With this manipulated photo image I am able to complete two DS106 visual assignments for the price of one. Giving me a final count of 12 stars when all is said and done for week 5 of the DS106 headless 13 open-online session.
Slide Guy for Visual Assignment 595 (2 stars) where we insert a png image of the “Slide Guy” into a photo.
A Whole New World for Visual Assignment 419 (2 stars) in which we are to take a picture of a subject (grandparents, pet, yourself) and put it into a totally different background in which they appear abnormally too small or too large.
DS106 is so open even the insect world is joining in.
Just fun during visual storytelling week I decided to illustrate how open DS106 could be. As shown here, even the insect world is joining in. The photo was easy to make. There are a total of three layers: The original background image, a transparent PNG image of the DS106 logo, and a magic lassoed image of the grasshoppers leg that is placed over the the DS106.
DS106 Slide Guy
To add the slide guy enjoying his ride, I simply made another layer, sized him appropriately so that his posterior would look like a more “natural” fit as he slid down the blade of grass, and placed him at the top of the stack.
This weekend I took a backyard photo safari. As I assembled the images a story of my past life as a wife and mother of two young daughters revealed itself. For DS106 Visual Assignment 426, Is that a ….GHOST! I decided to use one of the photos of an abandoned swing set to produce a new image of my daughters haunting their old playground equipment.
Little Halloween Ghosts
This was easy to make now that I have more experience with my photo editing software, Adobe Photoshop Elements 12. Using an old family photo I had taken proudly showing off their Halloween costumes, I used the magic lasso tool to select what I didn’t want and deleted it from the scene. I copied the ghosts only picture as a new layer into the swing set photo. I sized the girls appropriately for their ages in relationship to the size of the swing set. Then reduced the opacity of the little ghosts down to 60%. New picture and assignment complete. 3 Stars for me.
I went out this morning to capture images in my backyard during a time of day I knew would avail interesting shadows and lighting for a DS106 Photo Safari. What I didn’t expect was that through the process of my editing and choosing the photos, a story of my life as the mother of two now grown daughters, and the ex-wife of a gardener would reveal itself. The images tell of a time well past: A child’s swing set neglected and overgrown with weeds and trees, a prolific garden abandoned and no longer tended to, a bleached antler reminding me of the 9 foot electrified fence my ex-husband erected to provide a barrier to free meals for the herd of deer traveling through our backyard, discarded odds and ends left behind when a family dissolved. While this phase of family life has past, a new chapter has begun as an over-joyed “Nana” of a vivacious two-year old grandson. And who knows what stories my backyard will tell 10 years from now.
Bygone Backyard Photo Safari
A backyard of memories revealing their story of a family long past.
Abandoned Childhood
Forgotten Swing
Left Behind Garden Gate
Bygone Box
Bare Bone
Block & Bottle
Ousted Oilcan
THE MAKING OF….
All photos were taken with my iPhone using the Camera+ app. It is a powerful app that can do a lot if you know what you’re doing, which I don’t yet. I experimented with setting the white balance and selecting a focus zone. Neither of which proved to be successful. I think it’s time to read and watch some tutorials. Next, I uploaded the photos to my desktop with the Photo Transfer app. I love this little app. I can very easily upload and download photos and videos over WiFi or bluetooth to any of my Apple devices or even my PC.
Fallen Fence – Photo too cluttered.
I had taken almost 90 photos, and challenged myself to get it down to 5. With a quick look at the images I could see most of them weren’t all that great. The lighting was bad. The images were cluttered and/or blurry. Some just weren’t interesting at all. I then opened them up in Photoshop Elements 12 for a closer look and to do a little photo editing if needed.
Mossy Log Shadows- interesting to look at, but no story
As I worked I noticed a set of photos emerging with single objects dominating the image. I also had some very interesting natural environment shots with neat shadows and lighting, but they didn’t tell a story. They were just nice to look at like this one of a mossy log that had been used to frame the sand box under the swing set. I’m pleased with the results of reducing my photo safari down to the best seven photos with the single object focus, and leaving out the nature only shots.
