I absolutely love spacesick‘s homage to various movies by making them into old school books with fascinating, minimalistic design that somehow captures the essence of the films. The series is called “I can read movies”, and the whole thing really appeals to my sene of design. Plus, the idea of movies like Highlander and Dawn of the Dead being turned into novels is its own brilliant idea all together. I ran across this set while searching for examples of fan art for class tonight, and I have to say this whole idea of framing a series of assignments around various elements of design next semester, say like minimalist movie posters, is definitely gonna have to make its way into ds106.
I mean, how cool is the cover for Dawn of the Dead?
I Can Read Movies Dawn of the Dead
Or Highlander?
Or Blade Runner? I mean the whole reading I have of this film is apparent from this cover, it’s so amazing how much a graphic can communicate. Not only that, but how much more viscerally it can communicate it—you just know it when you see it.
And here is the whole set:
And then the actual minimalist movie posters, like backstothewall‘s The Shining poster. Wow!
I mean there has to be another two or three weeks built into ds106 for design assignments experimenting with posters, impossible novelization cover designs, and maybe even a fake Criterion DVD cover design.
Got to play with this, which may push me to get better at photoshop and/or illustrator. Or perhaps Gimp so I can actually do it with the class. And that Empire DVD cover reminds me of the brilliant Star Wars travel posters….
Man, the generative creativity of all of us made apparent and accessible by the internet seemingly has no end—it’s really such a source of inspiration and faith for me. Why the hell do I have to continue to deal with the completely debilitating sterility and blindness of the world of education in the face of this unimaginable and seemingly infinite treasure we have at our fingertips.
I was unbelievably impressed with the mashups the internauts in ds106 came up with for our 9th assignment. I took a pretty different approach to video this semester, I stuck with it intensively for about 3 or 4 weeks. Andy Rush came in and blessed us with his new media prowess, particular all things digital video . That set the stage beautifully for the coming assignments which were very much geared towards the fast, cheap, and under control mentality. We were showing student how to mash the web with free resources fro downloading, decoding, re-compressing, and even basic editing for nothing. What’s more, we played only with the video editing systems they had on their machine. This sucked for Moviemaker folks, but it got done nonetheless. What’s more, it as remarkable to me how much can be accomplished with a few weeks of assignments and thinking about the grammar of video. I really believe this part of ds106 needs to be extrapolated to its own 15 week course that Andy Rush and I should team teach. It would be a blast, allow folks to stretch out time wise. And, what’s more, get schooled by Andy Rush about the intricacies of digital video. It’s both an art and a craft, and their is so much to know. We came far this semester, but we could have gone further had we the time.
That said, the fruit of the dss106 video labor is to me more than apparent, and they set the bar high for excellent work in this regard. In fact none of the mashups were bad, they were all very solid, but I’ll limit it to ten below to both filter and celebrate some remarkable work.
Notorious VS Marie Antoinette
To start off, Linday Wlaker’s idea to mash up Notorious (as in B.I.G.) and Marie Antoinette seemed insane at first. But when you realize how much hip hop culture and the 18th century French aristocracy had in common it is rather remarkable. The heart of the mashup, try and marry two unlike things and make them anew.
Shutter Island VS Harry Potter
Morrgan’s recut of the Harry Potter by way of the audio from the Shutter Island trailer is well done. What is apparent through this video is just how much Morrgan is getting the grove of editing down. Understanding what shots make an effect, and the final shot really brings this to the fore. The process of reediting a film (or films) she loves also gives her a sense of how that film makes meaning though cuts and edits. It is awesome to see an acute sense of the pace of editing emerge so quickly.
Andrew Ryan VS Walt Disney (A Bioshock mashup)
I really enjoyed Garrett Bush’s simple and very powerful idea of taking an extended monlogue from Bioshock’s Andrew Rya and mapping it onto a film of Walt Disney explaining the concept of the Magic Kingdom. The effects are rather chilling, give Ryan’s ultra-conservative vision of an Ayn Rand reality for the future. One we are very much a part of right now.
