ds106: Digital Storytelling Tagged Stuff

This past week’s Daily Creates
I seemed to have done more this week with my iPhone camera than my DSLR, and dod a bit more experimenting or playing with 2 apps – PhotoGene for editing and ToonCamera for making cartoon effects.

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ds106 Propaganda posters– they seem to be calling from many places; I came across a great collection at Shorpy (another mint archive for visuals from the past). Hence a warning poster about ds106:

This one was rather easy to work with- the original poster was a warning against the dangers of syphilis:

The backgrounds of the text were pretty much solid, so it was a matter of picking some fonts from what I had installed in Photoshop. Bauhuas worked ok for the top headline. I did not find exact copies for the script font, so I used Savoye LET and the bottom text was using Marker Felt.

Heck I was tempted to leave the white cursive text as it was ;-)

Once infected, #4life.

BAGMAN may be running for president, but you should know of his leftist leaning ways formed from his Woodstock days

Yes, even in 1969 the brown acid bagman was #4life (one more ds106 assignment Hey Wait Where’d That Guy Come From?)

After seeing a tweet for these retro Russian propaganda posters I could not resist one more ds106 poster:

Best I can sort out, this means “GLORY DS106″.

Glory indeed.

Some might say that MAD magazine is not a comic, but I went for an animated version anyhow for the Animated Comic Cover ds106 assignment:

I saw this cover of Alfred E Neumann and ET and felt like they might me a love match for each other, so they gaze at each other with affection and experience the tickle of that magic extra terrestrial finger.

Don’t they make a sweet couple?

I read a ton of MAD as a kid, and I can recall backing out the plots of movies from the parodies there- so I knew about the Godfather from he satire first, seeing it in MAD before ever seeing it on video.

I think there is a future assignment related to the troubles faced by Roger Kaputnix or maybe a bit of mashup of Spy vs Spy.

In this animated GIF, I used a bit of magic I uncovered in the Photoshop animation palette. I copied and pasted out the eyes and ET’s finder to new layers, and filled in the background with some clone brush fill. In the animation palette, the layers have additional things you can animate via the toggle menu on the left side- you can set key frames for position or opacity, and by moving the slider on the timeline, you can nudge the position and make a key frame.

This method of animation is a bit closer to doing stuff in Flash or Director on the timeline- in Photoshop the only thing I cant seem to do is to resize objects, but doing movement and opacity offers a lot.

So I made the eyes of ET and Alfred move towards each other and away, and also made the finger move to the right. The glow and the star appear by keyframing the animation.

I thus only needed 10 layers (2 eyes each), and the animation weighs in at a puny 176k.

Don;t just get mad, get MAD! get Animated! Cause it is ds106 fir life and hell yes, I am over-branding this sucka.

It’s hard to resist a good ds106 assignment submitted by a student- such as the ds106 Propaganda Posters by Daniel Zimmerman (who is taking zero prisoners in this class)

Time to let out your inner Big Brother! Create a propaganda poster for ds106. Use your photo editing software of choice and write a message to inspire your fellow ds106ers. For example, I took a WW2 poster about increasing ammunition production, and turned it into a poster promoting tweeting.

I found a bunch by searching Google Images on “vintage posters” and was drawn in by the superhero look of a set of Kick Ass Posters from Affein Heim Theaters

This was some quick Photoshopping; it will take me longer to describe then to do it. I used Popular Std font to put the “1 0 6″ on the head- each a separate layer so I could rotate. For the 6, I converted to bitmap, and did a selection on the background of the poster layer to get a selection I could subtract from the 6.

To change the face, I made a new layer, did a multiple polygon selection of the face opening, and did Edit -> Special -> Paste Into to insert a Face of Groom. I fiddle a bunch with transform, rotate, distort- it is stil not optimal, but at some point you move on…

For the bottom text, I just filled the space of the words with clones of the paper background (moving the text wider apart to slip in the “ds106″. For the MAKE ART text, I used the Popular Std font again, and applied the Craquelure Texture filter to give the letters some gritty. I converted it to bitmap, and then selected all (command A) and nudged it up and down with the arrow to select everything, and used a Stroke at outline the letters.

This assignment can be easy or simple, but the appeal is trying to design something in the motif of these old posters.

I’ve been daunted by the ds106 Spreadsheet Invasion assignment where you are charged with creating an animation using the software designed for… sales reports, etc. It is, ironically, the first Design Assignment. And one that is least frequently done.

But thankfully, it was my student Tiffany who undertook it bravely in her Tale of a Flower version that pushed me over the hump of inertia to try this.

So here, I tell in a rather horribly inaccurate fashion, the process of Geology that form sedimentary rock (invasions of inland seas, rivers, and desert environments over time) and uplift/eroison processes that shape canyons.

I did this while idling time yesertday at BWI airport, wine was involved (Malbec, I love relaxing at Vino Vola). A lady at the next time working on NUMBERS in her spreadsheet must have been tsk-tsking me coloring in cells.

