Author: michaeljcripps

Pano-cloning for #tdc1983

Today’s Daily Create, digital cloning via panoramic photo, blew my mind at first. I’ve done some 360-degree pictures, mostly as a novelty for my Dreamcast VR headset and Pixel. And I’ve done some panoramic shots of landscapes, mostly as novelties. But this was wild and fun. I grabbed my youngest son before school, quickly staged a play, work, rest scene in the backyard, and noodled around for about 15 minutes.

Ok, so we managed to do a pretty nice job of this using my Google Pixel in a morning-lit backyard sun/shade panorama. The stitching in sun/shade could have posed a problem, I thought. But not in this one. Nice.

The real fun, though, involved the outtakes!

Our first shot was a 360-degree panorama nearly suitable for VR headset use. (We didn’t get the ground or the sky, or it might have been WILD! And I think it would be possible to have 5-6 clones in such a shot. I’ll keep that in my back pocket for another day.)

360 view.
This 360 view works with a VR headset like the Dreamcast. Wild. Right-click & open for large size.

I spent some time trying to sort out using PanoPress and Panorama Embed to embed a 360 viewer in this post, but I struggled and gave up. (I’m not a realtor, so I don’t need those tools for work.) Maybe another time.

WP PhotoSphere actually works (below), but since the panorama isn’t a true sphere, things get really pinched and look pretty funny!

[vrview img=”https://michaeljcripps.com/summer17eng304o/files/2017/06/PANO_20170614_074718.jpg”]

In the fail below, I didn’t quite make it to my chair fast enough, and my head is floating in space behind the seat. These are the kinds of funny photos one gets in panorama shots involving people.

Clone failure. Cripps can't rest his body.
Cripps’ body knows no rest. Floating head syndrome.

My son broke out laughing when he checked the photo. Fun stuff!

This was a wonderful daily create that pushes people to use features of their smartphone cameras they might never otherwise use. And it opens a world of possibilities, really. I’m imagining a backdrop where EVIL is going on and a staging of a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil clone.

A decade ago, I would have used Photoshop to put myself in a few places in a single photo. This is so much easier, more natural, and wild. Try it!

Fallacious Follies: Remixing The Big Caption & #tdc1980

One of the reasoning fallacies we often find in argument, particularly in high-stakes political argument is the “black and white” world move. You’re with me or against me. It’s yes, or it’s no. There can be no gray. The world is sometimes black or white. Often, however, there are many options or reasonable views.

I knew I needed to put up something as an example of The Big Caption DS106 Assignment for my class because I’ve been preparing examples all term. I wasn’t sure what I’d find to go with the logical fallacies in The Boston Globe’s Big Picture site, but I went in with an open mind.

Right away, I saw this image of a Venezuelan protester waving a flag and standing in defiance of the military. Who’s right? Who’s defending the country? This is a situation ripe for the Black-or-White fallacy!

Drawing on the layout of a Demotivational Poster, I quickly pulled the colors of the Venezuelan flag for the border, background, and font. I worked up a caption to tweak the image for the daily create’s theme, quickly downloaded (Tank, I need a program!) a graffiti font that I thought was good enough for this work, and sprayed some appropriate graffiti on the yellow barrier.

I thought about playing around with the text on the billboards in the background, but it’s a daily create. I had already invested 15 minutes.

The Big Caption gets remixed with #tdc1980. For good measure, I included a link to 24 logical fallacies in my tweet.

Sergeant Red Baron – #tdc1975

Day 6 of the June Daily Create Challenge brings Sergeant Hulka in to push the recruits. I wanted to do something more than a basic boot camp selfie, and the surf is building today. The legendary Jack O’Neill, surfer, wetsuit inventor, and all around bad-ass dude died the other day at 94, which I’m certain contributed to the inspiration here.

I drove by the beach for an early morning surf session in some pretty disorganized surf, and it hit me that I could stylize a selfie at the beach, animate it, and do more than the basic selfie pose.

I had loaded up my red Dewey Weber Performer for the bigger surf, and it ended up inspiring the Sergeant Red Baron moniker.

I took the picture using the Prisma app on a Google Pixel. After taking the shot, I quickly discovered a “surf” style setting and ran with it. I did no color work beyond that.

Back at the office, I brought the photo into Photoshop and got to work making some layers to move the bottom lip and the pointed fist. There are basically just 3 bottom lip positions (normal, closed, and open), and five fist positions (normal, up/left, up/left zoom, more zoom, and skewed zoom).