The Expendable VS The Power Rangers
Kevin Chernawski’s posts about his work are always as good as the work itself, and that is saying a lot. He always takes a moment to frame why he did what he did, and what drove him. It is usually short and to the point, but the impetus of nostalgia for including The Power Rangers in this piece informs for me so much of what drives us in this medium: nostalgia. And we are never too young to be nostalgic. This is extremely important to remember, but all too easy to forget.
Anchorman: the Legend of an American Psycho Chris’s mashup is at once the funniest and darkest. it is remarkable how much Anchorman and American Psycho have in common. This is also solid through to the end, keeps a pacing with a hard conceit to keep going.
Sick Jams: Kid in basement VS Michael Jordan
I really liked the Sick Jams video by Wesley which mashes up a kid playing basketball in his basement alongside some of the sickest jams of Michael Jordan’s remarkable career. Unfortunately the audio soundtrack was tagged for copyright, so that has been rendering ineffectual for the moment. Additionally, quality of video clips could and should be higher, despite conversion.
Terminator Salvation VS Modern Warfare
I like the way Ed Martinez illustrates how similar film and video games aesthetics in general plot line are running these days. And while the audio editing needs work, I think this mashup is so interesting because it points in the direction movies and video games have been headed for years. And it does with a sense of common let’s move as well as an idea of being able to depart from some parts of the past.
Yosemite “Scarface” Sam
Kevin Hernandez’s Yosemite Scarface has some real potential to kinda blow up. It’s always great to see a Loony Tunes character, and Yosemite would make a very mean and intriguing Scarface. Fact is, Kevin had the idea, and with a few more clips with Yosemite Sam and some further audio and video editing this would have phenomenal.
New Moon Mash
Gretchen Houser’s mashup of Ten Ways to Lose a Guy and Twilight works in yet a third element, the New Moon trailer that mocks the original Twilight . So, what you have going here is three narrative simultaneously. And while Gretchen remarks about her dearth of creativeness, I think how quickly she picked up the process and started really dealing on three levels with a rather sophisticated re-cut was impressive. Particularly the first 1:28 so compelling is well worth a shout out here.
Iconic
And last, but certainly not least, is Stephanie’s art mashup. She asked if she could just do an image mashup, I didn’t want to seem to biased towards video—even though I am— so I agreed. And I am glad I did, I love the way Stephanie frames this conceptual art piece for us in her post framing the piece.
I did it after seeing a video on an artist who did a piece with a sunken ship on a pile of ‘defect’ sculptures from a workshop. He pointed out that they were almost all images of icons, and if you looked at each one they still looked perfect but were considered not good enough for sale. He picked one of them out of the pile and put it on a shelf in his studio and suddenly instead of being one sculpture out of many, it became an icon again.
I love the way the icon can only really remain powerful when it is severed from any relationship of the other objects. Makes me think about the idea of iconography that much more deeply. How do we use these icons to embody an idea, something that can only happen in some kind of vacuum. I love the way the visual helps you read and see in ways we simply can’t capture with text alone.
OK, that’s all for my feature now, my next post if I get the time is to talk about the totally online and open version of ds106 I’m thinking about for this coming Spring. I have officially been given a second section of the course at UMW to do totally online, which pushes me to redesign the pieces and customize it to make a open version simply an amplification. Hopefully I can make sense of what I am thinking on that front soon.
Thanks to one of the elite ds106 alum, Modern Selkie, I was turned on to this gem.
What’s odd is that this video really does capture my attitude towards Star Wars and teaching it to my children. In fact, my wife and I are unschooling our kids (which basically means not schooling them in any controlled, formal way), and part of that whole process has been to conduct a yearlong indoctrination into the universe of Star Wars. So I am proud to say that this video is my life right now as a father. Enjoy.
And as a final note, Jar Jar Binks’s name is not to be spoken in the house. Thank you Modern Selkie, you made my day.