There is a fair bit of slop, I was not careful to move the selection box (I could not find a way to get it out of the way). But more or less, I just kept adding to it, coloring selections of cells and reverting them to no fill as needed- I ended up with 82 screen shots.

When I wanted to elevate the landscape, I just deleted 3 rows from the top, and colored the empty cells at the bottom.

I used an old Mac file renaming tool to change the file names to be “geo01.png, geo02.png” etc. This is because in QuickTime PLayer 7 You can do File- > Open Image Sequence…, select the first one, and it grabbs all the rest into a video file. I set the frame rate to be 1 second…

Which was pretty horrible, so I brought into iMovie. I broke the main clip into sections by finding the pots I wanted to have different speeds, and splitting the clip (control click for menu, select “Split Clip”)

Then for each clip, I use the little menu in the top left to do a Clip Adjustment, and change the speed to make it go faster or slower:

Beyond that, it was a matter of adding some titles, a few transitions. I grabbed a bit of the opening of John Mayall and the Blues Breakers “The Mist of Time” as a sound track.

Another little trick is get some black screen on the end. You cannot use the “Fade to Black” transition without something to fade into. Sometimes I import a black PNG, but what I did here was to add a title sequence with just spaces in it (no text), which creates a video sequence of black. I could then extend the audio sound track to match, so there is some outtro music.

This was quick and slightly dirty, I’d like to think about how to do something more elegant. It would be more useful to do some things with different sized columns, maybe make them square so you have pixel shapes to work with. Or perhaps the animation could eb done by creating the action as a long horizontal sequence, and doing a screen recording as you scroll the horizontal.

But I love using Excel for something it was not built for, this is so Ed Parkourish.

BAGMAN NOW!

It is about time we had a Bag in Charge we can trust, which is why I am on board to elect BAGMAN for President! My contibution is this campaign poster for the ds106 assignment BAGMAN Campaign Poster.

Although not of the same political ilk, I was compulsed to reach back for another unlikely candidate, Richard Nixon in 1960:

I found this at the Learn California site which has info on the Nixon Campaign:

As radio and television gained popularity with the voting public in the 1940s and 1950s, image and media exposure became increasingly important to waging successful campaigns. Companies subsequently sprang up across the nation offering campaign management services. Richard Nixon hired two of the most preeminent and innovative of these companies to run his California campaigns for his 1960 presidential bid.

I did this one in Photoshop CS5- some of this might not have been easily done in GIMP, but some of the principles should. Here’s how…
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Last year in ds106 I built a few of my assignments out of the movie Dirty Harry — and having seen this movie just last night, I am just shifting to another classic San Francisco cop, Bullitt.

I did this for the Bad Guy Business Cards design assignment — and completely missing that it said “bad” guy, cause Bulitt is anything but bad. Oh well, there needs to be a good guys card in the mix:

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.

He is the ultimate of no nonsense cool. He sees the in effectiveness and the preening of the superiors, but doe snot sneer as much as Harry Callahan. Bullitt is his own dude, with his own rules. And he uses his own bad ass car, the 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback.

I was not sure where to start so I began with a base car from PoliceBusiness Cards (actually it said Houston). I found a copy of the San Francisco Badge in Google, and use its colors to change up the theme of the card. I played with fonts to get match using Copperplate Gothic, not exact, but close enough. I added the car image, moving it slightly off screen to make it seem like it was entering the card.

Since he was so effective at it (and not really Bullitt’s fault, the whole deal of the witness he was assigned was rigged), I assigned him to the Witness Protection unit.

The address is actually from the SF Police site for the Mission District, I decide to use the old style phone exchange of a Name in front to indicate the first two numbers of a rotary Phone (the 55 real number did not work, that as “KK” so I made up “Belmont” as a holder).

Of course Bullitt did not have email (heck the cops in the movie did not even have a radio, they had to keep asking to use phones)

I’m going to use this dude again in another assignment.

Oops, I got in my mind to do a ds106 design assignment, and ended up doing a visual one! Oh well, it’s done. This is for the Four Icon Challenge (which to me should be design!):

Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons.

This is a movie I just watched (which means I could remember some iconic details). No fair guessing if you saw my tweet last night or were in the same room as me.

NAME THAT MOVIE!

I had dreams of tracing te visuals I found. Hah. So I nabbed some from various places online, reduced them in PhotoShop to fir within a 100px square frame, and layered it on top of or converted with the Note Paper sketch filter. For framing it is just a 4 pixel inside stroke.

I think Jim and I talked about making this a design assignment. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the difference. Visual assignments to me, are more towards the photograph or photo manipulation end of the graphic spectrum, whereas design are ones you create/manipulate from shapes, text, color. So an animate gif from a movie or photos is visual, whereas a animated gif of a poster or a comic book requires more graphic editing, and is design.

Maybe.

Got that movie yet?

This is one of the classic ds106 assignments- the decision you make when making this is- do I go very literal and make it easy to guess? or do I go more abstract? What if people are not familiar with the movie? Those are the challenges.