For some reason (help me Jim!) I cannot find the link for Assignment 4 in ds106 – it was more or less two do two weeks of posting photos in response to the prompts of the Daily Shoot. Heck, I’ve been doing it for over a year, if I were a slacker I would apply for former credit!

When it started a week ago Sunday, I hatched an idea to ratchet up my own challenge. I’d been thinking about what could be done ti link/connect the daily shots together, maybe a theme. Then I thought about writing a story that the photos would be a part of.

Then I had the crazier idea…

Inspired by the crazy innovation of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, I would aim to tell ny story backwards. Each day I would seek a photo that would match the theme of the Daily Shoot and at the same time find a way to make it part of an earlier sequence in the story. But wait, there is more– the careful planning Alan would have then sat down and wrote out the whole story, but that’s no fun– so I more or less made it up every day (more below).

But first the story. Yikes! I dont have a title- but what I did each day was to post the photo and write out the story text as a caption. I have not revised one bit after it was posted. In addition to the nromal dailyshoot tagging, the ds106 tagging, and also added the photo to a flickr set, ds for ds106. Initially, sets just append the newer photos to the end, so when I was done (today) I just re-versed the order of the set- so that the newest photo is first, and the story I wrote in reverse is in order!

Are you with me? Anyone? Anyone? The story unfolds at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157625951330506/

One more time. The end of the story is the first photo I posted for ds106/dailyshoot and the beginning of the story is the one I just posted today.

The one edit I made was to add a “next” link to the bottom of the story so it can be read in its proper (reverse?) order, if you starte from the end/beginning

Are you with me? Anyone? Anyone?

Now to be honest, while I did not sketch out my story, I did end up projecting a little how I wanted it to progress/regress, but it was not fully formed. Much of the plot, if there is one, really emerged as I wrote it.

All I started/ended with was a character, “Conrad”, who awakes from a stupor to find a goodbye note- he sets out to do something but we do not know exactly what it will be.

There are absolutely major plot holes- not surprising! If I were to recap…..

SPOILER ALERT

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The story starts with a phone ringing for this guy Conrad, living his dream life on a boat in Miami- he is some sort of con artist who has made his Big Score, enough to give up The Game. Until the phone rings, a call From his brother, Mikey, who was conned himself in a small town Arizona. Mikey, a truck driver, got caught up in the Incriminating Photos with a Woman in a Hotel trap. Conrad arranges to send Mikey his payoff money, and then sets out to head to Arizona to get even.

Conrad ends up in the (fictional) town of “Burns”, and works his magic to fit into the local scene and make an acquaintatce of the femme fatal, Lori, who he does his best story spinning over breakfast.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Lori might be seen as a small time con artist, but she is savvy, and she has a secret too. Her own mother was conned, and had her life ruined by this character, and she has been plotting a long time for her revenge,m including finding and scamming his brother. She has a plan to get even too, that involved rigging a window with some explosives and pyrotechnics to make Conrad look like an accident victim.

They then play each others game, working more scams together, ending up in bed, etc. Lori is poised and ready to set her trap, after they pull off a big heist. She has a plan to do a bag swap for Conrad’s bag of cash. He might have a plan to swap it back (the double switcheroo) or not- he does not even care about the money.

What he wants is for her to go to all kinds of extremes to trap him, working herself into a frenzy that he would find out– and he walks away. He out cons and then uncons the small town con artist.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

What should he do?
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Well maybe that is the story. This was both fun and challenging, and mostly I missed doing what I wanted to do for dailyshoot in trying to make it fit my story; hence why I wrapped a few days short.

But maybe there is an assignment idea in the telling a story backwards approach, which is really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really tough.

I am done.

Time for a drink.

Without the mickey in it.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Are you scared yet?

No?

Well you should have tuned in to our late night live radio show on #ds106radio — with Bryan Alexander visiting me here, it was the perfect plan to hatch. Sadly he seems to have been adbucted overnight by aliens, as have I.

Scary Stories from Strawberry

I cannot full say how much fun this was to do. I was inpsired to recall stories from The Thing at the Foot of the Bed, a book I enjoyed (or was spooked by) as a kid. I ordered a used copy on Amazon, but it will be another week before I can go back in time.

