CogBlogged Tagged ‘VideoAssignments’

Just last week, my ds106 students applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read Movies for their weekly assignment. One of my students was first in my network to share the sad news that Ebert passed away today @cogdog on a completely random note, just saw this article about robert ebert! movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-ta…#ds106 #moviecritic — micaela (@mmbutlerr) April 3, 2013 What a better way to honor his contributions that a ds106 assignment (well there are likely much better ways), but here you go, Thumbs Up For Ebert: Just a week after the Spring 2013 ds106 class applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie to analyze scenes of movies, he went on to that big movie theater in the sky. For this assignment, create a tribute to Ebert’s love of movies; but do more than just make a montage of clips of him. Put him in context with film characters, musicians, or place [...]

What is going on here at CogDOGBlog, taking the side of the cat? But you see, the way I saw this video, the poor cat was just trying o sleep at that Lil Tramp kept messing him up: This is an example for my ds106 students of this week’s video assignment. Here’s the deal- in weeks 7-8 while we were working in audio my students were charged with generating 30 seconds of foley sound for the action in a segment of a clip of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus. They tagged their clips in SoundCLoud to match the section of audio (well except for the last section, cause the teacher had a typo in the original lesson). The assignment for this week is to use those FOley segments and the original clip to make a new story. In my story, What’s a Cat Gotta Do to Sleep Around Here? it’s is [...]

In my story of Dorothy getting bored in Kansas, I wanted to have a way for her to go back to Oz, and the easiest way would be via the Play It Backward, Jack ds106 assignment: Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don’t they? So take a video of something in your life–someone running, the toilet flushing, the sink dripping, someone spitting, whatever–and reverse it! They not only look weird, but they sound weird. I used the “No Place Like Home” clip from YouTube, already saved as mp4 from my previous work. I brought this into iMovie, and edited the Clip to make it go in reverse. I added a bit of fade out on the end, visual effect of “Cartoon” and Audio effect of “Echo”, all to give it a freaky kind of satanic feel: Just keep repeating that, and you might go back [...]

We know people love ds106. I love ds106. I know you do. My students this semester are doing some of the best work (especially in terms of representing their work online) I’ve seen since I started teaching this course in January. The UMW Domain of One’s Own greatly streamlined the startup process, Martha and I have made syllabus adjustments (introductory Bootcamp, re-arranging the introduction of audio earlier) that seem to have worked, and having redone the materials now three times, it feels very solid going into my next round (I am teaching it online again for Spring 2013). My focus has been on our sections here at UMW, but we have a good amount of activity as well with Michael Branson Smith’s York College/CUNY section plus Ryan Rish’s class and Darren Crovitz’s class at Kennesaw State University. Yet I cannot help but notice the fall off among our open online [...]

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: [...]

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 tried my hand poorly a few weeks ago at the ds106 Kinetic Typography assignment. There is a reason maybe only 3 or 4 people have braved this one. Kinetic typography (“moving text”) is an animation technique that allows a creative entrepreneur to mix text and motion. Your job is to take a speech or bit of dialog (try audiobooks, movies, TV shows, etc.) and animate it like this example from Sherlock Holmes. Consider how you could visually enforce the speech’s underlying themes… or subvert them. Be creative! Without too much fanfare, and a nood to my fellow ds106ers who dig Cool Hand Luke, the classic line by Strother Martin’s aptly named character “Captain”, but more with the lines around it. The whole thing of putting people in their perceived places? What we have here… I got hooked on thie film a year ago, and did a minimalist poster as [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]