On a whim, I added the contextual info to the sweatshirt instead of keeping it off to the side. I especially like the way I’ve placed the fist layer above the text layer, enabling the fist to cover that part of the sweatshirt as it rises and moves towards the viewer.

Toggling between these and saving a total of 14 images gave me the frames for my animation. Not bad. It did take more than 30 minutes to tackle, but I don’t think it took an hour in the editing booth.

I should have made the mouth more open, so a fourth position would have helped. If I hadn’t been trying to stay around 30 minutes, I would have added a little head tilt. It wouldn’t have been that hard, really.

PSA on VVS – Useful Advice for Anyone Doing Digital Creating!

Several years ago a friend of mine, Michael Branson Smith, was helping me out with a video editing problem I was having. I had given an iPod to some students and asked them to go around and capture video of peers for a project.  When I got the iPod back, some of the video was shot in “portrait” or vertical mode, while some of it was shot in “landscape” or horizontal mode. I needed to edit this all together, and the vertical footage had massive black bars and was so tiny in the video editor.

As is his way, he offered me some tips for managing the problem. But he also shared the following Public Service Announcement with me.

There IS a movement out there to shift accepted format for video in the smartphone era, but vertical video is really limiting on any device other than a phone or tablet.

Atlas, Schmatlas – #tdc1970

Today launched the 2017 Daily Create 30-day challenge. I had to start strong, and the prompt was ripe for the picking.

Take the image from an old comic book ad and float in your text. This is a meme before the meme was a meme. Hmm.

I wanted to do something minimalistic and relatively easy, so I kept myself from modifying the image – though I did toy with putting our skinny guy in a full body tattoo for fun.

I stripped out the original text with Photoshop and subbed in my own text to flip the script, if you will. Our brawny guy is now inspecting scrawny guy’s tattoo and asking for one like it.

I checked back on #1970 later in the day, and there’s some really fun, smart work happening. The decision by some to really draw the young woman into the scene is great. I think I noticed

that it was mostly women who did that.  Curious. I do wish I had thought about doing something like that, although I did get the speech bubble idea from her #4LIFE tat. I wasn’t totally ignoring her.

30 Daily Creates in June Challenge Starts Thursday, 6/1!

I’m seeing some fun, creative Daily Creates coming out of the ENG 304 crew. I’m excited about the possibility that as we do more with images, we’ll see even more great stuff happening.

Do consider taking the June Daily Create challenge. Need a reminder of the challenge? Read about it!

Launch yourself by doing the DC on June 1 and on June 2. After that, see how you feel. There will only be 28 more to go!

Here’s a helping hand: I’ve taken the June 1 Daily Create Challenge image and stripped the words out of the text bubble to make it easier to get started.

Charles Atlas DC

Just right-click, control-click, or whatever sort of click you use to download an image and grab it. Now, be fun, smart, sarcastic, ironic, creative, or something else!

 

Snap Your Fingers Like Fred Rogers #tdc1968

Interpretive Dance Daily Create. I wanted to do something, but I’m no dancer. I have loved the PBS remixes on Youtube since I learned of them about 3 years ago.

Mr. Rogers (grow ideas in the garden of your mind, Julia Child (freshness is essential), Bob Ross (happy little trees), and others get a complete refresh in a series of musically oriented clips. I found myself torn between locating suitable “dance” from Mr. Rogers, Julia Child, and Bob Ross.  (Look them up!) But I have a real fondness for Mr. Rogers’ message in the remix.

This one was pretty easy. I used Giphy to make the animated GIF from a Youtube clip of Mr. Rogers’ PBS Remix. Giphy even gives me the option of a meme-like caption, which I used here.

I did pull the resulting GIF into my image editor to toss on @ds106dc and #tdc1968, but that took all of about 2 minutes.

In hindsight, I should have done something in the tweet to better signal the challenge of interpretive dance. But one can’t always be on one’s A game.

Super Soup for Life – #tdc1967

Daily Create #1967: DS Soup for Life.

This weekend, one of my kids has been running around the house echoing a classic dialogue between Frozone and his wife as Frozone looks for his super suit so he can battle evil. (What makes this really funny in my house is that we haven’t watched that film in about 8 years.)

I guess the similarity between “soup” and “suit” hit me hard. The result is the following DC.