Writing the intro paragraph was an additional unexpected challenge. In my head it sounded simple to put my thoughts down on paper, but that wasn’t the case. I struggled for quite awhile as to what and how I would share the memories and stories embedded in the photos.
Finally, I used the WordPress Slideshow plugin to add them to my blog post. Then by editing the HTML code in the text view the borders and shadow effect of the final two images were created. Learn how here.
I did it. I successfully pulled off a live broadcast on ds106 radio this morning. Christina Hendricks and I were going to rebroadcast our DS106 Headless week 4 audio review, but our open-online course mates had already listened to it through our earlier blog posts.
I decided to not let this free airtime go to waste. What a perfect opportunity to mess around when no one is listening. Although it did turn out that Cathleen Nardi caught the tail end of my broadcast before Nicecast severely degraded my sound quality until I paid for the $59 software license. I signed off amidst static, but plan to come back on the air again with the entire Obruni podcast series in week 7 (Oct 14 – Oct 20). I may also pop in from time to time with some of my acoustic music. I’ll let you know.
As a bonus to this blog post I’m including my first ds106 radio “futzcast” (as TalkyTina refers to it) aired last week 9/20/13. Dead air, sound level issues, talking to myself as I work through things, keyboard clicks during music… I can hear improvement this time around. 🙂
Here are the songs played in the my futz cast with videos I’d made a few years back for two of them.
I’ll Fly Away (3:00) hymn written in 1929 by Albert E. Brumley
Comes A Time (10:25) by Neil Young (Oops, forgot I’d already played this one, and put it in again for the “real” broadcast.)
1. To start with we took quite a bit of time scouring the ds106 Google+ Community, #ds106 Twitter feed, and ds106 linked blogs to find completed assignments. We kept track of links and comments in a shared Google Doc.
2. We had contemplated doing the show live on DS106 Radio, but neither of us had the experience to pull that off. Eventually we’ll get there. But first I have to figure out how to route my system sound through Skype, so the person on the other end can hear the additional audio I’m playing at my end. I’ve read a bunch of tutorials, corresponded with experienced ds106 radio broadcasters, and have become quite friendly with the Skype test call lady testing a multitude of settings to use with NiceCast. Nothing has worked yet. I’m beginning to think that my Mac hardware and operating system (10.6.8) might be the culprit.
3. We finally settled on “simply” recording our Skype conversation and turning it into a podcast to play on DS106 Radio next week. For recording I use:
It allows me at the click of a button the option to record each side of the conversation as audio and video on separate tracks. It also provides a number of translation tools so I can combine them as needed.
4. It took us almost an hour to get ourselves set-up to record the conversation. We tested levels and other settings to make sure we were good there. We had all of our audio tracks lined up and ready to go as quickly as possible in real-time. This would lessen the post-production editing time. Dead air and click, click, click as we find something on our computer doesn’t make for a riveting podcast.
5. Our 53 minute conversation went smoothly, except for three spots we had to edit when:
My little dog Abby was scratching the floor so loud Christina couldn’t concentrate.
Christina’s husband decided to pop in to get something from the fridge.
I pulled up Stefanie’s DS106 Rap too early in the sequence. (This caused me to move the segment to later on in the podcast, which resulted in some jumbled conversation as noted in Christina’s comments below. Oops!)
6. Once the recording was finished, then comes post production. We had both thought the review would be about half as long, and I wasn’t keen on using up half of my remaining minutes on my SoundCloud account to post the 50+ minute podcast. Christina also had restrictions on what her Tumblr blog would allow for media embedding. My inspired idea to post it on YouTube addressed both of our issues.
