ds106: Digital Storytelling Tagged Stuff

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by freshwater2006

Tonight we unleashed a new piece of the ds106 fleet of sites- the Assignment Remix Generator. This is an idea that was spawned by Tom Woodward way back in December 2010 as a way of instigating remixes of creative work by the playing of a “card” on someone else’s work.

Keep in mind, this was a month before the launch of the open version of ds106, and 6 months before the development of the assignment bank.

The students would get a variety of cards at the beginning of the course and to use them they’d tag the origin post and link to the person they want to be the recipient of the action.

So, maybe I want to take CogDog’s #ds106 aura photography challenge and assign it to someone else to remix as a drawing project. I’d play my “Change Format2” card in the comments and indicate that person X should do it. They might make something like the design below.

There are lots of possibilities for cards. There are lots of ways this might play out. It might introduce too much chaos but I think it has the chance to change how participants take part in the course. It gives them a degree of control and institutes a degree of randomness that is attractive to me and might be attractive to others. I like how it puts more power in the hands of the participants and changes how they interact.

We circled back to this idea a month ago in a Skype conversation with Zack Dowell where we spoke of the riffing of work in ds106, and the idea planted in my head.

So the idea of the Remix machine is to go from the remixing of media that we’ve had students doing the past two weeks, to the level of remixing the work they have been doing in ds106. The primary part of the machine now is the Generator- it pulls one random assignment from the bank (we have over 300 now), and combines it with one random “remix card“- the cards each describe a different “twist” to apply to an assignment.

This presents a user a potential combo- if they don’t like it, reload (eventually I want to make it more like a slot machine, and load new items via ajax).

By pressing “Remix it”, the code generates a new content type that offers the combination as a remix page (or if it exists, the button merely links to it).

Your task is to then interpret the combination as a new assignment- and do it. Not only that, we want you to look at the examples that were done for the original assignment, and use media from one of these as your starting point.

For example, one combination is combining the Wiggle Spectroscopy (visual assignment) with the Go Emo remix card – so the challenge there would be to create a wiggle visual that features an emo type character. To do this I might download the GIF created at http://www.generousworld.net/?p=101 and try to edit it to change a character.

Okay, chances are some of these won;t make sense. But it’s all about the interpretation.

Tonight in class, I introduced it to my students, and had them in small groups find combinations that would work (or would not) which led to some fun class discussion. I also got some good suggestions from them for new remix cards.

This is pretty much in the spirit of building the course was we go. There are a bunch of things to tweak, fine tune, and maybe plug holes into. I want to add a form that will allow people to submit new card ideas.

And going back to Tom Woodward’s original concept, we want to make a “play this” button on a remix that would allow them to email a card or assignment to someone else to do as a challenge. Or we add a “remix” this button to assignments on the main site.

I’m looking for ideas, and feedback on this monster. There is another long post that should be more on the mechanics, but this is all leveraging the genius of Marth Burtis who build the original assignment bank. I had managed to make a copy of the assignment bank site by cloning the key database tables, and making appropriate changes in the wp_options one. I had to create new custom post types and taxonomies for the RemixCards, the remix assignment combos.

I thought I would have to migrate the functionality back to the assignments site to tap into its info, but managed to find the switch_to_blog() function that allows be to switch to another blog database to run queries when I need to tap into the other site.

This has been pretty exciting both to build but also to see how it pans out. The students tonight seemed intrigued by this idea.

It’s a remix bonanza party at ds106!

It’s not quite the ds106 Speed Up Your Work Day assignment since I only grabbed 1 minute of video, but it was fun to play with speed up effects:

I grabbed this from the Dedon Road overpass of I-95 during yesterday’s bike ride. It would have been better if I had propped the camera on the edge, but I’m no a bit wary of dropping my iphone over edges. I had hoped for a shot that could seemlessly loop, but my positioning was not quite steady.

In iMovie, after detaching the audio, I sped the clip up 2000%, from 57 seconds down to 1, then simply copied the clip in the timeline and pasted it about 25 more times. It has the “dream” effect on the clip which gives it that burred edge look.

Following Lisa M Lane’s groovy movie idea, I went to the Internet Archive and found the funk in Ernie & The Top Notes Inc – Dap Walk.

I have no idea why I did this, but standing on that bridge, 25 miles down a country road, the rat race looked a lot more fun than the view in the car.

so…. @jimgroom @timmmmyboy a gentle reminder, in case you need design help with this is.gd/7kCbd5 #ds106 #pleeeez

— Lisa M. Lane (@LisaMLane) April 6, 2012

You may feel ignored as you have been asking a while, but it has not gone unheard. I’ve spent an afternoon climbing around the underbelly of the ds106 WordPress database, and am still not quite at the magic place where I can connect the feeds that are syndicated via Feedwordpress and the tags it applies on incoming posts.

