Today’s DS106 daily create tdc568 is to write a nonpolitical Haiku about your nation’s head of state. How can you write or talk about your nation’s head of state without mentioning politics? I am personally uncomfortable talking politics in any form unless I already know that the audience or person I am speaking with shares the same ideas as mine. That is just too hot of a topic for polite conversation, along with religion. [Link to July 1, 2013 Pew Research Center survey of common words describing Obama & Bush]
But since I’m getting in shape for the Aug 26th start of the 2013 Headless DS106 Course boot camp, I took on the challenge and was able to complete it.
Mister Obama Husband, Father, President Man of Confidence
This is not the first time I have been up against a challenge to create a piece of digital storytelling that tap danced on the edge of politics. In 2009 a composer friend of mine, Elizabeth Alexander, asked if I would create a music video for her choral composition of “Where There Is Light In The Soul” based on the Chinese Proverb:
Where There Is Light In The Soul
If there is light in the soul,
There will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person,
There will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house,
There will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
There will be peace in the world.
She gave me full creative license to choose the photo images for the piece, with final approval on completion. As I was trolling Flickr for creative commons photos I came across the White House photo stream. I was intrigued. Hmmmmm…. the concepts of beauty, person, harmony, house, nation and peace could all be found in those images. But because they were photos of a political figure there would be controversy no matter how I presented it.
I tried several other image themes, and nothing else fit as well. So I took a deep breath and cautiously went to work collecting and assembling the images to match the lyrics of the music. When I had a first draft ready, I shared it with Elizabeth, and she too had an uneasy feeling about the potential political controversy that could become associated with her music. We were both very sensitive to the other’s creative artist and in the end agreed we were okay with giving it a try, and if there was a problem I’d take it down immediately. As it turned out there was no problem at all and on last count the final version of the video “Where There Is Light In The Soul- 1st 100 Days” has been viewed over 3,000 times.
NOTE: I was very much a novice when I created this video in Windows MovieMaker back in 2009. I thought it would be powerful to begin the movie in silence as the text of the poem and my dedication played for the viewer. This lasts for almost 45 seconds. The dramatic effect I was going for ended up confusing more than a few viewers, thinking there was something wrong with the sound on their computer. I learned from this mistake.
Did you know that @IamTalkyTina and her brother @IamTalkyTodd had an older sister named Chatty Cathy? Yes siree… The infamous star of the DS106zone and the 1963 Twilight Zone episode, “Living Doll” was patterned after the very popular talking Chatty Cathy doll first introduced by Mattel in 1960 to the delight of little girls everywhere. Including one little Rockylou who you see above opening hers on Christmas morning and who most likely watched this 1960’s commercial preserved and posted to YouTube. (Fun fact: She cost around $20 back then, with inflation that would be $148 in 2013 – inflation calculator)
My doll was a rarer brunette with brown eyes and when you pulled the ring on her back she randomly “spoke” one of 18 phrases (not the original 11) that were played from a type of record player in her chest. I actually remember her saying most of these while playing with her.
I love you.
Do you love me?
Give me a kiss.
Let’s have a party.
Please change my dress.
Please brush my hair.
Where are we going?
Please take me with you.
I’m hungry .
May I have a cookie?
Will you play with me?
Please carry me.
Let’s play house.
I hurt myself!
I’m so tired.
What can we do now?
Let’s play school.
Tell me a story.
I also remember fondly, oddly enough, how curious and fascinated I was when her talking mechanism broke and my dad took her apart to show me how she worked. I still like doing things like that today. 🙂
Talky Tina with little Rockylou
I knew that Talky Tina seemed more familiar to me than she should. Even after I had created a video tribute and lengthy blog post a few weeks back [link here] about the DS106zone ‘relationship’ with Talky Tina, I had no idea that Chatty Cathy was the inspiration behind the “Living Doll” episode with June Foray providing the voice talent for both. My journey to making the GIF below and finding all of this out had simply started on a whim to find the picture of me with my much loved Chatty Cathy doll and replace her head with Talky Tina’s. (See image.)