7. I used the movie translation tools with the Skype recorder app to produce a side-by-side video chat. This was loaded into Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac. Unfortunately, something went wrong with the translation or maybe importing it into Premiere which resulted in the sound and video being out-of-sync after only a few minutes into the conversation. I was able to keep our introductions, but the remainder of the video would have to be manually re-synced bit by bit, (which would be painstakingly slow and tedious). My fix? To overlay still images & GIFs in place of the messed up video.
To make it a little more visually interesting, I added the animated DS106 Radio GIF when we are playing an audio clip.
7. After the first draft was completed, Christina reminded me she had envisioned us including John Johnston’s Chicken Talk podcast material as intro and outro clips. Boy did I amuse myself. I used the Mel Blanc and Sound Effect Man- Chicken Farm Song. Then one thing led to another and John’s B&W chicken GIF and his Red cartoon chicken GIF became once again stars in one of my videos [First appearance in Star Spangled… WHAT?!] The B&W movie studio chicken brings us in, and a duet with the B&W and the Red chicken take us out. I think it’s really funny! Although after looking at it again, I wish that I had flipped sides so they were singing to each other instead of back-to-back. (See update below.)
8. Christina also noticed that our sound levels were unbalanced and at times she had difficulty hearing her comments when listening on her iPod earbuds. Unfortunately, it would have been a HUGE piece of work for me to go back in and fix it for the video. I should have used the Levelator before I began the editing. This is a free software app that helps to balance the volume of a recorded conversation. It was recommended by John Johnston in his audio post Levelling up the LoDown . (The tip is about 3:30 minutes in.) I tried using it after the fact and it brought her volume up, but also the background hiss. It didn’t make it easier to hear her, so I left it as is.
9. The finishing touches required me to add two additional DS106 Radio bumpers at the beginning and end. The first one is a mashup I created this summer.
The final bumper at the end of the podcast was produced by Ary Aranguiz.
10. But wait… there was more that wasn’t quite right…. an excerpt from an e-mail received while I was writing up this post.
The only thing I noticed is that when we switch to talking about Ary’s project, after we talked first about Stefanie’s, the wording gets a bit garbled and then jumps to “Ary”, then goes right into her sound effect story (at about 27:25). I expect this is the best that could be done with the fact that we had to cut something out! Just wanted to check that how it ended up is what you meant, as it seems a bit jumbled.
Oh, and I just listened to the end, b/c I hadn’t had a chance to do that yet, and your last words are: “I had fun…I will” and then it jumps to the music. Not sure if you wanted to end it there?
But hey…this does not have to be perfect, and I don’t want you to put any more work into this if you don’t feel it’s necessary…so feel free to say: Christina, it’s just fine as is!
And in the end… that I decided to NOT INDULGE MY PERFECTIONISTIC TENDENCIES and let these go is a good sign. I’m getting more comfortable allowing myself to be seen in the world as a work in-progress, blemishes and all.
UPDATE: I tried…. I really tried to let it go. But when I heard the HUGE error with Ary’s radio bumper accidentally playing over a part of our conversation – I HAD to fix it. It turned out I had moved the bumper clear up to layer 8 while adjusting something else and forgot about it. The error was towards the end, and I hadn’t taken the time to listen to the entire 51 minute audio file before I posted it. Lesson learned? Either make my projects shorter or listen to the whole thing before I decide to release it to the public. I may’ve let it be played on DS106 Radio, but when Alan Levine decided to add it to the week 4 assignment page, so that future students could hear it, there was no way that mistake was going to remain for posterity.
Since I was going to edit the file anyway, I decided to fix the rest of what I could.
I essentially started over by separating the two audio tracks, which allowed me to boost Christina’s volume and apply a noise reduction filter to her audio only.
Alan Levine & John Johnston had recommended that I dial down the audio quality from 256k to 128k to reduce the file size. John said he’ll even go as low as 94k. My comfort level with the lower sound quality isn’t great, but I’m willing to listen to the voices of experience here.