We did this half planned and half improv. We sketched out a script of us talking, than getting spooked, and then something really weird happening at the end. Bryan shared a raft of eerie sound effects and music, and we practiced with a bunch of sound effects using ordinary objects (a bowl of rocks, a napkin, a knife on a piece of cardboard, a frozen bag of coffee beans).

I set up my MacBookPro with Nicecast (software which I should rename “F****ingNicecast” it is awesome) with the laptop mic as source, and used one of the effects to be able to mix/crossfade in music from iTunes. I also tossed in some sound effects which I turned on for the closing.

The best part of it was how easy it was to make up content on the fly, live while talking back and forth with Bryan.

I do not care if we had more than 2 listeners, this was a blast to organize and do live. There is something electric (= real scary) about performing something live.

Boo!

A few spare body parts, some electricity, whilring dials, and some hunchbacked assistant… ds106 The Mad Open Online Course is Alive!

So it’s not even place, it’s three weeks out, why are all my colleagues, friends madly in their labs, and doing of all things, retro 1990s techno things like animated gifs?

Now anyone can create an sloppy animated gif (like me)- it was this site @jimgroom first tweeted If We Don;t Remember Me that set this up as an art form

It is not just anything animated, it is a key selection of subtle movement from a single scene of a movie, placed in the ancient package of an animated gif, that makes it come alive.

So what beter source then the original monster creation?

is there anything more freaky than Colin Clive‘s portrayal of the manic doctor? In that opening scene, his head seems way out of proportion to his body, and that smock that somehow looks also like… a dress:

And so it is with this wild ride that starts next month. It really is under the hand of Dr. Bava, but he is being humble and not wanting to be a mad dictator, but he does have a vision. I was lucky to spend an hour on Skype with Jim, Tom and Martha, just bouncing ideas.

What should unfold will be unlike many of the other MOOC efforts in that it is not hinged on the weekly drum beat drive of the syllabus and synchronous lecture like sessions in Elluminate. There wont be discussion forums (likely). it will be blog based, and very much individually driven. It will be what ever you want it to be- you will be able to follow the structure jim and Martha are doing at UMW as a “regular” class, or you can cherry pick the bits you want to do.

It’s all about a continuous pulse of creativity. Jim is reeally hooked into the notion of The Dailyshoot and Martha has a nifty duct tape and RSS system for crowdsourcing assignments.

My own idea, also influenced my dailyshoot (which you know I love) is that there could be small daily creative assignments available each day. One does not need to do them all, maybe for a class, it would be 2 or three per week. But they would all be small things one could do each do to create something new, maybe a graphic, a fake movie poster, a story played out in Amazon reviews. The thing about Dailyshoot is that it drives you to try new, and challenging, things.

All fo these would be things people can do or not, but might feed the larger, conceptual assignments that are the frame of Jim’s previous ds106 courses at UMW.

But the crazy thing is… people are already doing stuff– weeks before the course already starts! How massively wildly open is that?

ds106… is ALIVE!

People like Jabiz and Dean have shared their methods, and this is the other cool part here- people are finding and sharing different ways of doing something like these mini movie gifs; its not coming from the instructor, who is now absent playing in Italy.

My approach was lazy.

1. I downloaded the clip from YouTube (tons of ways to do, this, google ‘em).
2. Open the FLV or MP$ in QuickTime Player 7 (the old one), and navigate to the short sequence I want to lift. I watched the time reading on the left. With the frame stopped, I do a command C to copy (the still frame).
   
3. I then go to Preview, and if you do command N, it creates a new image with whatever is on the clipboard. I saved it as a JPG with the name of the timestamp, e.g. “franky339.jpg” for the segment that is at 3:39.
4. I zipped 5 images together and uploaded to GifNinja Create a Gif from images There are tons of tools out there, google ‘em.

From there I could modulate the speed of the gif, and saved. Done. Easy.