I remembered that The Incredibles has a dinner scene full of turmoil, and I quickly found a good still to capture dinner conflict at Capital B’s blog. I did some light image editing to the image, put it in a motivational poster-like frame, and tweaked The Incredibles to make “The Inedibles” for the Super Soup poem.

The dialog between Frozone and his wife is slightly modified and clipped for the purposes of the DC.

How Can You Have Any Pudding? #tdc1966

Tyler Vigen’s Spurious correlations? These are great fun.

The challenge: Do something with one.

Following the link, I quickly hit upon the correlation between declining margarine consumption and a collapse in divorce rates in Maine. Perfect! I grabbed the graph.

What could explain this correlation? Governor Baldacci’s 1990s initiative to get Mainers to use real butter when consuming lobster! For some reason, Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education” came into my head as I thought about food, marriage, and divorce, which brought me off to the Internet for a good still from the film The Wall.

The scene where the school teacher is scolded by his wife for not eating was perfect for this, and it had a framed picture of the Queen in the background. Bonus! I pulled a Baldacci photo, cropped and skewed it, and positioned it where the Queen is in the original still.

By adding slightly modified lyrics, I established what I imagined might connect the image to the graph: We have an overbearing spouse insisting on margarine use as the true cause of Maine’s high divorce rate before the Baldacci administration.

Originally, I was going to make a split-screen image, but I decided to just make a GIF and lead with the movie still because of the subtle “before and after” structure it establishes.

Make a Song Boring – #tdc1964

I took it pretty easy on today’s Daily Create. I didn’t think it lent itself to a remix of DS106 assignments in the course, so I kept it straightforward.

First, I thought of a hard rocking kind of song and imagined how I might go boring with it. AC/DC came to mind, and I started thinking about what song to bore-ify. The “paint it black” pulled “Back in Black” into my head, and I grabbed an image of the album cover. But then I remembered “For Those About to Rock… We Salute You.”  I grabbed an image of that album cover as well.

forthoseaboutto

“For Those About to Rock” just seemed more conducive to a Daily Create with some remix of the cover art and the charge to make a song boring.

I planned to flip the lightning bolt to create a stylistic Z, worked up a new title (“For Those About to Sleep”) and set about finding something to replace the cannon on the original cover. I wanted it to be stylized somewhat like the cannon, so a bed and a pillow were sort of out.

I thought teddy bear or “blankie” might go well, and I found something that is both! I did a little magic want erasure, worked some B&W on the image, and was satisfied enough.

I duplicated that main Z a few times; resized and reoriented each Z; and settled with something that I hope draws some attention to the fact that I flipped the lightning bolt.

Then I took up font matters. I have pretty large font library on my computer. I opened “Font Book” and started scrolling through to find something akin to the album title font, and I’m pretty happy with the Baskerville Old Face font I used.

I had to go find the AC/DC font. For those who might be interested, there’s “Squealer” font available for free, and it’s based on AC/DC’s logo font. Not wanting to linger too long on this project, I added a little effect (outward bevel, plus a bit) to the letters to get something akin to the actual logo. After I was done, I noticed that I could have gotten the Squealer Embossed font, which IS the AC/DC look: http://www.dafont.com/squealer.font.

Lastly, unhappy with the continued use of the band’s name, I just changed it to BA/BY. It’s sort of lame, but it does retain the repetition of a consonant.

Fashion of 1963 & Remix of Phake Tweet – #tdc1963

I had been wondering when I might see a Daily Create that lent itself to a Phake Tweet. At first this DC threw me for a loop. What to do with fashion in 1963?

I went to pop music to get a sense of 1963, looked up the Billboard top 100 for the year, and found The Beach Boys. Perfect! The Beach Boys tweeting about their musical success. And who in Maine doesn’t like flannel. (Yup, the Beach Boys are sporting flannel on the beach in ’63.)

The Audrey Hepburn twist called for something special, so I worked her into the album cover. There are only 5 Beach Boys, but Audrey’s short cut fits right in there on first glance. (I should have done more to soften her image a bit, but I was working on a 30-minute timer.) And putting Audrey in gave the tweet itself some focus, as silly as it is.

I took this one much further than expected in the Phake Tweet assignment, though it’s sort of like the Forrest Gump Project assignment. It’s easy to use the Twister Phake Tweet maker available through the assignment. One just has to choose a person, do a little research to come up with some witty tweet, and boom!