Creating the new image was trickier than it may appear. Simply using the lasso tool to extract Talky Tina’s head from a photo and ‘pasting’ it on was not going to work. The hair styles were different with Chatty Cathy having her pig tails on top of her head. This problem was eventually solved by flipping Talky Tina’s head and using the clone tool to ‘create’ extra arm and dress for Rockylou. The arm was especially tricky because I had to extend the brown shadow at the top of Rockylou’s arm to a new part of the arm that was now magically visible.
1. Original Photo 2. Edited using clone tool to extend arm & create more dress
My first ever attempt at creating a stop motion video, Surf’s Up Dudette was a success. Inspired by the 7/28/13 DS106 tdc567 daily create to “Make a stop motion movie that brings something to life in a unique way.” I sat at the kitchen table this morning over breakfast playing with little objects I had around the house, gathering ideas and seeing what would be involved in making one of these things. In the end I decided to bring to life the little surfer “dudette” (feminine form of “dude”) that usually sits on my mantle above the fire place.
DJ & his new Hippo Sprinkler Pool
The blue background is the bottom of my grandson DJ’s new Hippo Splash Pool draped over a piano stool. (Here’s a GIF I made of him recently.)
To add some interest I then put a tennis ball under the pool at the front to look maybe like a wave. Then added a shell, a piece of coral, and a colored sand art bottle. This was actually my second attempt at taking the photos. I didn’t realize how many I would need to get something that was of a reasonable length to watch. In my first set she only surfed by once and it lasted maybe 5 seconds with the extremely short frame length required in the final video. I found this very similar to creating a GIF. As a matter-of-fact, I tested it out with my iPhone gifRus app before moving onto loading everything into Adobe Premiere Elements 11.
With the second round of photos I had her surf through the scene then back again. That way I could easily repeat the sequence in my video editor and it would look more natural. She then surfed by three times to give me about a 30 sec clip. I like the illusion of slight movement of the “ocean” because of changes in light in the room and my accidentally moving the plastic pool.
Scene set up to take photos
There are a few shots though that are blurry and I can see that I moved the camera a bit as well. Next time I will use a real tripod and my regular camera instead of a cardboard box with clothes pin clips to hold my iPhone. To add the title and credit sequences I added a longer empty frame at either end to aid in the transitions. You can’t do a 1 second fade with a 0.7 second image frame!
The addition of ocean sounds and background music really added a lot to the story to make the whole thing much more entertaining for the viewer. I found my music with a Creative Commons – attribution license at www.freemusicarchive.org
The DS106 Daily Create tdc566 for 7/27/13 was to “Randomly combine unused bits of video to create a surreal dream video with appropriate soundtrack.”
Aren’t these supposed to only take 20-30 minutes to complete? How in the world can I do that when it comes to video? I can’t post something out there that I wouldn’t be able to look at myself! So yes, this video sequence took me much longer than anticipated. Just gathering the unused video clips took more than 30 minutes. Video has been my digital storytelling medium of choice, and I’ve got a lot of it.
I wanted to keep the video at about 2 minutes, since that’s about the attention span of an average viewer. I choose a couple of different themes that I felt told something about my life and representative video clips for each. Then the soundtrack for the entire video was created with the “Synthetic Design 02” audio clip in GarageBand. The final video was pieced together in Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac. The image strip below was made by taking freeze frame shots from each video segment and using Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 to put them together.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE CLIPS & FINAL VIDEOS THEY REPRESENT
Hubble Telescope Photos [Link to one of the first videos I ever created, “Soul Journey”. This has a whole series of Hubble telescope photos along with poetry and a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack.]
Cooking at my Mom’s house out in Eureka, California this Christmas [Link to the video “Cooking With Tangie” created from this trip.]
The mouse hanging by it’s tail is from a video clip I made for a scientific paper my daughter was submitting to a journal. (I thought it would be funny to add it to the end of the cooking segment.)