I cannot say what this monster will do, but it will be fun. Start now, start later, just start. Go to http://ds106.us, register your blog (you do have one, right, right? Bueller?(, and lean in. Write, share stuff, from your blog, and tag it ds106.

Looking for something other than animated gifs? See the ideas shared by timmyboy, great stuff!

Jon Breitenbucher invited me back again to do a remote (via Skype) presentation on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the week-long Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program he and his crew run at the College of Wooster (by the way, they are rocking with wordpress multiuser there).

When I did this last year, it was one of the best sessions I’ve had; a lot because Jon’s team had prepped the faculty, so they already had done some pre-work to pick their story idea. The way we run it is I do the presentation first thing in the morning (wich was really early here on the west coast time!), the faculty spend about 3 hours working with the tools. We then convene after they are done, and they get to talk about what they were able to create (or the problems they had).

This time around, I used Google Presenter for the slides, and we did me on video over Skype to the group in Wooster. I had a slide deck I’d used before for other sessions, and made all the links for URLs as hyperlinks. What did not work well, and I;ve had mixed luck before, was using it in presentation mode, where me clicking the slides advances it for Jon’s computer at the other end. I’ve had it work before, but this time, no matter how many times I would “take control”, when I advanced, the only way to update for them was for me to “take control” again. So we went old school.. me saying “Next slide”

You can see the slides over at http://bit.ly/50ways-wooster and I also have
audio recorded in my Ediro.

I felt bad a few people really struggled with some of the tools- Quite a few of them tried Joggle, one of the tools I rarely look at, someone had issues where Tikatok failed to save their work. It’s hard to tell if it is an isolated experience or if the tool is flaky, and I struggle with how to list that on my tools site (I started addind user reports as Devon has told me of problems with xtimeline).

But you can see the great stuff they did on their twitter-like wordpress site http://faculty-fellows-2010.voices.wooster.edu/ — I am mining their as new examples to add to my 50 Ways site.

And one person had a suggestion which may appear as “Larry’s List”- he asked for which were the 10 top tools; i’ve hesitated to do this because it is a bit subjective, but I think its worthy to share which have the combination of best features and likely reliability.

I have some plans to roll out a new 50Ways wiki (already nabbed the wikispaces spot) to make it open for more people to contribute. The current 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story wiki is set for me only to edit, since I used it a lot for presentations; I had it open to members for a bit, but someone indvertantly wiped out some chunks.

But I have these ideas for a new more open wiki, and am widely open to suggestions:

• All of the existing materials will be moved over there
• Put each tool on its own page, have a screen shot, a more detailed description, a list of pros and cons, tags to identify both the type of tools (Slideshow, Map) as well as the types of media supported)
• The tags could be used to list all associated tools, so you can more easily get to the ones that allow you to import audio, or ones that use video, or ones that are presentation tools
• When people contribute, I will have them use the wikispaces code to add their “signature” to the page as a contributor
• Tool pages would be open to edit, so people can add more examples, or modify the description. I really want to have more, and better relevant educational examples.
• I’ll keep the main list under lock, so as people create new tool pages, I will add them once they have all the “parts”; I’ll provide a template for the tool page

I had dreamed of having this ready for this week’s preso, but stuff just keeps getting in the way!

This is the newest Dominoe story created in a tool so new and exciting I don’t have a category.

I heard of Zooburst first in March 2010 at the NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning when Craig Kapp did one of the most outstanding presentations I’d seen anywhere, a session on the Augmented Reality projects he has done in a year at NYU (see the presentation materials, including a YouTube video of the whole session).

We’ve also been pegging Zooburst it as an example in the recent NMC Horizon Reports. It is a web-based content creation tool for making a 3D story that pops up on a page when viewed on the screen. You can have 10 pages in a story, each with a caption.

Even viewed on the web it is impressive, you can spin the book around and view it from different angles. Any object can have a thought associated with it (click an “!” and you get a comic bubble).

The authoring interface is well designed, and fairly easy to use; it takes some practice to learn how to place and move objects. What is clever is that it is connected to an Open Clip Art vector library which offers a nice selection of objects, characters to use. In addition you can upload your own images- I made a few dog characters by masking the background out of my Dominoe photos and saving as PNGs with transparent background. It remembers objects you have used so you can re-use them in subsequent pages.

