Author: michaeljcripps

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Daily Create – #tdc3077 (Bring Your Pet to Work)

Today’s DC was too easy, really. It wasn’t fair. So I took the opportunity to show off our new dog, Ceres. My kids have had dogs (and cats) their whole lives. My wife and I have had cats and dogs for nearly our entire relationship – almost 30 years now. But we lost our last dog to old age about 5 years ago, adopted two older, special needs cats (on top of the one we already had), and have been ambivalent about bringing a canine into the mix.

With the quarantine and two college students at home with a high schooler, momentum built toward growing the family again. You might be surprised to learn that it’s just hard to find a shelter dog to adopt in the era of COVID. We tried for maybe two months, and we’re not especially picky. (Must not eat cats. That’s about it.) It’s a good thing that animals are getting adopted! But the quarantine has also mostly shut down the road from kill shelters in the south up to no-kill shelters in the north. In economic-speak, the supply chain has been broken.

Late this afternoon, we drove out to pick up Ceres, a canine that appears to be some sort of Chow/Rottweiler mix. He’s big, burly, friendly, quiet, inquisitive, and goofy.

The DC was easy. My son texted me a photo he took. I pulled it down to my photo album and loaded it into Twitter. I feel like I should have animated it in some fun way. Alas, that wasn’t part of the challenge.

Got a pet and want to get on an easy DC to start the week? Do this one before it’s gone!

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Daily Create – #TDC3061 – Change One Word Album

This was a fun one, though I’m not so happy with the quality of my image work with the headshots. I took one of my absolute favorite bands, changed one word, and put them in a completely different musical genre.

After coming up with Punk Floyd, I thought I’d work from The Wall album and do something interesting. I quickly found the “Floyd” font online, downloaded it, put it to use. It’s something of a mockup of the typeface for The Wall, so that works. Now, how to punk it out?

I started with the idea of Doc Martin’s and perhaps swapping out images from The Wall album with Doc Martin shoe images. Then leather jackets came to mind. Then I remembered the classic Ramones LP, with the Ramones standing up against a wall. Bingo!

Pink Floyd, Meddle
Ramones

I grabbed my Punk Floyd headshots from the album Meddle, did some Photoshopping to adjust the contrast, cropped, etc. I also chose to flip Nick Mason’s head tilt. I erased the background from the Ramones album cover and decapitated the Ramones. I swapped The Wall album as a background, added Punk Floyd across the top, and put my DS106 stamps on the whole thing. It took more than 20 minutes, for sure. And the heads are really too washed out. I should have done a bit more to get the saturation and contrast right.

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Quick Reminder/Help – DS106 Toolbox!

Some of us are reporting difficulty figuring out how to take on some DS106 projects (memes, for example).

In the right sidebar of the site, there’s a link to a toolkit of resources. There are lots of ways to do many of the creative activities in DS106. I encourage you to try some tools, find ones that work well for you, and expand your repertoire over the term.

GIF Run, for example, is a quick, easy way to grab a Youtube video, trim it down to a tiny clip, add text, and create an animated GIF. There are tools like that for images/text (ie memes).

I’ve grouped the toolkit resources into sections based on common goals/activities.

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Daily Create – #TDC3058 – Pinocchio Story

Today’s prompt was interesting, as it called for a 240-character story to go along with a drawing of Pinocchio. I quickly started imagining a mask, lies, and something about social distancing. The tension between a growing nose and the matter of distance struck me as worth working on. Initially, I thought about the nose as a yardstick for measuring social distance: If we all had Pinocchio’s nose, it would be easier to know we’re staying six feet apart.

I wanted to treat the challenge as a meme or GIF, so I headed to Google to look for images and possible clips I might trim for a GIF. I settled on a scene from Benigni’s Pinocchio, which I liked because it was not animated. Then I decided he needed a mask out on the end of his nose – or a mask on his face, with a hole through which his nose protruded – or a very elongated mask, with his nose stretching it near the breaking point. In the end, a dangling mask seemed to be the funniest (and, frankly, the easiest).

As I worked on the GIF in Photoshop, my mind worked on the text to accompany it – and the story I’d need to tell in the Tweet.

The mask itself is available from DarkShirts on Etsy. I did a significant bit of twisting/tweaking to dangle it at the end of Coronacchio’s nose. I thought I’d need a bit more “bounce” in it before I ran the GIF on export, but the animation isn’t so extreme that the mask needs to flutter or swing to work.

DS106DC

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Daily Create – #TDC3055 Mash it Up

I started this one thinking I’d mash together the theme from 2001 : A Space Odyssey and… something else. I was imagining something truly incongruous. Somehow, my mind went to Guardians of the Galaxy because I was thinking about sci-fi. One free association led to another, and I thought, “Star Lord is a white guy who’s into funk,” which led me to, you know, Vanilla Ice.