It all started with this Retweet by Melanie McBride this morning:
It just so happens that I caught this in the stream and my interrest was piqued when I saw Google Street View mentioned because right now the ds106 internauts are using Google Street View to create a narrative about their childhood home, a particular trip, etc. using Google Street View. And when I saw this link to the “seedy side” of Google Street View I couldn’t resist. Jon Rafman’s Tumblr blog that collects all these images is extremely provocative, and whether or not all the images are real—that aquarium seems like a hard sell as Garrett Bush mentioned in class tonight—a vision of the seemingly invisible realities of the police state, prostitution, public sex, and other random acts of craziness is fascinating.
All this to say I spent part of tonight’s class talking about this site, and sharing the examples. And what quickly became apparent to me is that everyone of these images is a prompt for a story. We all were taken in by them, but also we were let with a million questions, and the idea of stitching the story back together became an almost natural urge. I’d love to do a forensic/detective narrative using Google Street View, or a scavenger hunt on Google Earth, but that will have to wait until I actually have a plan. What did happen tonight, however, was kinda fun nonetheless. After looking at the images, I spontaneously asked the class broke up into groups and tasked them with captioning as many of these crazy pictures as possible in the time left of class. And they did. Not only that, what they did was very, very fun. I really can’t defend the “learning objective” (vomit) of this in-class assignment though, I had no other reason for making them do it other than I had an idea it might be fun, and oh was it ever. Look at the fruits of their sardonic joy.
You can’t see me… I am a Ninja!
Modern Day Abbey Road!
Hulk Smash!
Slippery when wet
“Is this how the squirrels do it?”
“Jinkeys, looks like Scooby found the Fire Sauce.”
“I better get out of here before her husband catches me.”
The Pink Portal to the Great Beyond
Welcome to STARK industries…..building the future!
Rock'n the "manddals"
Father time was not nice to you, Skeletor!
Pluto you've got you lay off the acid
Coming soon…..Google Inception!
Service Worker's Revenge
Lemonade: $1 per hour.
Dog Park Rejects
Hazards of Narcolepsy
Even heroes have the right to dream.
"Mom! There's a spaceship outside!"
Flowers do not equal happiness.
Flipper Five!!!!
I told you not to text and walk at the same time!
Police Officer “This is how you make the Y! Again from the top!”
Sometime this month the 176 videos I have uploaded to my YouTube channel have been collectively viewed more than 1 million times—well, 1,041,448 to be exact. It’s pretty crazy to think videos I have uploaded have been watched that many times, particularly because most of my videos are either joke videos, family videos, video game snippets, or clips from films that I have blogged about over the last five years (that’s right, bavatuesdays turns five years old in less than a month).
And the community on YouTube is vigorous to say the least, I get anywhere from 10-15 comments a day on my videos, and friend and subscriber emails regularly. But I never feed the comment community there because it has always for me been a staging area for the blog where I can really contextualize what I put up there. Which is kind of ironic given how much I use YouTube myself for research, nostalgia, blogging, and general entertainment. I have a weird relationship with YouTube, but of all the Web 2.0 tools I find I use Wikipedia and YouTube far more than any others—save maybe Google search.
What’s interesting is that the most traffic on my YouTube channel has been garnered by two videos. The screencast/demo of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Atari 2600 game I did a few years back which has 126,000 views.
The other one is the “Patriotic Popeye” cartoon I posted as a joke for the 4th of July three years ago which has a 134,000 views.
So these two rather unremarkable videos are responsible for more than a third of all my views on YouTube over the last three years. But where it gets interesting is that the other 600,000 or 700,000 are spread out around various clips of films I’ve uploaded. The views on these clips make up the bulk of my channel’s traffic, which is very encouraging to me. My personal videos and joke videos get a very small amount of traffic, but the movie clips are gold. And one of the things I pride myself on is that I have always tried to upload decent quality clips from good films that at the time I uploaded them did not already exist on YouTube. I felt like I was helping build out the unbelievable open and public archive that was and is YouTube. A public square for good film clips which provides an indispensable service to contemporary culture that you really can’t find anywhere else. Possibly the second best thing—and a very, very distant second—is the Internet Archive. I wanted to help build the archive that is YouTube, and over the last three years I have. Here are some of the movie clips I have uploaded along with their views to give you a sense of how these rather marginal films have a regular and consistent audience of fans on the internet:
The beginning of RIchard Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) —the first film clip I ever uploaded to YouTube (26,379 views).