I spent about 90 minutes making my AR version of my oft told story, most of that learning how to move things around. Also, I found that you have 10 pages to work with, and given my story has 18 frames, I did some combining– I dont see this as a problem, I like the creative challenge of working in a limit.

But the magic happens when you flip the view into Screen mode as shown in the top photo. You just need to print out a page with the augmented reality marker. When you hold the symbol up to your web cam, the box on the paper appears to flip open, the book opens up and your story is now there in 3D, you can move the paper around to move the characters.

So here is the Augmented Reality version of the Dominoe story which, nicely, you can also embed in a web page:

This was a bit intoxicating to explore, and I need to pull back and consider why this might be an effective approach beyond the WOW factor… but WOW is pretty good, right? This is just in time, as in about 5 and a half hours I am doing a 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story session via Skype to a group of teachers at the College of Wooster.

Update: I heard from Craig, and the next version of Zooburst is going to have no page limit and some nifty new features, like the ability to record audio for your characters to speak with! If you are excited about this, come to the June 2010 NMC Summer Conference where Craig is doing a pre-conference workshop on Augmented Reality in the Classroom

I will definitely show my age era here.

Yes, you kids with your “digital buy a song for 99 cents mix it up on your pod” may have something special you will blog about in 20 years. But for me, in many ways, there was nothing like the music that defined the Album Rock period that ushered me through those teen years.

It’s one thing to have a good song, but an Album, for many musicians, was a concept, a whole, and there was not only the music, but the art on the cover, the liner notes, the stamp on the disc… it was a feast. What do you get in an iTunes download?

Just bits.

So I had a hankering to come up with a list of ten albums that were formative to me- not the ten best albums nor the most important, but actually, ten I could recall because of when they occurred in my life. Ten stories.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Scoobay

But first, I was a little inspired by this book, 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die. I had thumbed through it last April when I was on my sister’s boat, and it was a nice surprise when she sent me a copy as a gift.

It’s a book you can just pick up and thumb through anywhere, it is arranged alphabetically by artist/group, crossing classical to rock to show tunes to punk to opera to world music. You go from Héctor Lavoe to Leadbelly to Ernesto Leeuono to Led Zeppelin to Peggy Lee to Michael Legran. Author Tom Moon offers clear, non snooty critic like commentary, but it is opinion (how can it not be?).

There’s a neat little bit of linkage at the end of each section, almost like hypertext in an old style book. For each album, the author lists “key tracks” from the album; then “Catalog Choices”, like a “see also” meaning another album by the same artist; then “next stop” which is something similar by a different artist, and last is “After That” something less related, that might help you branch out in musical style. This is all accomplished in about an inch of print, and it leads to discovery.

So here are my Ten Formative Albums…

1. Abbey Road (The Beatles)
This was the first rock album in our house, bought by one of my older sisters. The basement of our suburban Baltimore house had shelves lined with my Dad’s Philip Sousa, classical music, and Mom’s tastes like Neil Diamond or Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass (Whipped Cream and Other Delights is another story).

We had this old fashioned record player, the thing was in a wooden box, and it had TUBES!

I remember dancing around the basement to the Fab Four, and of course at maybe 7 no concept what the music was about or that there was a concept here. Likewise, I remember being in a car at the Reisterstown Road Plaza when the news came on the radio that the Beatles had split up. I had no idea why my sisters were crying. Or maybe that’s how I remember it.

2. BTO’s Greatest
Was this my early recognition of my love for everything Canada? Doubtful, but I was influenced by FM radio I started listening to in middle school when98 Rock came on the air waves.

This album was significant for one reason- it was the first album I bought with my own money. Back then, on Saturday’s it was my duty to go with my Mom for weekly grocery shopping, one of those duties I may have dragged my feet around in boredom… until the grocery store we went to (I cannot remember which one now!) added on the side a record store! That was amazing, as now I had something to do while Mom shopped.

So with my allowance I plunked down cash to I could listen on my own to “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” , “Hey You”, and of course their “anthem: if you will- “Takin’ Care of Business”.