Until I can do that last mile, I at least have a starting point:

The issue is part of a larger one where for now the process of adding feeds to ds106 is manual, and it is there we usually enter a tag for class sections (this applies the tag to all syndicated posts). The open online participants currently do not have a tag, so to test, I manually added it to Lisa’s posterous blog, my blog, Jim’s blog, and Giulia’s (this will only affect new posts coming in) — and should point at:

http://ds106.us/tag/openonline

It *seems* to be picking up some other posts tagged “open” (??), and you may be able to get your posts there if you add this tag to your ds106 posts.

I hope to work through the database understanding so we can modify any ds106 syndicated feed with this tag, as well as back tag older content (no promises, the wordpress tagging structure is a labyrinthian route).

If someone has better experience in working with the way FeedWordPress stores its information, pleas let me know, I just thrashing around in the bowels with a dim flashlight. I can see that FWP adds all syndicated sites to the wordpress links, and that link ID is used internally to connect to the feed via meta data “syndication_source_uri” — I am just not finding the right connections to the post_tag setting.

I am a database whacker not hacker not stacker.

Just wanted to let you know Lisa, we are on it….

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by DonkeyHotey

Today marks the 89th day of the ds106 Daily Create site. The TDC has been a typical ds106 roll as we go grand experiment, but it has more than rolled, it has rocked too.

Below is a little bit of what has happened between tdc1 and tsc89- plus a plea for you to help us by adding new daily create challenges.

This impetus was spawned a bit by the demise of the dailyshoot photography site which issued a regular challenge to do in photography.

I fully buy into the idea that small acts of regular creativity is not only good practice, but good for the soul. I have no proof, just my own case study.

For the start of classes in January, we hoped to create our own version, and to be more than photography, but video, audio too. Tim Owens did a masterful wordpress wizardry to put it together without ant custom programming (read his summary). The original DailyShoot worked by harvesting photo data (from numerous photosharing services) tweeted out with a specific daily tag- to make ours work, we had to pick one photo service (flickr), one for video (YouTube), and one for audio (Soundcloud) based on what they offered to aggregate content by tag.

There is something mesmerizing on seeing the graphic overview of the photo and video works.

I was hoping to pull together some stats on activity, and spent a late hour bouncing around the wordpress database with some custom queries before the anvil dropped on my head- the data is all external to the blog, so I need to code something up to get daily tag counts from the various APIs. I think its doable, and can be added as custom fields to the posts.

Aside.

We had a great wave of activity once we got rolling, some days getting well over 100 submissions. For the ds106 sections that Jim and I teach, we made it a requirement to have students to 3 per week, and ramped that up to one a day when we started our Visual assignments section.

The activity is waning, and I got a sense from some of the student work, that is was becoming more of a chore as we set it up as a requirement, so have relaxed it as a firm commitment. What I am enjoying is that I am seeing my students continue at it, one after class mentioning how much she enjoyed it and planned to continue doing the Daily Create after the class had ended. Another student decided just to make up her own photo challenges. Yet another took a simple daily create for a reversal video and evolved it into a much longer video story– just because he got driven by the idea. This is the personal challenge making I really dig.

It does seem that total activity has leveled off… people are still doing it, and I can only speculate. There is no desire to have this get MASSIVE, but am just curious to find out if we are saturating.

Heck, on my own, I have slacked off a bit doing this regularly.

What I would like your help on is creating new assignments – we have a good supply, but more is always better. People like Zac Dowell, Dr Garcia, and many of our students have been all star idea machines. Plus, we are going to need at least another 270 to be able to put on our calendar offered on the Kickstarter project

WE WANT YOU! to send your ideas now to the Suggestion Box. And of course, to make more daily creates.

Today’s challenge is relevant too, a way of saying thanks to Soundcloud. We went with them because of the widget that it creates as a player in our site, but to get the widget, we have to create a new group in Soundcloud. A limit of the basic accounts is that you can only create one group, and as an end around, we were asking people to make groups for us, or offering some bogus accounts if only to make a group.

When we contacted them about this issue and what we were using their site for, Ben from Soundcloud kindly added the capability for us to create multiple groups.

So today’s Daily Create is to give SoundCloud some audio thanks:

Show your appreciation for @SoundCLoud- record your thanks over a drum beat

Soundcloud has recently given us permission to create all the TDC groups we need, so let’s thank them with music! Record yours over a repeating drum track, such as the ones from Phat Drum Loops.

Whatchya waiting for? Make some sounds!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Just tonight on The ds106 radio, Scottlo was scoffing at the idea that the ds106 Kickstarter could fund a bus “What kind of bus can you get for under 2 grand?”