I worked it up from a screenshot of an actual tweet. I found Twitter’s font, matched the size, weight, and color, and wrote it all up. The text is laid out just like a tweet would be. I rounded the corners of the background just so, and made this tweet popular (136k likes). 30 minutes. Done.

Feeling your image-editing oats by the time we hit the Phake Tweet? Give something like this a shot! If not, be smart about your historical figure and the content of the tweet and use Twister’s Phake Tweet tool.

A Three Wishes/Forrest Gump Project Remix GIF #tdc1962

What are your three wishes? This Daily Create was provocative, to say the least. I didn’t really have much sense of what to do at first. I thought about the Miss America pageants and how all the contests wish for world peace.  I thought that might be fun – and funny.

But I then went to the ENG 304 DS106 assignments to see what I had not yet taken on in a DC. The Forrest Gump Project spoke to me. The problem with that project is that it’s not immediately conducive to a “three wishes” framework.  (I suppose I might have tried to find an old photo with three somethings in it and turned those into wishes.) I decided to use animation and thought bubbles to build in the wishes.

Working with the idea of world peace, and lamenting the lack of surf in Maine over the week, I settled on peace and waves as two wishes. Then the Woodstock motto popped up: Three Days of Peace, Love, and Music. Aha!

The Huffington Post had a nice, old AP photo of concertgoers that had a hundred possible faces to swap out. One guy up front was perfectly positioned, leaving me plenty of room for a thought bubble. I grabbed a selfie I had in my library, tucked my head under the guy’s hair, and made a GIF: peace, love, and swell.

The time-consuming part, really, was finding the images. I’m pleased with the peace and the love, but I don’t like the wave. I had exhausted my allotted time on this activity and settled with a cheesey clipart wave just to wrap up.

Source images:

This one was more technically challenging to set up and involved about 36 images in a stack. Adjusting my photo to sort of blend in took more than a couple minutes. I wouldn’t call it “basic” image editing. It’s more intermediate/advanced. And there’s a good bit of layer swapping and gradient/transparency manipulation involved in creating each of the images for the layer stack. But the swaps/manipulations took only about 20 minutes once I had my face placed and the thought bubble positioned.

Lindsay Kolowich’s GIF in Photoshop tutorial covers the mechanics of making the GIF once the images are set.

The face swap itself makes for a great little exercise in image editing, so I think “The Forrest Gump Project” is a great week 6 DS106 assignment in the course.

Favorite Toys Remixed with What’s Your Meme – #tdc1961

This morning, I misunderstood today’s Daily Create: “What was your favorite toy as a kid? Why? And if you still have it, show us in a photo.”

I just saw the title “Favorite Toys” title on Twitter and ran with that. It was only after I tweeted out my DC that I noticed that it was really about looking backwards at one’s youth.

I might have brought in something like G.I. Joe or Big Jim, had I noticed the actual challenge text. One of those would have made for a really fun “What’s Your Meme” remix. (Missed opportunities.)

My favorite toy was pretty easy to call to mind, and I grabbed a late 2015 photo of me crouching under the lip at Wells Beach on a beautiful November morning. This photo made the Hanlon Longboards calendar for 2016, so it’s already out there in another context.

This was super easy to make. 15 minutes, tops, once I chose the photo and settled on the text. I could have used one of a half-dozen different meme tools online to add the text, but I whipped it up in Photoshop.

I’m not one who makes memes much (ahh, alliteration), so I had to research the typical meme font: Impact. I have the font in my library, so there was no problem there. I put a little stroke on the letters and, voilá.

This experience confirms that the “What’s Your Meme” DS106 assignment is a great one for the second week of the term. Not too technically challenging, which can help students keep their focus on the idea in the meme. And those who want to push things a bit can spend an hour or two in Photoshop or GIMP.

I do have a critique. In hindsight, I think there may be a bit of pop culture reference overload in the text. It mashes together Sean Penn’s character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now. But I do think the smell + tasty waves really does work for the image, and waves are definitely fun to play in – and with.

The Steel Steeds. A #tdc1960/The Brady Bunch Remix

Today’s DS106 Daily Create was a pleasure to open. A picture of your bicycle? Almost immediately, I decided I’d use #tdc1960 to explore what might be done with the “We’re the Real Life Brady Bunch” DS106 assignment and my vintage steel bikes. (“Steed” is another word for a bicycle, or a riding horse, or a motorcycle.)