This isn’t the best quality, but I grew a little bored playing around with the audio to locate more opportunities to create something like lip syncs. Also, I didn’t do good enough work with the green screen background. But it’s a Daily Create, not a masterpiece.

I used VidPaw to get a couple Guardians clips, including a great dance clip with green screen behind it. I used iMovie for this project, so it didn’t involve lots of specialized software.

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Daily Create – TDC3050 COVID Holiday

This Daily had me stymied for the first 5 minutes this morning. Partly, it’s because I was doing the crossword and drinking coffee when I gave the prompt a look. But I also know that my in-laws just cancelled their regular July vacation trip to visit us in Maine. That’s something of an un-vacation or de-vacation. The prompt saddened me a bit, though the early bird DS106ers were throwing down some very upbeat, positive tweets, which was nice.

But then I remembered a photo I took right after our beaches closed around late March. I didn’t know it at the time, but I must have had some idea that it would offer me a Daily Create opportunity. What I remember that day was the shock of it all. Damn! My local break barricaded.

This Daily was easy peasy lemon squeezy. I used Photoshop, but GIMP would have worked just fine. I could have done a version of it in Preview on my Mac. It’s not really a meme at all, though I borrowed some of the visual layout cues from the meme genre: Set up at the top; punchline at the bottom; bars at top and bottom to establish good text/background contrast. I don’t like my choice of red, but I just picked the red of the stop signs in the barricades. They’re not quite as deep and rich as I would have liked. Alas.

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Daily Create – TDC3049 Album Cover Remix

The challenge today was to remix an album cover. I started with the idea of the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach and even took a photo of a lemon on a Matchbox van. But then I got inspired over my Cheerios and thought of Abbey Road.

I probably watched the entire Avatar series with my kids back when they were little and it was on TV, and I always sort-of liked it. I did a bit of borrowing to remix this iconic album cover.

I owe a debt to nickcruzz0 for his drawings of the four benders, which he has made into stickers one might purchase: https://www.redbubble.com/people/nickcruzzz0/shop/?collections=1150140. I did a bit of work to rotate, skew, and otherwise adapt his work for this purpose.

And the Abbey Road shot is from a Swedish remake that took the white VW and moved it off the curb, apparently to advertise some self-parking features of a new VW. This made it a lot easier for me to add The Benders, as I didn’t need to remove John, Paul, George, and Ringo first. https://www.adweek.com/creativity/why-volkswagen-just-moved-the-beetle-on-the-cover-of-abbey-road/

Oh, and here’s that lemon van photo. I think it had real potential!

I was thinking “Eat a Lemon.” I think Desert Sun is a suitable band name. Initially I intended to throw in an “Eat a Peach” style background behind the photo, which is why I shot it with a white backdrop.

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START HERE! Introductory Walkthrough Video

Welcome to Writing 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 once through, and then opening another window so you can do your own walkthrough as the video runs again.)
  • Read the Big Picture and Syllabus pages
  • Take the open notes Syllabus Quiz and Pre-flight Checklist (do it all by 11:59PM EST, 5/18)

Note: The video below shows an earlier course theme; the actual content is accurate and remains current.

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Daily Create – #tdc3047 Poem of Kindness 4 DS106

I’m not a poet. I went with a haiku, as it’s brief and has a structure I can follow.

DS106 and the Daily Create is the ongoing product/project involving many people, and it’s difficult to express kindness to an entire group without naming names. I benefit enormously from the energy people have invested in DS106. It inspires, amazes, and carves a path through the wilderness.

I think Jim Groom merits special mention in any expression of kindness for the work of DS106, so this morning I put together a crazy-hands GIF of Jim and included him in my haiku. I thought about turning the whole crazy-hands thing into a video with audio from Peter Gabriel’s “Shake Your Hands.” But it really didn’t work with the haiku. Hmm.

Tools: Google image search for the base Groom image; Photoshop from there. I used layers, eraser tool, text tool, band-aid tool, frames-to-animation to make a GIF, and legacy export to get the GIF out.

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Daily Create – #tdc3046 International Family Day (5/15)

I immediately knew I wanted something “around the table” for my daily create. The family dinner is an anchor point for me. It’s long been a place and time for conversation, checking in on the day (and on life more generally), and, of course, dining.

The question: What might work? Should I grab a family “birthday” photo and post as a meme? Hmm. Then I started thinking about family sitcoms. That 70s Show quickly came to mind, but there’s too much angst and traditional gender/familial role stuff going on there. Besides, their kitchen table is almost always too small because it’s a sitcom.

The Addams Family then came into focus for me. After a bit of work, I settled on a dinner-table scene and got busy making a GIF.

It’s not bad. I’m pretty pleased with the way the cuts more or less seamlessly create an infinite loop GIF.