A trip to Duluth, Minnesota
A 2010 trip to Europe: Abby Road in London & a street shot in Brussells [Link to “London Town” photo documentary of the trip]
Hangin’ out waitin’ for the Headless ds106 to begin at the end of August? Care to join me in the fun of creating a parody remix/mashup of the song “Mad World” by Gary Jules, but with new ds106 centered lyrics? You get me new lyrics, I’ll record them and then pull together media to create a video that I’ll post to YouTube. (Similar to my TalkyTina video)
It could even become part of our PR package for our Fall 2013 headless experiment.
MAD WORLD lyrics by Gary Jules
All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good Happy birthday, happy birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me, what’s my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very, very
Today’s DS106 daily create tdc562 is to “Describe a recurring dream you had as a kid. Give an update as if the dream comes back.” I’ve been having difficulty with the daily create writing assignments this month, like write a limerick of someone really famous, or “Write a story dialogue in 5 half-twits“. So when this one came along, I jumped at it. “Yes! I can do this daily creation no problem.” The only issue now was to choose which dream story line to share.
Would it be my flying dreams?
Or the ‘I have a test today and I haven’t been to class since the first day of school and I forgot to study‘ scenario?
Or maybe even the ever popular embarrassing realization that ‘I’m at school and I don’t have all of my clothes on.’
I’ve decided to go with my flying dreams for this daily create.
Rockylou has never lacked creativity and that certainly extends into her dream life. I’d start out by sitting in a black inner tube. You know… the kind you’d use as a kid to float down the river. But the trick was if I wanted to actually fly I had to relax, really relax, and the more I did the higher and faster I could go. I can even remember trying to teach my little sister and a friend or two how to fly with me.
I also have the fun of having a common theme in a sequence of dreams over time. It’s a little like lucid dreaming, but not quite. It’s only happened once or twice that I recognize I am actually dreaming and start consciously interacting with my dream. But when I am following one of my extended dream story lines (Some are still showing up as an adult.) I remember what has been happening in the previous dreams and will build upon that in the present dream. They seem to have a life of their own. For the flying dreams over time I learned how to get going right away when I wanted to, and knew that there was something going on in my life that I needed to tend to if I was having trouble relaxing in order to fly. This dream theme still makes an occasional visit from time to time.
All images are public domain downloaded from Microsoft Clipart.
Producing the DS106’s Sweet Talky Tina video was a labor of love as it presented many challenges due to the number of different media from several sources that had to be combined and sometimes created: image stills, GIFs, YouTube video and audio. And writing up this blog entry documenting the process turned out to take as much work and time as the video itself!
The task was to take a misunderstood, outcast, marginalized character and transform her into a more powerful, independent, and self-managed member of the ds106 community… to rehabilitate a character out of The Twilight Zone, such that the character would be accepted as one of the ds106 own.
The inspiration for the video was the result of listening to my Pandora Classic Folk Rock station when a fun song about love from the Beatles came on – can’t remember the name right now. The lyrics made me giggle when I thought of Talky Tina’s DS106 persona. Then Tupelo Honey by Van Morrison began to play….
She’s as sweet as Tupelo honey. She’s an angel of the first degree. She’s as sweet, she’s as sweet as Tupelo honey. Just like honey baby, from the bee.
I couldn’t resist. A video mashup/remix of Talky Tina as sweet as Tupelo honey had to be made.
As is the case with most of my projects, they are iterative in nature – forever improving and incorporating new ideas as I go along. Sometimes I am inspired by the work of others. Other times I just happen to stumble upon something that I like more. There are two versions of the video available. I decided to keep the first draft posted to YouTube so that I could illustrate with examples the modifications undertaken to produce the final version. Links to the actual in-video sequences are provided as needed.
=>INTRO & OUTRO
The first draft does not contain an intro or outro sequence. And upon request, Talky Tina was kind enough to create a special title sequence GIF, Starring @iamTalkyTina, that I could use in my final video.
For the title sequence, I liked the GIF that Talky Tina had made, but the first few frames of “smack talk” directed at Jim Groom needed to be deleted. By opening the GIF directly in Photoshop Elements 11 for the Mac I gained access to all of the original 30 image layers, and could easily delete the objectionable frames.
Next, I noticed that the star pattern used in the GIF was less dense than the star pattern I was using in other parts of the video. This lack of continuity didn’t sit well with me. I tried to let it go… telling myself no one would notice…. but it just kept bugging me every time I watched it. In the end, my “OCD” alter ego won out and I went about making the necessary image modifications.
