CogBlogged Tagged ‘VisualAssignments’

Two more for the GIF pile of ones made not by downloading video clips, but using my own photos– the ds106 assignment is Photo it Like Peanut Butter: Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minmal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff. See a bunch of examples at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/02/10/photo-gif-peanut-butter/ I found these in my own backyard, a place I have photographed 1000s of things, yet I find two new ones today. The first was noticing the patterns in water dripping out of one of my conduits that transfers runoff from my roof gutters out to my apple tree. I thought it would make a nice photo, but once I got my belly on the ground, I fired off 5 shots in rapid fire mode in my [...]

Just put the phone away, will ya? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This one is for the Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge a rather special one since it was former ds106 student Sara K who sent this out as a challenge last year. It’s only fitting with Valentines Day tomorrow t put it through the ds106 treatment, this assignment is required of all my students for this week in visual storytelling. The task? I was in Urban Outfitters the other day and stumbled across a postcard pack labeled “Unbridled Passion” by Franco Accornero. It’s a collection of 30 different postcards from an artist who has painted more than 5,000 romance novel covers (as well as westerns, thrillers and sci-fi books). The postcards are really ridiculous on their own, but I thought for this Valentine’s day I would make them even funnier but adding my own [...]

The Abominable Pine Man was spotted in the vicinity on December 15, 2012. Unlike the Lock news Monster, Sasquatch, the photos of this super natural creature ares sharp, clean, and obvious no fabrication or some buffoon in a fur suit. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In time the monster morphed into a floppier version cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But it was not invincible, in fact, it had pretty much transformed into a sad shell of its former glory: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Until today! It’s back, reformed, and now something more of a Squirrel Bear Hybrid: Just for the sake of the ds106 GIFfest, I call this a sporting event GIF … who’s gonna stop me? When will the GIFfing stop? NEVER!

How could anyone resist doing Tom Woodward’s Not Quite Norma Jean assignment? The past is strange. Remake this classic Marilyn Monroe “expressions sheet” with self-portraits or with the aid of a friend. Bonus points for the involvement of a stranger. And I thought, if Tom Woodward can pose coyly like Marilyn, than surely my stuffed animal Feldspar can pull it off? And as I worked with the image I made from it it started saying to me, please make me into a GIF, yeah, a Riff a GIF type of GIF. Enjoy. For the makings, I created Photoshop file with the background a capture of the screen at Retronaut (I liked the frame on it), and in the top layer, a copy of this made with the images of her cut out, so it was a copy of the frames around the images that sits above the 9 separate image [...]

I spotted many a grain elevator in my cross country travels, but this one in Lawndale Illinois caught my attention the most, for the faint “Faultless Feed” on the side of the grain elevator, plus as a bonus it was right on Old Route 66. While snapping my photos, I saw the lights down the track. I had to book it and run under the dropping barriers to get a series of photos of a passing Amtrak train. What could be more suited for doing animated GIFs than trains? We need something like this for the upcoming ds016 GIFfest (what is that) (it’s a secret) (shh). So we have the new All Aboard The GIF Train assignment hoisted in a new corner of ds106 “Train kept a rollin’ all night long…” “Down around the corner half a mile from here, see them long trains run and you watch them disappear…” [...]

What could be more key and symbolic of the magic of Oz than the red slippers that Dorothy snagged from the Wicked Witch who got mushed by her flying house? The fact that Dorothy always had the magic but did not know it until sparkly Good Witch clued her in. This GIF is done for the classic ds106 Say it Like Peanut Putter assignment Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential. I knew an animated GIF of the shoes would be part of my new story. So I used PwnYouTube to download the video for the “No Place Like Home” clip as an mp4 I opened this in MPEG StreamClip to snag just the 2 second segment of the shoes flopping. I opened it in QuickTime player to then save it as a [...]

Dorothy seems timeless even looking back at the Wizard of Oz from maybe 80 years past its time. But her statue I saw on the streets of Liberal Kansas seemed kind of old, maybe it was just the texture of the metal, but I speculated she might get nostalgic for her own youth (or at least mobility): I made this for my story project as a response to the Then-Now-Together ds106 assignment: Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo! Okay, it was not “me” but my character. And Dorothy is young and innocent enough in Oz to qualify for childhood. I [...]

On my trek home earlier this month, I picked off of the map a route in Kansas that would take me through the near Texas border town of “Liberal” – which I read on a plaque has nothing to do with politics– it was in reference to the sharing of water liberally by the first settler. It’s created draw of interest is being where Dorothy’s house (a replica thereof) sits so there is a lot of Oz-ification cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There are a number of Dorothy statues on the streets. I was intrigued of some over the shoulder photos as maybe she gazed wistfully at a fun shriner convention across the street: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This lead me to do a series of rapid shots in succession to get the blur of traffic going by Dorothy, [...]

I was on the beach recently and found a cute kid to take a photo of: I got the push to make it seeing Before and After Pictures with a Twist on Buzzfeed where some dude inserted modern photos of himself into photos of him as a kid- but its more than cut and paste, he carefully considered the pose and details like shadow. My first reflex- “This would be a cool ds106 assignment” I am thinking of creating a twitter auto responder then when anyone tweets a message like that it responds with something like: So this is now an assignment Then-Now-Together: Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to [...]

Gotta feed the animated GIF bacteria that lives in my gut. I had a few sets of photos I have taken over the travel span that I took series of things in motion for the express purpose of making them animated. I did these in PhotoShop via the method blogged earlier – essentially importing files as a stack, setting frame sequences in he animation palette, and sometimes masking out to reduce the elements being animated. These will be tagged to end up in the Photo it Like Peanut Butter ds106 assignment. First up, from the great state of New York, at the small town where I crossed the Hudspn River, I had just hopped out of the truck to take a photo of the bridge when the sound of a train grabbed my attention (I literally ran across the tracks to get the angle) – this one is 549k. Next [...]