3. The Kids Are Alright (The Who)
This was/is hands down the most influential album in my musical arc. I may have only known of the Who from before via “Pinball Wizard” (see what a nebbish I was), and it was 9th grade, when my new circle of friends (Yo, Kev!) opened my eyes to all kinds of things.

I think we actually went and saw the movie first, after which I rushed out and bought the album, then in about 3 years, every Who album I could get my hands on, then the Pete Townsend solos, then… well I am still a Who junkie.

This double set spans the glory years of the Who, with the opening explosive My Generation along with the Tommy Smothers Brothers opening (documented elsewhere). I can still almost recite the dialogue from memory “That was bowling”)– and while I likely did not really “get” the smashing guitars and exploding drums when I first saw it, the power, energy, and attitude propelled me to aim far form the status quo that was high school.

Don’t even try to get me to pick a favorite album, but if a gun were held to my head, it would be “Who’s Next” and the must under-appreciated “Who By Numbers”.

4. Paranoid (Black Sabbath)
Even wanting more to not be like the preppies or popular kids At Milford Mill led our little group (we were the group that did not want to join other groups, kind of like a “Non-Conformist Club”) into the darkness of Sabbath, of which one murky night listening to “War Pigs” at Doug’s house was some sort of rallying cry– for what I did not know.

Sure “Iron Man” was on the radio all the time, and even I could pick out the 3 note progression on a guitar, but who could help an 11th grader rebel more than a song like “Rat Salad”.

I have to add a side note to the intense concert we went to when Ozzy went on his forst solo tour- before the stupid bat biting theatrics, when it was (or it seemed to be) about the music. Randy Rhoads was a freaking guitar genius, why’d you go on that plane and die?

5. Tommy (The Who)
I had to come back for more with The Who.

Few works really define the rock album concept than the Who’s rock opera. Opera? Rock? Who would have ever thought? This had to be Pete’s musical genius peak, though he had many highs. I still get chills at the Overture, the repeated themes that weave through the 2 record set. And its a whole store, from start to finish.

The real light was that in middle school I had seen the plastic coated movie version, likely due to the insane popularity then of Elton John (oh my). At that young age, I did not even know that the movie was not the original. Thankfully I wised up.

I’m fuzzy on when I first listened, but it was definitely high school in the late 1970s.

Our group was so into it… that when it came time for the senior yearbook, when all those people I could not stand were trying to define the experience, I convinced my friends that in our yearbook listings, we put fake nicknames– from Tommy. So Larry with the curly hair is listed in the 1981 Milestone as “Tommy” and Kev is “Cousin Kevin”… and not even realizing the implications of it, my fake nickname is written there as “Uncle Ernie”.

I was interested then in doing anything to go against the high school establishment.

6. Led Zeppelin I
Of course you could not be into 1970s rock without knowing of Led Zeppelin, but I had to groan every time “Stairway to Heaven” played in the radio, which was like every other hour.

So I never got too much into their music til that night we hung out with Jimmy’s house– he was the one in our group I had known least well, and he was certainly the most wiling to do something daring or illegal– I can recall sitting in his basement with some bottle of scotch we had snuck out of one of parent’s liquor cabinets, and Jimmy smiling that devilish grin as he laid down the needle every so gently on “Good Times Bad Times” right on through to the white british boy blues “You Shook Me” and we played that disc again and again.

Led Zep I is still my favorite of their albums.

Where-ever you are Jimmy… thanks.

7. Highway to Hell (AC/DC)
If there was ever an album that would shake your parents house and make them want to take away your turntable, it was the bad boys from Australia.

I first heard “Highway to Hell” o FM radio in high school, and my first thought was how crass and cheap that song was (it got a bit much rotation). It was again, my buddy Kevin, who sat me down under the influence of some substance (heck it might have been diet coke) and listen closely to the whole album.

This was power rock if there ever was one. Kevin had a revenge song going, so “Walk All Over You” was always blasting out of his Nova… but if there was any song that got me, i was the bluesy riff of “Night Prowler”, stuff you did not even hear on the radio– you had to get the album to hear the real stuff.

