Author: Katherine Smith

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DS 106: Say it Like the Peanut Butter

Koe No Katachi GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

I’ll admit, when I first saw the name for this prompt, I was utterly confused as to what this assignment involved. Thankfully, the description quickly remedied that confusion. The prompt asks us to create a gif from our favorite or least favorite movie that embodies a key moment. I had a bit of trouble deciding what exactly my favorite movie was, but after I found it on Netflix recently and rewatched it, I decided this film fit the criteria exactly. This movie is “A Silent Voice”, which is a film about a deaf girl told mainly from the perspective of one of her past bullies, who is the guy shown in the gif. Throughout the film, he exhibits symptoms of anxiety disorder, which is symbolized by him putting his hands over his ears to block out the situation he is in. I picked this moment to gif because it’s a parallel to all those previous moments and is also the point in the film where he really grows as a character. I started by finding a clip of this moment on Youtube, which was easy once I used the right keywords. I didn’t realize until I saw the clip that the moment I wanted to gif was actually two separate clips, so I had to decide which of the two clips I found was better. I then uploaded the clip onto GIPHY and cut down the clip to the moment that I wanted.

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Daily Create #tdc2703: Catching the You-Fish

In today’s daily create, they ask us to imagine what bait or lure we would be caught with if we were a fish. I’m a huge fan of sweet things, like cake, ice cream, candies, and breakfast sweets, so I imagine if I was a fish, I would be caught with sweets. I went on Giphy for some inspiration. My main challenge was figuring out which specific sweet I should focus on for my daily create. A lot of the gifs I could find mainly focused on burgers and pizza, so I had to filter through that to get to gifs related to sweets. I ended up finding the perfect gif while looking, so I used it for the create. I liked it because I know Salem the cat can be sassy, kind of like me, and the gif of him eating the pancakes looked kind of funny to me. This may not be my most creative submission, but I thought it fit well with the prompt.

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Daily Create #tdc2701: Clet a Sign

Today’s daily create had us modifying street signs ala Clet Abraham. This one kind of interested me because it reminded me of a few of the entries in a subreddit called r/MildlyVandalised, although Clet’s work is more professional. To start this create, I went to Google and looked at some street signs for a while trying to come up with some good ideas. After I picked out a few, I choose which idea I thought would be the funniest. I eventually choose the swerving car sign. In a mix of hunger, looking at the swerving lines, and wanting to play with the idea of the original sign, I decided to edit the sign to look like there is bacon behind the car. I took a good image of the sign and added it onto GIMP. I then found a picture of cartoon bacon online and used ColorPick Eyedropper, a browser extension, to pick the colors of the bacon. With the colors I needed, I proceeded to color in between the lines to make it look like a piece of bacon. My main challenge was picking a sign to use and how to color with the correct brush using GIMP. On my old computer, I used Windows Paint whenever I wanted to color something in, so I wasn’t used to all the brush choices I would have in GIMP.

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DS 106: Demotivate Yourself

A sketchy drawing of a person sitting while holding a low detail video game controller. framed with a black background. In the background, there is text that says "Gesture Drawing attempt. 'There's no such thing as bad art!' - Art Professor".

I had some problems with this assignment in the conceptual stage. Most of the ideas I came up with were either too obscure, since they were based on personal inside jokes, or unfunny, since the text I came up with didn’t seem to work with the format of the meme. After looking at my photos for a bit, I came across this picture I made during a Drawing class I took for an art credit at my university. The drawing was for an assignment on gesture drawing, which Wikipedia says is the laying in of the action, form, and pose of a model/figure. Specifically, my professor wanted us to focus on the general shape and “emotion” of the figure, and to draw quickly. This resulted in this lovely picture I made of my roommate playing a videogame.
Sketchy drawing of a person sitting while holding a low detail video game controller.
My roommate and I thought this picture was so comically bad that I decided poking fun at it would be funny to do for this assignment. I used GIMP to format the picture to fit that of a demotivational poster. I had to do a bit of research to find the correct font to use for the meme since I wanted it to be accurate, and framed the picture with the black background and border before adding the text below the picture. The quote wasn’t said by my professor in relation to this art in particular, but she did say it towards the beginning of the class when explaining how she’d grade our work.

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Daily Create #tdc2697: I Feel so Good

For today’s daily create the prompt was “I Feel So Good”, accompanied by a song with the same title performed by Big Bill. While somewhat vague compared to the other daily creates I’ve seen, I decided to tackle this one to challenge myself. I saw that most of the other entries were either related to something they liked or a gif of dancing, and was more inspired by the former. My mind jumped to what are referred to as moodboards since I thought recreating a scenario where I felt good would be a nice direction to take this daily create. When I’m referring to moodboards, I’m talking about the meme format where people compile a bunch of images together to “re-create” either a style or funny situation. They are usually done in a style similar to the one shown below.