Alan also suggested that I add meta data to the mp3 version so that when it plays on DS106 radio people will know what it is.
Remember my concerns about the length of the 51 minute audio file and where to post it? Once again Alan & John came to the rescue offering me advice on uploading the file via FTP to my own website and embedding that file into my blog post. I use Cyberduck for the upload and followed the directions for the Compact WordPress Audio/Music Player settings to get the cute little player button at the top of this post
What the heck… I flipped the chicken images too. They are now singing their duet to one another.
Rochelle’s sound effect story: [Headphones highly recommended] Spend a summer day at an island cabin in Northern Wisconsin. Wake up to the sounds of loons on the lake. Spend the day enjoying all the amenities that no running water or electricity can provide. Fall to sleep to the rumbling of a thunderstorm. And don’t get me started on the MOSQUITOES!
I crave community. Do I need to be flashy and bright to be seen? Do I need my words set in stone to be valid? Is it okay to have fun and learn along the way? With heart, body, and soul my story can be shared.
Creating this Five Card Flickr Story wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. I was way too literal at first. I started by reading the directions and figured this was going to be a piece of cake- just pick out 5 photos and tell a story ‘about’ them. (ALERT: “about”) I tried a few hands, picked some images that seemed to follow a theme, but none of them told a story. I finally chose the above deck and started writing a narrative about how we are social beings, and that storytelling has always been a part of who we are as human beings, that it is our way of sharing with the present to make an impression on the future. blah…. blah…. blah… BORING. No story was making its way into the world.
I then contemplated just pulling another hand, but decided instead to hang in there. I went back and looked at examples. Oh… that was different than what I was thinking. They were continuing to flesh out their stories in a poetic rather than a prose format. The photos were telling the story, not me telling a story ABOUT the photos. Back to the drawing board. This time I got out of my literal mind and engaged my heart and soul to sense what was here. Then the story revealed itself.
I crave community. Do I need to be flashy and bright to be seen? Do I need my words set in stone to be valid? Is it okay to have fun and learn along the way? With heart, body and soul my story can be shared.
I’m glad I decided to hang in there with the original photos and relaxed into letting my creativity and intuition flow, instead of staying stuck in my literal mind and trying to get a set of images that I could logically put together into a story.
My struggle to tell the story of these five cards reminds me of how it took until my early 40’s before I could “understand” what poetry was all about. I knew I was missing something & really wanted to “get it”. So at my request a wonderful minister friend sat down with me and took the time to teach me what poetry was all about. She read different authors to me, had me read them to her, shared how you have to let your mind go, see and feel the images the author is conjuring up for you. This wasn’t a logical mind thing. A black chair is not just a black chair. There is a whole story beyond the literal black chair that you tap into to “get” what the poet, photographer, writer, artist, digital storyteller,… is trying to say.
Here is one of my first poems written after my heart was opened to the beauty of poetry.
This blog post was submitted internally at 3M by “HC”, one of the 3M-DS106 Salon members on 9/10/13. I’ve been given permission to re-post it to my personal blog in order to share it with the outside DS106 community. Last week “HC” created his headless self-portrait that I riffed into this GIF. [Read about it here.] Now this week he’s created his own GIF to go along with the post below.
Storytelling can be used in a number of ways, from sharing experiences, showing a vision, an escape from the real world or even poach top talent from another company. When I heard one of my friends from high school left Google (Australia) in November 2012 to join a small start-up (Canva), it raised some eyebrows – was it that Google was treating him poorly (doubtful based on the perks and benefits they get and constantly on the top employers to work for list), or did they offer him more money than what Google was giving him (doubtful based on the fact it is a small start-up that hasn’t raised their first round of capital yet). So what was it that pushed him to switch?
