly derivative.

“Oh, we saw The Shining once on VHS,” Child said many years later. “It doesn’t bother us in the least. We had fun making our films, and after a career of sharing our expertise in both the cooking and film industries, we’re just happy to see that our work is being valued and re-served to sate the appetites of today’s young people.”

—

This is my first official (albeit contrived) entry for the Visual Assignment 2: Say It Like the Peanut Butter assignment. Yes, this GIF is from television, rather than from a favourite movie, but it stands on the originality of the flickering knife effect, the resultant homage that it pays to the assignment, and also helps to set the record straight about the true origin that Shining GIF. LOL.

(In actuality, a static image from this would have been my preferred photo source for The Daily Create TDC 381: Julia Child Action Poster, but the quality of the video was too poor and too dark.)

View Assignment Details

Assignment 3 – Not Quite Norma Jean

View Assignment Details

Hello again!

This week has been again a week of business but lucky for me I have had my eye on this assignment since last week. I had without really noticing started this project about 2 weeks ago. The assignment is to recreate the Marilyn Monroe Expression Sheet.

I decided I wanted to get some story about the expression sheet to see if I could find out who created it. So I searched for “Marilyn Monroe Expression Sheet” I sifted through the results with growing frustration all I could find was an entry on a website called retronaut.

After a few pages of google searches finding references to the retronaut page I decided to try a few different searches like Marilyn Monroe Paintings, contact sheets and Magazine covers. Still no luck, which was a bit frustrating because it isn’t the first time I have seen that image I am sure.

So I began to think, how can I find something relating to Marilyn and photography. I began by searching for Marilyn Monroe and Photographers. I came across this site which documented all of the photographers that worked with Marilyn. I took a little journey through the pages that had comments and quotes from the photographers about Marilyn and a selection of thumbnails of the photos they took of her.

This site “Immortal Marilyn” documents her relationships with 25 photographers, the range from self-taught to fashion, to documentary photographers. They include Americans, English, Scottish and other Europeans. Out of the 25 photographers mentioned 2 were women (Jean Howard and Eve Arnold).

I took the time to scan through each of the photographers on the site and got a real sense of Marilyn. Some photographers had worked with her from when she was Norma Jean through to being Marilyn just before she died. It is an interesting journey through their eyes to a much more 3 dimensional picture of Marilyn. She is often described as sweet, innocent and fragile while at the same time being able to take care of and handle herself. Yet that is not all there is to her their observations also paint a picture of a woman focused and determined with ambition and willingness to keep on going for what she wants. As she continues to move from model to starlet

Richard Miller:

‘She was nice when she was Norma Jeane, very sweet,’ Dick Miller reminisced. ‘She posed very well, she was creative about her modeling She came to dinner at the house. A nice, friendly girl.’ Then Norma was signed by Twentieth Century Fox, and soon changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.’

‘Nearly sixty years after his first meeting with Norma Jeane, Miller recollected in the Los Angeles Times, ‘I invited her to have dinner with my family, and to this day I remember her description at dinner of what she wanted (in her career.) And every bit of the thing that she wanted she achieved. And, of course, it killed her.’

Earl Leaf:

‘His last time with Marilyn was in 1962 at the Golden Globes. In his words he describes her this day – “These photos are so strange. Taken shortly before her death, they show a haggard woman, her flesh pulled back on her face. The many selves that flickered through her presence only two years before – they seem to have departed. She looks hardly there. She still uses her skills to reflect more light than those around her, but she no longer registers on the camera with anything like her previous face. Only in the most shadowy shots does she look “herself”, as though the shadows had already claimed her.”

So with that in mind I decided to continue on with putting my “expression sheet” together. What struck me about the expression sheet was the versatility of expression. She goes from serene to sad to playful to silly. I wanted the same range of expression and it just happened that my willing model, Rachel was in a playful mood. We began with a couple of standard or serious portrait shots where I aimed to capture the quieter expressions. Continuing on, Rachel began to get a little bored which turned out to be a bit of a bonus as she began to pull faces. I love Rachel’s silly faces they always make me laugh and my laughing encourages her faces, bonus! So I think the energy of my expressions sheet does in some ways match the one of Marilyn and I imagine that the shoot that produced the expressions was a similar experience.

I’m probably going to find out that the Marilyn Monroe expression sheet is not a result of a photo shoot, but that is ok.

VisualAssignments
VisualAssignments886

View Assignment Details

Gimli

View Assignment Details

Don’t toss the dwarf

Significant Otter

Getting Cheesy up in here + a tutorial

“As You Wish …”

You’ve Come A Long Way, GIFby

Watch your step on the sidewalk of yesteryear’s Information Highway

Let’s Bring the “Under Construction GIF” forward into this Century!

This sounds like an ideal opportunity for a ds106 Assignment, yes?

The Challenge

A Little Reflection

Memory Lane: Animated GIF Collections on a 1997 optical disk

It’s been a .GIFeriffic Kinda Week

Bootcamp: Crushed!

Girl, Interrupted GIF

Deleted Scene from “Reçette Pas Nécessaire” Later Shows Up in “The Shining”

Assignment 3 – Not Quite Norma Jean

Gimli