bavatuesdays

I loved Linda McKenna’s assignment to make a ds106-themed movie poster, so I started searching through some of the classic horror movie posters over the years. I didn’t have much time because I still have an Animated Comic Book Cover GIF to do, so I was looking for something quick. When I saw the movie poster for Poltergeist I figured why not just replace the hockey game on the TV screen with the ds106.us website? I did a quick screen shot of the ds106 website, but proceeded to spend about an hour messing with the layers anyway between tracing out the TV screen, cropping the added layer, messing up a few times, etc. In the end it’s still far from perfect, but I think the idea of ds106 as an alien that abducts your soul not unlike TV is made clear. What’s more, this little known alternative tagline for the film sums up my whole idea of the class 🙂

I was looking through the icons in The Noun Project, and while others might have already used these icons for similar reason, I couldn’t help but reproduce a couple of classics for The Four Icon Challenge assignment (one of the all-time greats). The first should be dead simple to guess, the second a bit more difficult, so I’ll give you a hint: 1985. As for the assignment, very easy. Take screenshots of the images and then scale them an paste them together in GIMP.

After seeing the inspiring work so many ds106 folks had done with the Spreadsheet Invasion assignment, I knew I eventually had to try it myself. I’ve been on an Atari 2600 kick for some reason lately, so I was originally wondering how much work it might take to re-create Asteroids for Atari 2600 in Excel. After looking at what that would entail (basically endless hours, though I’m not ruling it out in the future) I decided to animate the first great, mainstream video game: Pong. It seemed like the perfect option after seeing this video of the game play to spark my memory.

So, using the video as my aesthetic guide, I opened up excel and homesteaded a sheet in excel that was 81 columns wide (at .2″ a column) an 42 rows high (at .2″ as well). I filled in that area with black fill to create a basis to work from an then used five vertical squares in a column to create the paddles with white fill (each 1″ high) and I used one square that was .2″ x .2″ as the ball. The center line was made by shrinking the two center-most columns down to below .1″ each and highlighting every other cell in light gray. After that I had the field, an what was amazing to me is that it looked exactly like a game of Pong!

After that came the laborious work. I had to animate the movement of the ball diagonally from cell to cell as well as moving each of the paddles with every movement of the ball. It took me about a minute or so to animate each movement of the ball, and after each animation I had to take a screenshot. Like the one below:

After about two hours last night, an another two today I animated the ball moving at an angle from one paddle to the other, after that I decide if I wanted to finish my fifteen stars worth of assignments this weekend and still see my family I couldn’t animate another volley back, so what I did is grab all the stills I took and reverse them so that it gives the illusion of the ball going back and forth. This is a strategy I often use to make the animated GIF look smoother, so I figured I would make this animate spreadsheet an animated GIF as well—another play on the assignment I figured. Given that all my screenshots weren’t exactly the same I re-sized the layers and cropped them all to hide as much jumping from shot-to-shot as humanly possible. Of all the many GIFs I have made I might be proudest of this one, it was like making a game from scratch, and it gave me a real sense of just how complex a system video games represent. What’s more, what could possibly be cooler than using Excel to make an animated GIF of a game of Pong. I would love to finish my work with this as a more complex game but the labor is too much right now, so I am uploading my Pong template in Excel here and all my screenshots thus far in a zip file in the highly unlikely event that anyone else would want to spend endless hours animating Pong in Excel. Excel Pong anyone? 😉

That’s 11 stars, I have 4 more to go. here I come Animated Comic Book cover.

I added another new design assignment for ds106 called Remixed Game Covers inspired by this awesome remixing of a series of Atari game covers that Mikhail Gershovich turned me on to a few months back. The assignment is pretty straightforward, take a video game and remix it to change the meaning or idea. I went through the archive of Atari 2600 covers at Atari Age and found the Bowling cover to be pretty trippy, and the first thing it made me think of was Lebowski, so I changed the title to create a The Big Lebowski Atari 2600 game, which is pretty awesome. The only issue I had was locating the right font, and I was trying to find Harry Fat font without paying $60, but I should have known the awesomeness that is Atari Age has all the fonts for all the games and cartridges, and this one is called HammerFat. So, in the end, that made this one a bit easier, but I am thinking you could animate the image, or even add an animated GIF from a film, which is what I plan on playing with later this weekend.

I just submitted this as an assignment, and I will be doing a quick tutorial for this one in Photoshop and GIMP shortly. It is either a two or three star assignment in my mind, and the inspiration comes from this contest from a few years back. I took William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and interpreted the title somewhat literally with an image I found from this Guardian article.

Here is the version of the book I own (this is not a picture of my book, just one like it I found on the internet):

I simply grabbed the background color of the book cover and filled it into my image and then copy and pasted the title and author’s name from this image into the project. I then posted the image of the nude people eating lunch between the title and the author’s name. The inspired touch was having the motion picture by Anthony Bourdain rather than David Cronenberg. This was too much fun.