Using the Magic Wand tool I selected the portion of images I wanted to retain, and deleted the rest. The remaining images fortunately did not have to be perfectly clean since they would be merged with a new black starry background that would hide the imperfections. This saved a lot of time, which I greatly appreciated.
When merging the selected images and text with the new background, I reduced the image opacity to 80% to give them more of an eerie feeling. Tina’s head is a little transparent – floating out in space. The GIF below visually illustrates the sequence of steps taken.
Click on image if the GIF is not running
The expanding “The DS106 Zone” text was created using the zoom effect on only that specific text image. The soundtrack for both the intro and outro were pulled from the original Twilight Zone television show. The outro was used in its full length. But the intro could only be used the first 10 seconds before Rod Serling speaks.
My video editing software is Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for Mac and my story purpose was to show Talky Tina as only sweet and loving – especially with Erich. To accomplish this task, I pulled the audio soundbite, “My name is Talky Tina, and I love you very much.” from the beginning of the episode when she is talking to Erich’s daughter. I unlinked the video and audio, deleted audio portions where Talky Tina and Erich hate or threaten to kill each other, and dubbed in the love line. I also found a segment of “silence” in the original video that I could use to cover up dialogue I had deleted but where video remained. The audio proved to be a bit trickier for Erich though. I didn’t want there to be the dubbed foreign film effect, and have Erich mouthing words that didn’t match the audio. To get around this I found back shots of Erich and strategically spliced in images of Tina at certain locations. [View example in video]
“And I love you very much.”
Erich’s facial expressions and actions also had to look loving toward Talky Tina. Again, careful splicing of the right portions of video did the trick. In one case I tried using Christina’s reversing effect so that instead of Erich throwing Tina against the wall, it looked as if she were throwing herself toward him and he is lovingly catching her in his arms. But the effect just didn’t look right in my video, so in the end it was deleted. As you can see, Erich and Talky Tina can say and do nice things to each other through the magic of video & sound editing.
=>GIFs
As I mentioned above, this project contained a number of different media. Each of which presents its own challenges. Working with the GIFs was a big one. When I tried inserting them directly into the video editing software, they no longer looped endlessly. They ran once and stopped. No problem you say… just copy and paste to make the sequence repeat… Sounds great, in theory, but my video editing software “deletes” a few beginning and ending frames in order to blend with the visual media on either side. While this wasn’t too big of a problem for most of the GIFs…
…for two: Quick Wink Tina and Tina & Julie Andrews – this resulted in the wink and the ghostly image of Julie Andrews being cut off prematurely. You’ll notice these irritations in the first draft version as illustrated below.
The use of the GIFs was further complicated by the fact that I only wanted the important event, such as Julie Andrews or the wink, to appear once, and the entire segment needed to be a specific length in order to match with the music soundtrack. To address these issues I opened the original GIFs in Photoshop and placed the layers with the “event” in the middle of the GIF, instead of at the end. I then duplicated a few strategic layers to make the event last longer on screen and to make the entire sequence itself longer.
The long GIF sequence of Talky Tina at the computer needed no modification what so ever. It was meant to play only once and was miraculously the same length as the instrumental section in the music soundtrack. What a stroke of luck. [View in final version]
=>Image Stills: Tips & Tricks
A trick I often use when mixing visual media is to capture a beginning or final frame of a video or GIF sequence. (In Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for Mac the command is Tools => Freeze Frame ) By inserting a still image captured from the original source the image is already perfectly aligned and will aid in providing a smoother transition between the media. And as an extra bonus you can easily adjust its length on screen to provide better synchronization to your music soundtrack if desired.
Reduce opacity of overlay by 80%
Reducing the opacity of an overlay image, such as Talky Tina’s head in the intro sequence or her webpage banner text as shown to the left, allows the underlying image to remain partially visible. This works great for title and credit text sequences as well.
Increasing the brightness & contrast of an image, such as for the cover of Talky Tina’s memoir, “The Stairs. They Go Both Up and Down” helps the image to stand out and become more memorable in the video.