The Brady Bunch image.
Image from Brady Bunch title sequence.

The 1980s was the pinnacle of high-quality, relatively inexpensive steel-framed road bikes. By the end of the ’80s and into the ’90s, aluminum was taking over, and then came carbon, and then other crazy stuff.

My first real problem was that I only have seven true representations of the steel roadie era that are in ridable condition. I cheated a bit by including my awesome 1995 Ice Root Beer-colored Trek 990. It is steel, so it has”Steel Steed” DNA. The 990 had to make the cut; it’s the only one I’ve owned since it left the showroom.

A “How To” of Sorts

Where most people new to image editing may want to start with the Brady Bunch panel image, I think that’s a mistake. I think it’s easier to make it up from scratch.

Skipping over the finer details, here’s what I did:

  • Photos of all 8 bikes, each lined up in front of a painter’s drop cloth to simplify the image editing. Careful positioning ensured an “inward-facing” look for the end product.
  • Selfie with helmet, dressed and posed to look like Mike Brady in the original title sequence. (I look happier than Mr. Brady, but we only have 3 kids!)
  • Color Picker tool (Chrome Color Picker, for example) to get the blue backdrop for the scene right off the webpage. Easy. Get this tool, or one like it!
  • New Photoshop/GIMP image in the 4:3 format (2400×1800 for me) found in old TVs, paint it with the blue, add a new layer and set the grid using Rectangle Marquee (photoshop) or Rectangle Select (GIMP). I put my grid at 800 & 1600 on the horizontal and 600 & 1200 on the vertical. This gives me 9 TVs at 4:3, and a photo that’s also 4:3. (Math helps in life.)
  • Grabbed a free “Brady Bunch” font – yes, Brady Bunch!  I thew an outer glow on the font to get the white outline around the black text and played around a bit with the glow.
  • Edited the original backgrounds from all 8 bikes and my selfie. The selfie was easy with the Magic Want/Color Select tool. The bikes were a pain in the… There’s a lot of detail between those tubes, spokes, and more, and the quality isn’t what I would want in a more polished production. But this is a Daily Create, and I think I’ve done a decent job in the resulting relatively small image.
  • Done!

I’m convinced the Brady Bunch assignment is a great one to encourage learning about image editing. I see work with layers, color palette, font selection, background removal, adding images, and more.  This assignment forces one to pick up some key image-editing skills, and it’s difficult enough to ensure that one learns that image editing does take some care.

Who cares how “great” and professional it looks in the end. If you’ve done something that looks at all like the Brady Bunch title sequence, pat yourself on the back!

 

Introductory Walkthrough Video – Welcome!

Welcome to English 304, Reading and Writing in Digital Environments!

There’s no way to describe how excited I am to see what you can do over the next six weeks. Let’s get started with an orientation to the course and its components:

  • Watch my Introductory Walk-through Video below (I recommend viewing fullscreen)
  • Read the Big Picture and Syllabus pages
  • Take the open notes Syllabus Quiz. (by midnight, 5/22)

One Word Poem TDC in a FIG Remix – #tdc1959

The May 21 ds106 Daily Create: a one word poem. Ok.

I don’t think the one word poem is the best subject for a FIG (Turn a GIF into a FIG DS106 Assignment). I think a video clip running backwards is probably much better – or potentially more fun – for that assignment.

But my chosen ENG 304 DS106 assignments didn’t lend themselves to a one-word poem, at least not on Sunday morning when I made my poem “START” into this FIG.

The big question: What’s the word for the poem? ENG 304 launches on May 22. I’m creating an animated GIF that runs in reverse. Begin. End. Begin at the End? End at the Beginning? Start (at the End) it is!

This one was a little tricky for me. My Pixel kept wanting to make a vertical video as soon as I started recording (gyroscope-itis?). And once I made the video, I struggled for about 45 minutes to figure out how get frames out of it without resorting to higher-end editing tools.

My guess is that iMovie or Movie Maker would have made quick work of this. But I thought it might be neat to try to do some of the work on a phone. I turned to the Google Play Store, downloaded Video 2 Image, and pulled the video into that app. (This IS The Matrix era, folks: “Tank, I need a program that will…”) I converted the video to still frames to make the GIF.