It was maybe Freshman year of college that three of our group met up in DC to see them play live. Kevin was unable to get transportation there; and I remember us all afterward recording our impressions for him on a cassette tape– which I think I have somewhere and would be truly embarrassing if it ever saw the light of day.

For me the band was never the same without Bon Scott.

So it was fitting, that when I visited Perth Australia in 2007, that Sue Waters and friends banded together and, with the help of twitter, found Bon Scott’s grave (photos)

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

That was a crowning achievement!

8. Combat Rock (The Clash)
It was a college room-mate with the unlikely name of Mike Wang during my freshman year at the University of Delaware who incessantly played “Rock The Casbah”, also in the time of the first years of MTV when they actually played music.

It was not strictly formative at the time– and I really did not think much about who the Clash were– I just remember the cover, Mike’s wide eyed look when he played it usually during one of our poker marathons and he slammed a straight flush on the table.

It was not for a long long time later, way past the point that I had a turntable, that I truly got to appreciate the drive and the range of The Clash (I can never get enough of “The Magnificent Seven”).

But I’d like to give Mike credit ;-)

9. Morrison Hotel (The Doors)
You could not have escaped the 1970s without knowing the music of the doors, with staples ‘Light My Fire” even crossing over to stations your parents might listen to.

They are another of many 1970s bands I knew first surficially and did not really appreciate until I dug into the tracks the radio stations did not play.

I recall listening to Morrison Hotel (and LA Woman) this a lot (on cassette) on my cross country move in 1987 from Baltimore to Arizona. It was definitely road music, but the division of this disc into the two themed sides of Hard Rock Cafe / Morrison Hotel was always interesting.

Sure Roadhouse Blues was staple radio play, but did yo ever hear ‘You Make my Real” or “Waiting for the Sun” on the air waves? But it was always Peace Frog, the driving power chords but also the dark message of revolution, that got me (I must admit I have Peace Frog as a ring tone on my iPhone).

And then after rocking, you flip over and mellow out to “Queen of the Highway” or one of my faves “I’m a Spy”

You can check out but… you can check out.

10. Legend of Cash (Johnny Cash)
I was so musically ignorant for most of my life. I really dismissed Johnny Cash as “country” or old people’s music, this “guy in black”.

My eyes were opened in a movie theater watching Walk the Line – part of it appreciating the range of music he played, but more so, the whole story behind the story.

Sp I first dug into his music with this “best of” collection, and its still heavy n my listening rotation.

But it was really his cover of.. a heavy metal song by Soundgarden, that clued me into his genius- he turned that song inside out for his own hard edged raw version.

I tried in a few of my edtech presentations to use this as an example- that for some teachers, they are just a cover band- doing faithful renditions of traditional materials, while others, like Johnny Cash, truly taught in a way that re-interpreted previous work in a novel, new way.

I dont think anyone every followed my thinking.

But I did have fun doing a re-mix of the two versions.. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/movies/rusty-cage-remix.mov

So those are my 10– any of you other old farts out there want to do your list? If you do, I found http://www.coverhunt.com/ useful for finding album art.

Now all I need to do is oen day drive to Florida, to reclaim by boxes of vinyl Mom is holding for me…. wel and get a turntable… and turn the lights down low, and let the needle drop into the groove….

cc licensed flickr photo shared by danmachold

As Stephen suggested where he plotted his own tour of Metcalfe Ontario, this is a great simple activity one can do for some online storytelling- now with Google Street view, you can literally snap photos of your old neighborhood, and mix that with your memories, and shazam! Digital story.

It’s something most every person could do, assuming they have a childhood they don’t mind recalling.

But hee hee, it is not often one gets to say he did something way before Stephen, but (cough cough), I posted a memory map in flickr back in 2005 when a group started to collect similar photos

This was old school Google Maps- no street view to snap photos, so I used the Notes tool in flickr to annotate my map with bits of memories, sledding on Suicide Hill, the creepy corner that had been a Civil War slave cemetary, my old middle school, etc.