The trailer for The Miracle Mile (1988) –not the best quality but I actually found the video on MySpace and downloaded and ported it to YouTube a few years ago (51,196 views)
THe Repo Code scene from Alex Cox’s masterpiece Repo Man (1984) with 59,450 views.
The openings of two of my favorite films by John Carpenter, the 1976 classic Assault on Precinct 13 (26,242 views) as well as Jamie Lee Curtis narration at the beginning of his 1981 apocalyptic visionEscape from New York (57,422),
And then there is the internet scene from David Croneberg’s Scanners (14,969).
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And even Mario Bava’s The Whip and The Bodywith 41,950 views—a little bondage always helps those stats!
And then I can’t forget the Italian TV vignettes with the great Totò I published. Like Totò Cassiere with a healthy 49,830 views.
So while most of my 176 videos have less than 100 views, the clips I have been sharing out for films and video games have resonated rather widely. As for the final class of videos, well there are maybe 20-30,000 views on all my video art stuff. The only one of these videos with more than 1000 hits is The EdTech Survivalist with 1780 whopping views (I love this video):
After than it gets fewer and fewer. But somehow, some way, what has become a part of my process of posting to my blog–namely uploaded and sharing video I created or wanted to critique—has hopefully fed the same joy I feel every time I search YouTube for a movie clip and hit the jackpot. It is a very good feeling, and I want to share in some of the work.
Because the bava family are gluttons for punishment, we are thinking about getting a dog. It’s huge for me ’cause I haven’t had a dog since growing up on Long Island with our family dog Thurman—named after the late, great Yankee captain Thurman Munson. Thurman was a rather large English Springer Spaniel. I loved that dog, and he lived a long, happy, and rather healthy 16 years. And given I’ve finally come to terms with settling in Fredericskburg for the long haul, I’m even enjoying the whole thing which has put me in a kind of domestic sphere of bliss these days—admittedly it’s hard to have an edge when you’re so god damned happy. Life has been fun these days, and I’ve been enjoying my house, manshed, and life in general with the bava family. So, given things have been going so well, why not add another variable to see if we can’t screw things up. How do you know you are really happy until you are tested? 🙂
And while I grew up with dogs, my peripatetic life for the last 20 years has allowed me to only ever have cats as an adult. Both of whom I love dearly, and who have been with us now for more than 12 years now. That said, I have to admit that cats ain’t dogs, and the bava is a dog lover through and through. And I’m not just talking about that rare breed of online dog either.
So, anyway, all this to say we’re considering an Italian hunting dog called the Spinone, it’s a bearded breed, and I just love their look and disposition. They look kinda like how I imagine British gentry look, and the fact that they are great with kids, total loungers, and sure hunters simply seals the deal. More than that, they’re Italian—which means they’ll appreciate the food in our house. What’s more, after having taken Dexter on a late night walk Brian Lamb (well to be accurate, Dexter walked us) I’ve been deeply impressed by the seemingly cosmic bond between dog and owner. It seems almost transcendental since language is not necessarily what rules the relationship—it’s all about trust, consistency, and developing a groove. It’s more about your every action as a cumulative effect, and I like that. And despite that Tom Woodward has repeatedly warned us against getting a dog, I think we’re almost ready to pull the trigger—plus I think i am a little tougher than Tom when it comes to these things. So, I have a feeling new era of my life is about to begin: adult dog owner. Rock on!
What’s more, Antonella agreed that what ever the name of the dog, we will append di bava as the surname. So, something like Bianca di bava or Bruno di bava. I’m kind loving this whole thing.
Update 10/9/2018: I found and updated the original video that was lost back in 2012 or so when my account was deleted.