I also tried using GIPHY to convert the frames into an animation. No go. So I moved them onto my computer, imported them into Photoshop, and re-arranged the frames to run the animation in reverse. GIMP would have worked just as well, but I had Photoshop open.

I threw in the @ds106dc and #tdc1959 text to mark the project with a context and audience. What I didn’t realize until I got nearly finished was that I could add a text layer to the layer stack and it would show on all frames. I expected to need to duplicate that layer on each frame. Time saver!

I’m not particularly pleased with the product. There aren’t enough frames to smooth out the animation, for example. And I let the GIF linger a bit too long on the opening frame. But the point isn’t really production quality. If I make another FIG, I’ll be better at it.

Start to finish, I spent about 60-90 minutes on this project, and that included lots of time trying to decide on a poem and several failed attempts at recording my writing. The tech on this was probably an hour.

What the fig!

Hidden in a Selfie with a Pet Remix #tdc1957

At first, this one had me a little worried. I didn’t want to do the bland selfie in a reflection: water, car door panel, or the like. Besides, the “hidden” part complicates a lot of this Daily Create. It’s not actually that easy to put your face on an object in a way that seems a little hidden – at least not without using an image-editing tool like GIMP or Photoshop.

Since I’m committed to doing these as remixes of the DS106 assignments in ENG 304, I went back to those assignments to locate some options. Selfie with a Pet!

I came at #tdc1957 from the Selfie with a Pet angle. The Selfie with a Pet DS106 assignment is super easy – if you have a pet and a smartphone. The challenge in that assignment is coming up with something interesting, provocative, or fun in some way.

Hidden in Abby’s selfie!

I took a picture of Abby, our most skittish cat, this morning as she sat in the living room window. I grabbed one of my Google account profile photos, and got to work with Photoshop. (I could just as easily have used GIMP.)

  • I got the photo from phone to laptop and into Photoshop.
  • I cropped the photo to get a facial closeup for a relatively small, tweet-able image for the reflection. (The photos on my new Pixel are awesome, by the way.)
  • I added a layer over the image and pasted in a copy of my Google profile photo and worked some image sizing and shape adjustments, in addition to some distortions, to mostly cover Abby’s left pupil.
  • Using the lasso tool, I created a copy of the reflection that already existed over each of Abby’s pupils and pasted them on a new layer resting on top of my profile photo.
  • I moved the profile photo over the left pupil, made a copy of the profile photo, and repositioned the copy over the right pupil.
  • I took down the opacity of each profile photo to blend them in over the pupils.
  • Finally, I moved the copies of the original reflections back into their original positions and over each of my little profile photos.

For someone wanting to do a reflection of this sort, layers, the lasso tool, cropping, moving, and opacity are probably needed. One could skip the lasso and opacity to get a more basic product, and an image-editing beginner could learn a great deal from a more basic creation.

My self-critique: Abby’s left eye (on the right side of the photo) is much better than the right eye.My face is too obvious, and the overall “look” is a little creepy. The profile is too opaque on the right eye, and the watery eye reflection is perhaps not opaque enough. I also think the profile photo could be rotated counterclockwise perhaps 10-20 degrees. But this is a Daily Create and it is supposed to be a quickie. I think I spent about 30 minutes of focused work once I got the idea.

My Best Decision Ever? #tdc1956

What was your best decision ever? This is the challenge for #tdc1956, my third ds106 Daily Create in a row.

I thought a bit about this over breakfast. College has to be the thing. It actually changed my life in more ways than I could ever enumerate.

In my last Daily Create, I hit upon the idea of remixing a DC with one of the @ds106 assignment bank activities in play for this course, English 304. It seemed like a Demotivational Poster could be a good way to go.

The story: I exited high school and was going nowhere fast. I found myself working as a house painter, a noble profession of sorts. But it was also one that enabled me to pursue a set of activities that really were not helpful. I think about the bar, the hours facing walls of peeling paint, the dust all over my sweating body in the summer, and the fumes.

I had the opportunity to go to college, applied to one school, got in, and went. I didn’t know what I was doing when I showed up on campus, but it ended up changing everything! It has to be one of the top 3 decisions I ever made. And so I demotivated the whole thing by attempting to capture what a rewarding day might have been for me had I taken the other path.

This was a pretty simple assignment for me. I found a royalty free, high-quality image of a warm, dark bar on https://pixabay.com/.

