CogBlogged under ‘Magic Macguffin’

Oi, somehow I never published this post, my own answer to my own challenge. I just found it in my unpublished drafts drawer. Bad Dog. The first rule of issuing challenges is be prepared to remix your own dog food. Thus I find myself tonight working at doing my own creation for the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge. You can see the whole series of related posts at http://cogdogblog.com/tag/7daychallengetdc Okay, this is not easy. I scanned the 174 entries that came in (actually there are more now than when I summarized), and downloaded enough media I could use (I had to skip a few flickr photos that were not creative common licensed and some audio that were not set in SoundCloud to be downloaded). A theme somewhat emerged, like something bad that might happen if a flame was turned on somewhere in the world, that triggered a few catastrophic events… [...]

makes use of cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by bitchcakesny: http://flickr.com/photos/bitchcakes/5187928447/ Now that the 2012 Summer of ds106, Camp Version is over, I spent some time trying to pull some numbers from the machine, given how crazy folks are about analytics and massive. First of all, I want to thank all 172,000 people who registered for the course (just kidding, we want to make the BIG MOOCS nervous). 454 This is the number of blog posts by the 11 registered UMW students over the 10 week course. I first ran a database query to find the number of posts in ds106, where all the aggregation happens, that were tagged for our summer section (umwsum12) SELECT count(p.ID) FROM wp_posts p INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships tr ON (p.ID = tr.object_id) INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy tt ON (tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id) INNER JOIN wp_terms t ON (tt.term_id = t.term_id) WHERE tt.taxonomy = 'post_tag' [...]

Time after time the road out of a blog funk is sitting down to make some silly ds106 art. So it was later this afternoon, when this tweet form Cathy Finn-Derecki set me in motion: @cogdog @twoodwar My God. What a load of twaddle! What’s next? Sebastian Thrun on the cover of “Tiger Beat” right next to Justin Bieber? — Cathy Finn-Derecki (@saracup) July 28, 2012 So challenged to put Sebastian Thrun on the cover of Tiger Beat, I got out the old Photoshop clone brush and went to work. Now, one thing that gets me growling is when people send out a link via twitter with something like: This would make a great #ds106 assignment Which to me is a bit lame- if it would make a good assignment, then go ahead and make it so, damnit. Just tossing a link out there is not #4life to me. So [...]

My diabolical plan to pump up the activity of the Daily Create seems to be working; The first day of the Daily Create Challenge is not even over, and I see already 21 tornados submitted (the challenge was to draw a tornado). I’ve been growling and calling people out, daring them to do 7 Daily Creates in a row, and then weave together in a blog post, make something out of it, and leave a comment on my original post. THERE IS NO SLACKING OFF! I decided to enlist the help of five tough guys, and at the same time complete a ds106 video assignment, One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds. Created by Michael Branson Smith, this is one of the more popular assignments, with over 50 examples listed: Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: [...]

Limited editions of this holistic and cleanly book are available! This is for a brand new ds106 Design Assignment: Weird Book Room: The Abebooks Weird Book Room lists a collection of titles so farcical you would think they are made up, but they are not. “Grandma’s Dead: Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals”, “Beyond Leaf Raking “, and “Goats: Homeopathic Remedies” are all actual book titles — “finest source of everything that’s bizarre, odd and downright weird in books.” Your assignment is to design the cover of a book title so weird that it will look like it will fit right in to the Weird Book Room. Be sure to include a little bit of jacket blurb for your blog post where you include your designed book cover. Go weird! This all started with the tweet: Go to this link andgaze on the titles and be made happy. Trust me. [...]

He’s the baddest cop on the streets in 1908… I felt I was overdue to sit down and do a ds106 assignment, one to do some iMovie work as a demo for our current students. I was called back to do Return to the Silent Era (one I added myself) with the hopes that I could push iMovie a bit farther than the last one I did — 2001 a Space Odyssey set back 100 years. The assignment is: The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track. I was trying to think about what would be interesting to set [...]

Here is a new ds106 video assignment based on the notion of going to Camp Magic Macguffin for summer camp, Send a Camp Movie to Camp: Take one of the movies on the list of movies with camp themes, find a trailer for it, and re-edit the audio to completely change the plot- e.g. make a horror movie turn into a comedy, or make a romantic movie seem like a spooky movie. Send a camp movie to personality inversion camp! I went easy, and selected the trailer for the original Friday the 13th, made in 1980, the first home of Camp Crystal Lake I locked into this when it came out, I was still in high school, and could have easily been one of those wide eyed teens- one of which is a really young Kevin Bacon. Yeah, Jason rises out of the lake and takes his gross revenge, and [...]

I’m late with my ds106 design stuff, but you will not catch me saying I am sorry. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I did assemble this for the Postcards from Magical Places assignment, which we had our UMW students with a requirement that the image come from Minecraft. Design the front and back of a postcard that might be sent from the location of a movie or a work of fiction. Both sides of the cards must be created as graphics. The fornt should use graphic design elements that provide a sense of place or use the classic motifs of old postcards (“Greetings from ______”)_, both pictures and text. The back of the post card should contain a stamp and postmark that fits with the theme of the movie, as well as an addressee and a message that fits the plot as well. The inspiration [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog With activity ramping up for me at the Northern Voice conference this week, my window for MADI (Making Art Damn It) is closing, hence here I sit working an hour on a faux book cover for the I Can Read Movies assiognment: Create a film-based book cover using the aesthetic framed by Spacesic See the original images I’d seen people do this one before, but was a first for me. I tried recalling movies I was drawn to as a kid, and the original Andromeda Strain was one I watched a few times, maybe it was the sci-fi escape the suburbs thing, maybe it was the allure of the southwest as a foreign land for a kid on the east coast, maybe it was the mad science angle. The one thing that I did recall, and could not find too [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by photosteve101 Dear Dominoe, I thought I would write since it has been like forever since I last communicated (literally), but who would understand me better than the dog pal who followed me across the country and then some. You might noy be aware, but I have been away for three works helping run a summer camp called Camp Magic Macguffin – the magic meaning that nothing bad happens here and the people who come just want to create, create, create art and funny animations all day long. In a way I wish I was a camper, because then you get to play. But I also have to work .My colleague Martha and I have much to do with orienting our UMW students to things like WordPress, creating course materials and videos, running live camp fire sessions, clearing timber, planning activities, etc. [...]