Recently Business Insider (Australia) published the pitch-deck that was enough to sway Dr. Hearnden over (here is the link to the article). It was lucky for Canva to have Lars Rasmussen as their advisor because David was in Lars’ team in Google Wave before Lars left to go to Facebook. Apparently Facebook also did a pitch-deck story for Lars to leave Google and join Facebook – which might have influenced his advice for this approach.
I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to play around with animated GIF and have the pitch-deck in one image. Interesting enough the pitch-deck itself didn’t have the images of the same size so I had to fill it in as black to block off the image below. To make it readable, I set the frame speed at 3 seconds, so for 16 frames this means 48 seconds to view their story for Dave.
Would a pitch-deck like this sway you from your current position (assuming you are somewhat happy with your job at the moment)?
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Comments:
“HC” this is a great example of the power of digital storytelling and the use of the GIF format in this context is something I haven’t seen yet. BRAVO! Thank you for creating and sharing with the rest of the salon. And speaking of sharing…. do you mind if I share this with the outside DS106? Or even better yet, do you have an outside personal blog where you are creating your own non-proprietary digital presence?
Reply…
Thank you Rochelle, I think it is powerful what they did to Lars and Dave (and creative). It would be cool to see Facebook’s deck to Lars. You are free to share this with the outside DS106 as it is public information – although I did take the photos without asking permission from Canva or the Business Insider but at least attribute it back to them. I have pondered creating my own non-proprietary blog but find it hard to find time to do so. Started to do Twitter so I do have somewhat a small digital presence (in addition to some of my activities on LinkedIn within some groups).
What did I do in DS106 Headless 13 Week 2? Tried to keep up with essentially two courses of ds106 at the same time, and it’s stretching me to the limits. I’m learning tons setting up the 3M-DS106 Salon’s cyber-infrastructure behind the 3M firewall. And continuing to experience a lot of frustration as I come up against technical obstacles with the 3M systems that I know I can do here on my WordPress blog, in Twitter, in Tumblr, on Flickr and YouTube. But the small group of brave souls who are taking this journey with me are jumping in, starting internal blogs, commenting on one another’s posts, sharing their skills and workarounds, creating headless self-portraits, and GIFs – even had an unexpected GIF riff today with a Koala bear that wanted to blink. 🙂
The 3M-DS106 Salon going headless.
I just have to share the headless self-portrait created by one of the 3M-DS106 Salon members, HC. He had followed the advice to take two photos- one with him in the picture and one just of the wall. He hadn’t counted on the lighting casting a shadow against the back wall. With GIMP he created two versions which I’ve ‘riffed into a GIF’ to illustrate the differences. When asked which we preferred I was torn. I’m certainly familiar with the flat no-head-at-all version, but his shadowed headless self invokes in me the realities of the work that goes on behind the scenes in any collaborative effort. There are always leaders in some shape, way, or form, but they may not be visible.
BLOGGING
“Each blog post must be able to stand on its own as something that makes sense if that is the only thing a visitor reads on your site.”
I’m getting a lot of practice blogging these days, and I found the blogging tips very helpful:
Some of us who have been through a round or two of ds106 know the realities of balancing a full-time job, family, friends, and the addictiveness of being an open-online participant in this digital story telling community. We were joking about the three R’s could be “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. You can read all about how I’m using these to try and keep my balance and sanity as I manage all of my responsibilities. State of The Daily Create – wk2
“IT’S SHOWTIME” WITH A DIGITAL STORYTELLING GIF
One of my favorite movies of all time and characters is Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice. The ghostest with the mostest. This 1988 comedy horror film directed by Tim Burton is a scream and I’ve always thought quite romantic too. [Wikipedia Post] There are indeed headless ghosts running around from time to time. But none of those scenes seemed as appropriate to sum up the movie and capture the essence of a key scene as when Beetlejuice, a self-proclaimed “bio-exorcist”, is being released from his exile in a small model town in the young couples attic. Indeed… It’s Showtime! Including a post on how I made the GIF.