I played around with the colors a bit, flipped the image, and resized it for what I wanted. I then used layers to build the frame border for the poster and did a little work to ID possible fonts for a motivational poster: times new roman and century gothic.

I can see a demotivational poster taking maybe 3 hours for someone needing some basic GIMP or Photoshop tutorials to sort out the details. Someone with image editing skills could do it much more quickly.

Play Spoons! #tdc1955

Ok. Today’s Daily Create (#tdc1955) calls on folks to “Play Spoons.” Sound in a tweet? Hmm. I’m not quite ready. Can you even do that? (Yes! Who knew?)

I thought about this one all day long. Ok. Not really. It hovered around the back of my mind throughout the day. I toyed with a few thoughts: basic spoon playing; use a spoon to play a uke; an image of an antique jelly spoon my wife and I received as a wedding gift decades ago; sporks?

Then it hit me. My problem here is that there is no spoon! The Matrix.

But what to do? I had been floating in the hyperlinks for the assorted ds106 assignments in the schedule, and I remembered thinking that it might be a little tricky for students to actually select frames and make the “Say it Like Peanut Butter” Animated GIF assignment. BANG! Remix an assignment and a daily create. No, Re-MATRIX it.

I quickly searched Youtube for the bending spoon scene from the Matrix. Easy.

I decided to try using Giphy.com for this project, mostly because I know it’s a free, web-based animated GIF maker and students will probably want to use it.

I grabbed the Youtube video URL, pasted it into Giphy, and did a little work to select just the frames I wanted. Then I threw text over the top because I could right in Giphy, downloaded it for sharing, and tweeted it out to @ds106dc with the #tdc1955 hashtag. I’m pleased! Total time: maybe 20 minutes at the computer with the tools.

What about that call for sound?

I then toyed with the new GIF with Sound tools out there. They’re fun, or funny, or maybe just clunky. Basically, mash together audio from Youtube and an animated GIF on the web. If you’re curious, knock yourself out: https://gifsound.com/.

I had high hopes at first. My GIF had spoons playing as the spoon bent. OK. But it turns out that you can’t really loop the sound – or I couldn’t in the 10 minutes I wanted to spend on the effort. Additionally, I was hoping I’d get a URL and be able to embed the resulting GIF mashup in this blog post. What one gets is the audio playing alongside the GIF, side by side in the window.

In the end, I decided that if I wanted this clip to loop with spoons playing in the background, I’d be better off just making an actual video, posting it to Youtube, and embedding it in the post. That didn’t seem to fit the basic idea of a daily create tweet. There is no spoon, so there is no sound!

It’s Muddy #tdc1954

If I’m requiring students to actually participate in @ds106dc, I figure I should be doing some myself to explore the level of difficulty here. I’m thinking “Practice and Preach” here, or what’s good for the goose…

#tdc1954 was pretty simple. “It’s Muddy!” The call was for images of mud, or perhaps metaphors of mud. Someone posted a clip of bluesman Muddy Waters, and that got me thinking a bit. On the drive home from work, I hit upon Mudd’s Women, a classic Star Trek episode featuring the criminal Harvey Mudd. Bang!

When I got home, I had a 45-minute window in which to work. I decided to challenge myself with an animation because, well, I’m asking students to make them.

This Animated GIF marks two firsts for me: A daily create, and an animated GIF. I know my way around Photoshop and GIMP (more or less), but I’ve never been called upon to animate a GIF image.

Using Google, I quickly found a tutorial by Lindsay Kolowich to help make animated GIFs in Photoshop. (There are similar tutorials for GIMP, the open-source alternative to the very, very pricey Photoshop.) I selected an image of Harvey Mudd after spending some time walking down memory lane and Star Trek forums!

Wanting an animation, I grabbed a basic STAR TREK image and photoshopped out the space background, leaving just the words. A little resizing of Mudd and STAR TREK, and I made 21 quick layers, put them on the timeline, and made a frame animation. I had to do it twice to improve alignment as the GIF looped. (It’s far from perfect, but it’s also a first.)

The animation is a bit faster than I really want, mostly because I was aiming to evoke the feeling of the Enterprise in the opening sequence of the original Star Trek. And I didn’t take time to revisit that opening sequence. Had I done that, I probably would have animated an Enterprise over Mudd.

If I did this again, I’m confident I could do it in about 15 minutes or less. It takes a bit of time to make all those layers with slight repositioning of the title.