Adjusting an image position and zoom factor in relation to an adjoining image can make for a smoother more natural transition without the need to create a time consuming manual pan of the shot. [Watch example in video]
=>Badges
Talky Tina had created badges that her DS106 “True Friends” could insert into their blogs. [Talky Tina’s True Friends Index] And there were a few technical hurdles that I had to overcome to include the badges in the video. First off, the whole badge wouldn’t fit on screen and remain legible on a mobile device. I was able to get around that by cropping the top half with the picture of Talky Tina and use it to introduce the badge segment in the video. The bottom half of the badge, including the “TalkyTina Says So” text, was then cropped and used as the badge image for each friend.
The video includes badges of people whose media I used, and her other “Super True” friends. I think of this segment as part of the credits and acknowledgments. Amazingly there was a length of soundtrack that lent itself well to the needed seven friend badge image sequence.
Originally I made the decision to exclude badges with GIFs. I assumed they would be too time consuming to make them work correctly and align them properly. I had a change of heart after modifying all of the other GIFs in the project, and the GIF badge by John Johnston (who also made the CogDog/Alan Levine-TalkyTina Dissolve) would be included in its full glory. [Click here to view]
The transitions between badges were surprisingly challenging. Fortunately, Talky Tina had used a template to create the original badges and I had used the same size and technique in Photoshop to crop them. This meant I had a supply of badge images that were the same size and shape to work with. I tried different transitions:
… and finally settled on the film dissolve. With careful alignment of each badge I was able to give the effect of only the photo image gently dissolving from one badge to the next. Toward the end of the project I was still not satisfied with the sequence. The badges were thin and there was a lot of blank space to either side. I considered adding vertical text, such as DS106 on the left and Zone on the right, but that felt like it would be too cluttered. It wasn’t until I had the inspired idea to add the starry background and reduce the opacity to 80% that I was satisfied and could call the badge section complete.
=>Rockylou Productions Animated Logo
The Rockylou Productions animated logo at the very end of the video was created by incorporating a dissolve transition between two logo images designed by Amber Lockridge. Transitioning from b&w to color with a slight increase in the size of the color graphic by 1% is meant to give the illusion of growth and expansion, an important value statement for Rockylou Productions.
The audio logo for Rockylou Productions was made with GarageBand and a simple “D” chord that I played on my 12-string guitar. I took the original recording and added a Bright Guitar effect to the basic track. I then duplicated the original track four times, and added dimensionality to the chord by adding a Lunar Bounce to two (panning each slightly left and right) and a Swirling Echo effect to the two remaining tracks, also panning them slightly left and right. With the addition of the Ambient – Wide Spaces effect to the master track the memorable audio logo for Rockylou Productions was born.
=>Wrap-Up
I think that about does it. This will most likely by my last DS106Zone related project, but I’m looking forward to completing many more digital storytelling projects in DS106 and with Rockylou Productions in the future. In the wings already in the early stages of production are two challenging projects:
a multi-media story using Facebook entries & Storify about the uprising in Istanbul in June, 2013
a video interview of Amber & I talking about the creation of the Rockylou Productions logo and website banner which will be incorporating images against a green screen background.
If you have any questions or would like to know more about the production of this project, post a comment or send me a tweet @rockylou22 and I’ll be glad to share.
=>Media Sources & Credits
Soundtrack: “Tupelo Honey” by Van Morrison
Twilight Zone Video & Audio Clips
YouTube 2min Talky Tina — Living Doll — Two Minute Twilight Zone Project
I tried several other image themes, and nothing else fit as well. So I took a deep breath and cautiously went to work collecting and assembling the images to match the lyrics of the music. When I had a first draft ready, I shared it with Elizabeth, and she too had an uneasy feeling about the potential political controversy that could become associated with her music. We were both very sensitive to the other’s creative artist and in the end agreed we were okay with giving it a try, and if there was a problem I’d take it down immediately. As it turned out there was no problem at all and on last count the final version of the video “Where There Is Light In The Soul- 1st 100 Days” has been viewed over 3,000 times.