There’s always some sibling thing going on around my home. Mostly, it’s pretty innocent, but this scene captures the potential for things to go bad. The parental gender roles in the GIF, the father-son dynamic, and the meat cleaver capture so much about family – and provide plenty of opportunities for commentary/critique.

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Daily Create – #tdc3045 Blindfolded, Draw Favorite Animal

This was pretty quick and easy. The hard part was settling on an animal to draw. After I drew the elephant – pretty well, I think – I discovered that Kevin @dogtrax had also drawn an elephant. I felt a bit like a copycat, so I had to acknowledge that I wasn’t the first to it.

I should have taken the picture in “portrait” mode, as Twitter isn’t really set for landscape. Or I might have done a rotation before tweeting the Daily Create.

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Daily Create #tdc3043 – Draw a Purse

This was pretty fun, though it took more than my budgeted 20 minutes this morning. Initially, I was imagining a GIF where a gunslinger draws a handbag from his (almost always his, with a couple important exceptions) holster. But the output lost lots of the color, and I didn’t want to dig too deeply into the project.

Here’s a GIF version:

I think the horse in the background is hilarious! It’s the kind of thing I could have easily edited out but didn’t.

I created both of these in Photoshop, though I did use GIF Red to quickly trim a Youtube clip and grab a GIF that I could further trim and modify. (I’m not sure why, but I’ve really come to like GIF Red in recent weeks. The trimming and rendering tools are not the most elegant or intuitive, but the do work. Also, the text tool is quite limited. But there’s no watermark.

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Daily Create – #tdc3043 “It’s Alive!”

I was at something of a loss when I saw this one. I thought about the sourdough starter in the refrigerator, but it’s not really doing much in there right now. Over coffee and breakfast, as I finished the paper and started into the crossword puzzle, it occurred to me that the puzzle was coming to life. “It’s Alive.”

Quick:

  • Take phone from pocket.
  • Open camera app.
  • Take picture.
  • Share to Twitter with #tdc3043, @ds106dc, and @eng304cripps.
  • Load it into page for ePortfolio, with explanation about inspiration/idea, tool used, etc.
  • Make sure I have the “ds106dc” keyword at the bottom.
  • Done.

And then I noticed I hadn’t read the prompt closely. It called for a POEM! Oops. Lesson learned. Here’s a poem:

It’s Alive!

Peering through the puzzle clues,
Pouring soymilk over Cheerios,
Poring over the rows and columns,
Penning answers with a Bic Round Stic,
Pondering a proper create for #tdc3043,
Proclaiming, eventually, “It’s Alive!”

Not all Dailies need to involve lots of image/text manipulation. I’m glad I did this one without making a meme, editing an image, or turning a video clip into a GIF.

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Daily Create – #tdc3042 Very Special Day

Spring course final grades are due at the university today. Seeing today’s Daily Create, I quickly decided to do something (other than submit grades) to mark the day. Paul Revere’s midnight ride came to mind: “Final Grades are Coming! Final Grades are Coming.” I played with that idea for a meme or GIF while making coffee. But by the time the water was ready to pour into the French press, I has moved on to “ring the bell” as a very special, celebratory activity for the conclusion of a pandemic spring of college.

Some end-of-term celebration is particularly important this Spring. Students have effectively been forced to complete classes in practical isolation, seniors will graduate without a ceremony, and faculty cannot come together to congratulate, to exhale, and to mark what is always a very important moment.

A quick Google search turned up a video of Buddhist monks practicing for the New Year’s ringing of the Chion-In Temple bell, the largest in Kyoto, Japan (https://youtu.be/NlvRvsDUkdM). I turned to a pretty solid, watermark-free video-to-GIF tool called GIF Run and quickly trimmed the clip to create a reasonable looping GIF. I added some explanatory, celebratory text and threw in @ds106dc, #tdc3042, and a time stamp to lock it all in as a daily.

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Daily Create #tdc3041 – Let’s Do Some Colouring

This was pretty simple to execute. Nomadwarmachine put out the Daily Create and included a link to some Black and White images, with a charge to “do some colouring.” I grabbed the Harley patent application drawing. As I was dropping some color in using Photoshop and both the magic wand and paint bucket tools, I started imagining a biker on the Harley.

Shel Silverstein’s illustration that accompanies his poem “My Beard” immediately came to mind. I headed to Google, found the image, and grabbed it. Then I flipped it to fit the orientation of the bike, played around a bit with the eraser tool, and sizing to make adjustments to my bearded rider, the “Shel’s Angel.”

Not wanting to omit some credit for this remix of a historic patent application and great art by a truly gifted poet and artist, I also floated Silverstein’s signature in near the other signatures on the patent application. Naming the rider “Shel’s Angel” adds a bit more. And, of course, I date stamped the whole thing by adding in @ds106dc and #tdc3041 right below the “Fig. 1” text on the original image.

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