All the Cat Breading and Dog Swapping shenanigans that has been going on around ds106 as of late reminded me of that crazy scene in the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the dog man comes running up to Donald Sutherland, Veronica Cartwright, and Brooke Adams. It was pretty much a total freak out for me as a 10 or 11 year old young kid.
So, there was just one thing left to do….
Section 1 of ds106 at UMW #4life. Everything else is for the mandogs.
And while my photoshop of the above image sucks, I will make it up to you with this brilliant recut video of the Dog Man from Invasion of the Body Snatchers re-visione as a lovable pet in a Cesar’s Dog food commercial. Brilliant! There is an assignment here somewhere.
I was not having an easy go with today’s Daily Create which is to take a picture of confusion, but in the midnight hour Anto reminded me of my idea to confuse some characters in my son Miles’ lego collection. I raided his Harry Potter legos given we are deep into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which is turning out to be my favorite thus far. So, in honor of our reading binge over the last couple of months present you with a Harry Hagrid, do you know the spell that causes this?.
It was only a matter of time before I did an animated GIF assignment from the 1979 classic The Warriors, a film that seems to be an integral part of the ds106 fabric. This one was actually pretty easy to do—I’ve done many an animated GIF—and while this isn’t the best GIF I’ve ever done, I love that Rogue gang leader Luther is featured here doing his infamous “Warriors come out and plaaaaaaaaay.” You can see the scene below, and if you haven’t had the opportunity to see the film you really, really should, I mean what could be better than a gang film set in NYC during the late 70s, early 80s.
In terms of my process. I used the beta version of MPEG Streamclip to download the clip from YouTube, which is a great tool for ripping and converting YouTube videos for animated GIFs, mashups, etc. What’s nice is you can trim down the scene you want from the YouTube clip an then export to your desktop, from there you need to play with GIMP to create the animate GIF. I’ve created a tutorial just for this occasion, and you can find a tutorial for ripping YouTube clips from MPEG Streamclip and create a GIF using GIMP here. Hope it helps.
Being a child of the 1980s it’s hard not to have deep psychological reactions to seeing a Rubik’s Cube. So when I saw this bad boy sporting on the desk of one of UMW’s faithful—I couldn’t help but make it fit for today’s Daily Create. I mean it isn’t that much of a stretch, I’ve always wanted to complete a Rubik’s cube without moving stickers.
In Tuesday’s face-to-face class at UMW I had the good fortune of Alan Levine presenting to my students in the flesh. I have to take a moment here to recognize how much better ds106 has gotten since I started constantly reflecting on my teaching with Martha Burtis in the Spring of 2012 and now Alan this Spring. Teaching a class alongside someone else like this has proven unbelievably crucial for trying to experiment and find some kind of grove for the in-class teaching, as well as for designing and collaborating on reading and engaging the students beyond the classroom. And this is not even to mention the parallel work and learning we are doing with Scott Lockman (Temple University, Japan), Michael Branson Smith (CUNY: York College), Cynthia Sarver (SUNY Cortland), and Bill Genereux- (Kansas State University) and soon to be more–all teaching some remix of ds106 at their own schools. It has been an amazing experiment in cross-campus collaboration, and makes me think the current incarnation of ds106 is quite similar to what Matt Gold had envisioned with the Looking for Whitman project back in 2009.
All this to say that in my last class I felt like I had really started to figure out a way to manage the time together effectively, and it has taken me a long, long time to feel like I got it close to right. Here is how it went:
First 5-10 minutes: I introduced visual section of class, laid down requirements for the week: doing 10 stars worth of assignments, doing a Daily Create everyday, wondering why many still not using twitter, and reminding them to comment. The usual.
The for the next 20 minutes I borrowed a page from Alan Levine’s teaching book and borrowed his plan for the night before š I asked them all to walk around the building and film three things:
Make an ordinary object look more interesting, almost supernatural.
Take a portrait of a person; have them display an emotion.
Take a photo that makes use of converging lines.
Allow enough time to take the photos and upload them to your flickr account. Tag all of your photosĀ ds106photoblitz
Alan Levine spent the next twenty minutes engaging them in a discussion about some basics of photography such as lines, angles, the rules of thirds, and more. That is where the video above begins, and it was simply awesome to have CogDog here in Fredericksburg sharing his unbelievably generous and understated way—sometimes I have to pinch myself and ask is this really happening? He is a freaking natural!