But its not about the platform or when someone did this; it’s about what opens when you post it online. In my case, I got a comment from Phil who is currently a student at my old school:

I go to Sudbrook. They are renovating the whole place…. I know exactly where your talking about. I will upload some pictures of the school now so you can see a difference (If they let me take some pictures). We have a new gym floor and new bleachers, air conditioning, new windows, new bathrooms, and new lights!! I have never heard of “Suicide Hill”.

And in a similar fashion, someone commented on Stephen’s map/story who grew up in the same town.

There is so much one can do with map based stories, especially with the ability to, in many places, even Strawberry Arizona, go into Street View mode.

For another twist, a few clicks back I noticed while exploring Street View in San Francisco (likely cause thats one of the few places one could see it), that often, the Google Camer Car would end up following another vehicle, so I had the idea to make up a movie following the path down Lombard Street… I see no reason why one could not use screen capture software, and make an audio narrated tour as you do a streetview walk through your old neighborhood (or even a new one).

Maps can add a whole new dimension or 3 to your stories.

But what is most interesting is the variety of ways people have managed to take Doug Peterson’s idea and create them in all kinds of tools.

If you had not played with this before, the initial description tells it all:

I’ve been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora’s workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative work, from all things, of old Nancy cartoons. Using the Five-Card Nancy web version of Scott’s original card game, Ruben conducts an exercise in visual story weaving.

Basically, you get a shuffled deck of five panels from different Nancy cartoons, and you have to pick one at a time to, in five steps, produce a coherent story, or at least die laughing trying. The point is to make connections and discuss the reasons for the choice.

The idea that has been brewing is to create a web tool that works the same, but rather than drawing from a pool of Nancy cartoons (no offense to the Nancy-holics), draw from a pool of images, say in flickr– this is different slightly from the Flickr Tell a Story in 5 Frames, but presents another way of facing the challenge of telling a story in images only.

The problem with that version was the part of it that fetched flickr images with a given tag was built on some code that a tweet out got a solution from John Krutsch. While this worked, the logic was based on parsing the results display of a flickr search, and when flickr changed the output of their search last August, my code went up in a puff of smoke.

I knew that what I needed to do was to do it the right way, via the flickr API. Fortunately, I had some experience and used before the phpFlickr code library, and a few months ago I got a portion of the code redone, but left it on the shelf too long.

One task was to redesign the database a little more compact fashion and to do away with so much dependence on writable text files to store data (I was trying to be nice to the flickr API and store a local array of found photos). I also wanted to try and preserve all the bits that had been created before, so I had a few rounds of running some custom code to move and update the database.

So now the story creation parts al work again, and any photos you tag as 5cardflickr should be added to the pool (note that I poll flickr only once an hour to look for new photos).

I’d like to test it a bit before updating the google code site, but when I get the code, there, it should be easier to set up than before.

Try it now, tell a in 5 flickr photo…. http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/play.php

But c’mon, how many other ways do you mix up Jack with an Ax, Jack in the Ice, Jack in the Bar, jack poking his head through the wall, Jack as Woody Allen (oaky, Mikhail, that was clever and rule bending) ? Yawwwwwwwn I was looking for some different angles on the story. Some made up ones.

For me, the Shining was a story about a boy, his toys, and his boundless love for a Dad who gave him more and more toys.

But as I watched it, I was mesmerized first by its elegance. Not being a film critic, the simplicity of its form (no music, no spoken words beyond the ambient), the detailed closeups impressed me. But more than that, if there was not a title on the video, and I just watched it, there is a smartly created sense of mystery as to what is happening, slowly revealed.

Done straight up documentary style, with an opening credits sequence, hip music, and some professional announcer voice, it would have no magic or charm.

Thankfully, it was not done that way.

I only wish they would have not titled the video in a way that totally gives it away. I could have done something to mask it, but imagine you have not seen the title…

If I were teaching video or storytelling, I would most certainly use this video as one example of a powerful style. Sure one could copy it, but there are elements you can use in other pieces, be it the slow unveiling of the action, or the edit cuts, or the use of detail, lighting, camera angle.

And woah, 2380! Wow.