Thanks to the great Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding fame—dear friend, code guru, and the guy who invented the internet for me—I have a step-by-step guide for editing the aliases.conf file in order to enable domains pointed at UMW Blogs’ IP address to actually be mapped to the appropriate domain. Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin makes the actually pointing of the domain extremely easy, but we made it that you now need to manually added new alias to the aliases.conf file as a mechanism to keep track of mapped domains. It’s relatively simple, but I lost the directions recently, so wanted to post them here for safe keeping. Especially since the demand for mapping domains on UWM Blogs has exponentially increased this last year. We are pushing 200 mapped domains on UMW Blogs, which I think is truly remarkable
Anyway, here is how to add an alias on umwblogs, thinking this may help someone out there as wel. As long as you remember where our aliases.conf file may not be where your is.
The last week or so in the digital storytelling class has been a blast for me, particularly because right now we’re playing around with mashups with everything from film to video games to music to the fine arts. The assignment was due Tuesday, but I had a hell of a week so this one got done a little late. And to the ds106ers credit, almost all of them had theirs done and submitted well before me. What’s more, so many of them did amazing mashups—the video section of this course went better than in the Spring, but it still needs work. But to the class’s credit, their imaginations made it seem like an unconditional succes. As for my mashup, as always it was very fun to do, if not painstaking. I like the detail work in mashups, matching up dialogue and interpreting and reworking one film to visually conform to another, completely different one. I was inspired by a series of 70s and 80s horror film trailers. When I saw the 1977 trailer for The Car, I immediately knew I could cut up Cars (2006)—which I had seen over 30 times with my son a couple of years back. It helped that I knew the film inside and out. It’s by no means perfect, but I think it begins to accomplish my main objective: make Lightening McQueen a car from Hell. And even if it falls short, I do think I’m getting better at both the quicker action edits as well as the pacing. It’s hard to capture a narrative in two minutes, and playing with film trailers for mashups is a perfect assignment in this regard. And having finally finished the assignment, albeit late, I’m thrilled to have returned to and finished some “creative” video stuff—it has been too long.
I’ve been knee-deep in film commentaries, homemade Halloween movies, and mashups for the last three weeks in ds106, and it has been awesome. I’m on the verge of finally finishing my mashup, but in the meantime, here is a short video made by Wesley Frank, Kyle Nero and K “Money” Hernandez titled “Kyle Nero’s Halloween.” This totally appeals to my kitsch/b-movie sensibility, and the fact the Chucky from Child’s Play figures so prominently into this short film makes all the more alluring. I particularly enjoyed Kyle’s deadpan acting s well as Aubrey Elliot. What’s more, Wesley’s writing and direction were a lot of fun, and his establishing a sense of shot order is pretty impressive. Enjoy more ds106 internaut greatness.
While working on my mashup for Digital Storytelling (ds106) I found working through trailers on YouTube was the easiest way to come up with ideas (which I must admit was pretty difficult). I stumbled upon a 4-part series that collects the so-called “best” 22 horror movie trailers from the 70s and 80. And if you are familiar with the bava, you’ll know why I really couldn’t resist. Not only did I watch them through (and I’m glad to say the only two films I haven’t seen are Shock Waves (1977) and The Beyond (1981)), but I asked myself which of the following twenty two film trailers are actually scary. And so I picked what I think were the five scariest trailers of the lot (in order): 1) Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) Halloween 3) The Omen 4) Zombie 5) Evil Dead.
Fact is, most of these trailers weren’t really scary at all (though The Exorcist is downright high art), but the truly great horror films (namely Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween) are downright horrifying. I mean these trailers probably couldn’t be made today, they give you pretty much everything but the gore. And Evil Dead gives you that, kinda wild. Not to mention that both Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may be two of the legitimately scariest films ever made.
Here are a list of the trailers in this four part collection:
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
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-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
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“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
“Onward, to Camelot!”
Sometime this month the 176 videos I have uploaded to my 
While working on my mashup for 