And we spent the last twenty minutes pulling up all the photos that students took during the 20 minute photo blitz and did a quick class critique. This was amazing on many levels. First, I still marvel at how easy it is to use something like a flickr tag (in this instanceĀ ds106photoblitz) to look at all their work on the fly for a critique. Second, I had both open online students and online UMW students sharing their work during the class using the #ds106photoblitz tag even though they weren’t physically present. This element was made possible by the fact that we are live streaming as many in-class sessions as we can for just that reason. So special thanks to Linda McKenna, Tyler Crump and Michael Branson Smith for sharing their awesome remotely—that was magic for me. Third, the raid prototyping of creating and critiquing during a class session continues to be the most rewarding way to experiment with contact time in ds106. I need to do more of this!
In short, this course period just seemed to flow beautifully because we broke up the activities from me keynoting for an hour—which has happened often before and I’m afraid to say will happen again, and that is not entirely bad ;0 —to making the class more exploratory and community driven.Ā Still far from perfect, but I like the fact that patterns of effective practice seem to be emerging out of all the experimentation. But I also have to remind myself to ask the class what they thought of that class, and what they think a successful class would look like—I’d be very interested to see if our ideas correspond on this.
Anyway after all that, enjoy some of the phtotos from the ds106 photo blitz:
Create a photograph that represents the happiest or most memorable moment in your life.
This is a photo I took back in May of 2011. I chose it for today’s Daily Create because it represents the fundamental shift my life underwent over the last seven years. With each one of these maniacs I feel a sense of joy and wonder that I had never experienced before. All the lost moments come welling up while simply looking at them which in turn leads me down a gauntlet of emotions from joy to dread to outright terror. In many ways the nebulous idea of happy is inextricably linked to each one of them for me, but that is only one emotion that is wrapped up in a relationship that is emotionally all-encompassing. So, for me, it’s the moment of their arrival, the moments of their being, the moment I continue to try and come to terms with and understand the transformative shift in my worldview as a result of the arrival of these little freaks!
As soon as I saw Annie’s visual assignment for ds106 postulating that “Fat Cats make Better Art” I wanted to do it. And when Nick Antonini actually did his own version, I knew I had to do it now. So I spent some time thinking tonight about what kind of image I would put my fat cat in. Most of the examples on the insanely cool Fat Cat site (which is all in Russian) are mainly featuring the baroque art of Europe during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Given I am a proud, red-blooded American that loves freedom and pizza, I decided against this trend. I wanted to return the art to the exceptional lands that invented the web, save for that Tim Berners-Lee guy. Ā I went with my favorite 19th century US artist Winslow Homer, I figured putting a fat cat on a small dingy that is forever staring at two huge fish might introduce some much needed tension to the artwork. I am pretty happy with the way it came out, in the end.
My Process
This one was easier than I expected. I pulled Winslow Homer’s image from hereĀ and then looked around for some sedentary fat cats that are staring intently. I came up with this one from the abnormal hospital.
After downloading the images, I opened the Winslow piece, and then opening the image of the cat as another layer.
I then traced out the cat with the lasso tool and cut the cat out and then pasted it into a new layer. I then deleted the old cat layer I had just cut, and scaled the new layer with the cat to fit comfortably in the dingy by going to Layer–>Scale.
Finally, I selected the cat and used the Filters–>Artistic–>Oilify to make the cat more like a painted piece, and adjusted the brightness to dim the whiteness of the fur a bit.
I revisited an earlier image I had taken of Miles to experiment with Alan Levine’s “Splash the Color” visual assignment. I always wanted to learn how to experiment with color masking in Photoshop (I used PS for this one, not GIMP—sorry!), and thanks to Annie Belle’s brilliant tutorial here I can and did. I won’t give myself full credit for this attempt because I messed up the hair and don’t think I chose the perfect image because the hairline made it really tough, but I wanted to try it before class tonight to get my assignments started (I was feeling creatively stifled for the first 3 weeks) and I am happy with my new found understanding of masking in photoshop as well as the use of an adjustment layer, both a first for me. So, while worth 2 stars according to the assignment repository, I will only give myself one star until I redo this assignment again with a bit more precision and creativity, kinda like Annie š
Today’s assignment: “Share an image of a place that you lose things in your house.” tdc.ds106.us/tdc030/
I spend a lot of time sorting through the bookshelves in the Man Den of Casa Bava looking for books, Wii controllers, DVDs, video games, keys, my wallet, lighters, computer chords, and just about everything else you can think of. Plus, I love images of stuff clutter, no better eway to get to know someone, look at the really big version if you are interested in my book and/or DVD collection š
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
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