Picking up the GIFFight challenge this week turned out to be a double edged sword. I had no problem creating and posting my “Headless Over Heels In Love” GIF. But a serious issue arose when another GIFFighter, not in DS106, posted a GIF that I feared could be labeled as sexual harassment by someone viewing it from 3M. This prompted the e-mail exchange below with one of our ds106 headless mentors.
I’ve been struggling with this decision since the 80’s toys poster GIFs. The drug & sexual references in a couple of the GIFs are not appropriate in the corporate world. The latest naughty GIF could even get me in trouble for sexual harassment. I know the guys are just having fun, but I take my professional responsibilities seriously. I’m going to remove the GIF Fight assignment references from my 3M version of the weekly assignments.
I don’t feel I have any right to ask the GIF Fight guys to not post those kinds of GIFs since this is their game & I am just a visitor. These are some of the consequences we run into with the open nature of the course. How have you guys handled stuff like this in past DS106 courses?
Sincerely,
Rochelle
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Rochelle,
Perfectly understandable. First of all, not everything listed in each week’s laundry list is necessary; it is more of a buffet than a required consumption list. GIFFight was an add-on; the real challenge in this week is asking people to figure out how to create an animated GIF w/o us providing explicit directions.
It could be a lot worse. A lot. But this is the flip side of a class on the open internet. We had a case in 2012 where some male students did a radio show played in class that had some offensive content to women. It led to some hard but good discussion on grounds of decency.
But for the most part we have avoided as much of this that could easily happen.
Gardner Campbell Golden Treasures
Figuring out how I wanted to share my reflections on Campbell’s article and videos took some time. My first attempt had me making a little GIF from a discussion point about the work of John Medina on the human brain.
After seeing Mariana Funes use the Tapestry app, I wanted to give it a try. It seemed like an interesting new platform to capture my notes from the Gardner Campbell 2012 discussion with a group of UMW DS106 students. And I tried to incorporate my little alien presenter. It turned out “okay” – nothing to write home about though. Next time I make one, I’d like to add more images to the mix and figure out the best animation speed when adding a GIF.
UPDATE: 9/11/13… Imbedding the tapestry story so that it work across multiple operating systems, browsers, desktops, and mobile devices is proving to be an issue. I’m trying to figure it out and will keep an updated list of ways to help you see the story.
You may need to refresh the page to have the story show up.
Try a different browser. I know Goggle Chrome works for me.
By refreshing the webpage on a desktop computer you can return to the beginning of the story when finished.
I’m joining the GIF FIght again. This time we were given a pair of stark white mannequins to work with. I like to give some time to thinking about my projects before I start them. [Link to past example of my non-linear creative thought process. ] I had a couple of ideas in mind that would use existing GIFs that I could riff off of like Alan Levine’s (@Cogdog) blue caterpillar. It didn’t work here, but I’m going to use it someday. I then tested out what it would take to move the arms to have them hold hands. It could be done, but with more work than I had time for. My daughter is getting married on Saturday and if I wanted to complete this DS106 Headless13 Week 2 AnimatedGIFAssignment1190 I needed to get it done now. I then had the idea of giving this lovely headless couple pumping hearts. I tried my luck over at Microsoft Clip Art, but again nothing seemed to work. A Google image search on animated heart and GIF was fruitful and led me to a whole bunch of free heart GIFs at: http://www.picgifs.com/graphics/hearts/Using Adobe Photoshop CS5
I opened the animated heart GIFs which show up with all of the layers intact.
Combined the two heart GIFs with the mannequin base layer
Selected all of the layers for the hearts
Moved them into place
Enlarged the small heart layers to match the size of larger heart.
Created the animation frames by selecting the appropriate layers. There is no need for merging of layers when using the full version of Photoshop.
Resized the entire image to 350px by 500px making sure it would be less than 1Mb so Tumblr would accept it.
Previewed at 256 colors, liked it and saved as a GIF.