Why a groovy Mystery Machine, of course! May the hippie force roll into your town (and CogDog too!)

Continuing on a theme of tough cop genre, I made a movie mashup of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt mellowed out with the mellow sounds of Simon and Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song:

Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy.

That was the sentiment I thought of contrasting to the speed of the chase scene as well as the mostly unspokem tension between McQueen’s Bullitt character and Robert Vaughn’s slimy Chalmers.

I used MPEG ScreenClip to pull the classic car chase segment plus a few of the interchanges Bullitt and Chalmers. With not any dialogue during the chase, you have to imagine them cheerfully singing or at least toe tapping.

This was edited in iMovie, of course the hardest part trying to match music to lip movement- I did a ton of splits to pull our bits of motion. It is still really challenging to match it up cleanly. Mostly I wanted to explore the juxtaposition of the music to the action.

Driving Groovy… la la la la la la la

My wild ride of teaching ds106 has been a bit like riding a crazy horse on speed. We are in the intense part of the course where students are working in video, and while they talk about how hard/challenging it is, I am seeing in many of them that fiery drive to create.

In already two weeks, I am seeing work I am proud of from people who had never edited video before, and are doing so with little or no formal training. They are just doing it.

We are collecting many of these in a delicious stack (yeah, that sky has not fallen yet), but wanted to highlight some right here. Please send some comment juju their way.

There is more →

For the ds106 assignment One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds

Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies.

I went for my familiar territory, cops from the 1960s-1970s who just don’t fit in. They clash with the bosses and the bad guys. They are heroic badness.

Featured include:

• Al Pacino (Serpico, 1973)
• Steve McQueen (Bullit, 1968)
• Robert Blake (Electra Glide in Blue, 1973)
• Clint Eastwood (Magnum Force, 1973)
• Richard Roundtree (Shaft 1971 the original)

Electra Glide in Blue is the only one I have not seen, and given what I read of its location shot in Arizona, I’m gonna put it on my list.

I downloaded clips for all movies exvept Bullit from YouTube (I have Bulitt ripped for doing another assignment). For all of these I trimmed 5 second sections in MPEG StreamClip, an dimported into iMovie- from there I narrowed each down to a second, which is damned hard to pick.

I went over by one second. What are you gonna do?

Another great assignment in less being harder to do.

Wow, I needed a does of ds106 creativity, so I set out tonight to do the very assignment I submitted, Return to the Silent Era:

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. As an example, see Silent Star Wars. Get creative and choose a movie that would look most unlikely to be done from this era.

Presenting… 1901: A Spatial Odyssey:

On my walk home tonight I was rummaging what movies of the future would be fun to retro back, and landed on 2001: A Space Odyssey. I used the “Stop Dave, I’m Afraid” segment where Dave Bowman is working his way toward shutting HAL down- the monologue is all HAL.

After downloading the clip and bringing into iMovie, I first added the effects to the entire clip- I could not combine black and white and the aged film effect, so instead I used the video effects to desaturate the color and add brightness to create the black and white; the aged film effect gives it a tad of a sepia tone.

I then played through the movie, and did splits at each point where HAL spoke; I inserted a screen card I found by google image searching on “silene movie title card”, this one from the thelinuxexperiment.com

and I removed the “Bang” to make a blank card. At each split, I inserted a 4 second still of the card, with one of the glow effects on it, and added the centered title. I found I could copy/paste the card image, and could duplicate the title by option dragging the blue title track (preserving the font and sizes I had used).

Once I had transferred all fo HAL’s lines to text, I select everything and used Edit-Mute CLips to remove the movie sounds. I then found the Batty MacFaddin music from Kevin MacLeod’s royalty free music site. Then it was adding some closing credits, and one closing shot of HAL and a special guest.

While the assignment said do a trailer, I liked doing a segment of the movie as a silent film. This was a blast and a half!

Along the lines of the ds106 Return to the Silent Era Assignment, this set of “Premakes” by YouTube user whoiseyevan offer a fascinating approach to recasting well known videos into mashups of movies that came before them.

HInt for my students- this would make a great idea for a final project.

The concept is called a “premake” – for example “What if Forrest Gump was directed by Frank Capra instead of Robert Zemeckis?” this is made by piecing together films from 1949

The person behind this has even created a few frame by frame comparisons with notes so you can learn more how it was assembled

Or see this alternate reality version of Gone With the Wind

The film tells the story of Scarlett O’ Hara, one of the last surviving human beings, who is caught in the midst of a great vampire civil war. Marvel as she outwits the forces of the undead, while she flirts with her true bloo… er… love. Complete with heartaches and staked hearts, “Gone with the Wind with Vampires” will ‘blow’ you away.

I am finding no end to the well of creativity..