This idea was first suggested by Tom Woodward and has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment.
The assignment is to reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them. Write your blog post up but do not give away the answer, let people guess! The challenge is to find the icons that suggest the story, but do not make it so easy. For icons a great resource is The Noun Project.
Turn ideas into pictures!
Visualize a blog post, TED Talk, Class lecture or even dense text from a book- through drawing. Use the pictures to symbolically represent & concretize abstract concepts, and to make connections between ideas. Try to use words sparingly and only to reinforce your imagery.
Doodle it in your notebook, use your tablet, or scribble it on the back of a napkin. Just be sure to digitize it and then blog about the process, including citing where your inspiration came from.
Make an animated .gif of something pop-culture centric. This could be animating a celebrity, part of a music video, or a TV show/movie. It doesn’t even have to be from today… head back into the annals of history and pull out something that used to be pop culture back in its day.
For best effect, I suggest using at least 4 frames to create the animation.
Improve movie posters to make them more accurately reflect the content of the film. Inspired entirely by theshiznit.co.uk
Apparently, street gangs in Chicago, like the Hell’s Devils, used to have calling cards (see the gallery: http://bit.ly/pyuOEl). This makes me think that poor marketing gives evil-doers a bad image. Help some of them out by creating business cards for them. But not the Joker – that’s too obvious.
Make a super-hero origins strip about your online persona, or the persona of someone else. You might want to use Pixton (http://www.pixton.com) – you might want to use something else, or draw it freehand if you are super-talented. But capturing the mood and making the story “feel” right are key, you might want to track down some super-hero origin strips to get the idea.
See the originas of the Apocalypse
Pick a movie poster and animate it. You can see an awesome example and quick explanation by Michael Branson Smith here.
Givien the popularity and ubiquity of animated GIfs on the web right now, it is time to get jiggy with them. Animate a comic book cover. Check out Kerry Callen’s examples for inspiration.