The situation I wanted to recreate was a chill day playing video games, snacking while drinking tea, and hanging out with my pets, since that is what makes me feel good. Normally this also includes a soft blanket except for the summer when it’s too warm for blankets. I started by finding images of popcorn, tea mugs, and blankets, which I figured would be the easiest to find. I ended up having more trouble than expected in finding a good mug picture.

Sources for used images: popcorn, blanket, tea mug, video game,  moodboard example.

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DS 106: Selfie With Your Pet

In this picture is me and my cat Bootsie. We inherited her from a family friend and she bonded with me at first sight. If you’re wondering what she’s looking at, she saw a bird outside my window next to the bed (yay spring!). The assignment seemed pretty straightforward, so I just had to pick which pet to take a selfie with. In my house, I have 2 cats, Kiara and Bootsie and 1 dog, Phoenix, so I had a few options to choose from. I would have been fine with a picture with any of them, but I decided to go with a picture of Bootsie since that one had decent quality (read: not blurry) and was also cute. I decided to use my phone camera because it took decent quality pictures and would always be available for me to use when taking a selfie for this assignment. I decided to start taking the photos while my pets were awake and around me since I thought the photo would look cuter if they were awake. I took many photos during one particular day and had to filter out the ones that were blurry from movement. The main challenge I had during this assignment was from the animals themselves. If you’ve ever owned a pet before, you know that they will move however they want whenever they want. This sadly left me with a large chunk of photos out of the running for being on this post. Although, I’m very happy with the end result.

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DS 106: What’s the Meme

I had a lot of trouble figuring out what angle I should go for when doing this assignment. Do I use my own pictures or one I found on the internet? Do I base my meme off of one I know or make one up myself? After looking at all my photos from the past year, I came across one that I took of my roommate’s cat. She was sleeping on the couch while I was playing a game and she stuck her tongue out at one point, which I thought was cute and funny. Given how she looked and seemed really tired, I thought I would do a meme related to sleep. Since all of us know how tiring finals can be, I figured the meme would be extra relatable with that subject.

First, I put the photo in Gimp and cropped it to make the cat more centered. Then, I added another layer and put a black box at the bottom to make the text easier to read. I finally added the text on top of the box and changed the font type and size to fit the box nicely.

I had a few major challenges when it came to this assignment. Originally, I had made another meme that I thought would go well with this assignment, but I ended up scrapping it since the quality of the photo didn’t come out like I wanted when I went to post it. Since there was text in that photo, the quality was necessary to fully understand the meme. I was also super indecisive on which font would work best for this meme, as well as the wording of the text. I decided to go with a generic bold font so it was easy to read.

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Daily Create #tdc2694: Another Planet

Visiting Another Planet
I was a huge space geek when I was younger, so when I saw the daily create for today, my mind had a million ideas at once on what I should do. I ended up narrowing down my ideas to those related to gas planets, specifically Neptune, since that was where some of my more creative ideas were. I debated using dark humor for my entry, given how dangerous the gas planets would be to visit in reality, but I figured it wouldn’t be as fun as suspending disbelief.

First, I looked for a backdrop that looked similar to the color of Neptune. This was hard because most of the blue stuff I had was either too dark, more teal-like, or too small. I eventually came across a Snuggie that ended up being the right color and size for the photo. Since Neptune is very cold (around -214 degrees celsius!), I wore a coat and my UNE hat. My next challenge was conveying the fact that Neptune is a gas planet. I looked online for a PNG (Portable Network Graphic) of smoke and came up with a couple of good images. I used Gimp to crop the original photo and to add the smoke effect on. I discovered the duplicate layer tool, which made it helpful to have smoke around me while not covering my face. I also tinted the layers to have the smoke look more blue.

This was definitely a very fun create!

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Daily Create #tdc2688: A New Hero

While I’ve heard about Keanu Reeves multiple times before, I’ve recently learned many things about him that I consider heroic. He’s given away money to many organizations to help children and those in need since the early 2000s and has been shown to be kind to anyone he comes across.

I figured since I learned so many cool things about this guy, I would make a cool looking gif for this Daily Create. My main inspiration for my process was the “like a boss” meme, which is an oldie but a goodie meme when it comes to conveying how cool a person or situation is. Given his repertoire of cool films that he’s in, I figured I would have no shortage clips where he looks cool. After sorting through a few, I came across the clip in the gif, which I thought was cool and kind of fitting with the downward moving glasses sticker I was planning on using.

I made the gif using Giphy by pasting the link to the clip on their gif maker and trimming the clip to the necessary length. I then added the moving glasses and the cool looking text at the bottom. This was my first time using Giphy, so I had to learn a bit on how to use it. However, I looked at all the options I had for my gif and quickly got the hang of it before making it. My biggest challenge in this project was finding a good clip to use and actually posting the gif on Twitter. Thankfully, my classmates were a big help in figuring that out.

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