Category Archives: ds106

Bumping The LoDown

4 Replies

What better way to show my appreciation than create a series of radio show bumpers for my teacher.

Scott Lo hosting the LoDown for DS106 this summer

+

AudioAssignments36 to create a DS106 Radio Bumper

+

HAPPY STUDENT improving her audio storytelling skills

=

5 different LoDown bumpers for Scott to use freely on his radio show and blog posts

What is a bumper? It is a short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into.

There’s no mistaking that you know where you are and where you’re tuned into with this set of bumpers. I used as my foundation a single voice track that I recorded while in the grocery store parking lot with a new iPhone app, Recordium, that I downloaded yesterday at the recommendation of Scott on LoDown episode 12. Then the real fun began …….

I’ve been experimenting lately with how a soundtrack can drastically change the mood of the media project I’m working with. A few months back I was creating a photo slideshow for a friend, and it was amazing how the flow of images, and our decision to add title text or not, was altered by the choice of music. I’m able to illustrate that effect at some level with this set of bumpers. The spoken audio remains the same, just new music underneath.

I had plans to really show this effect by adding a soundtrack that was silly or comedic. But sadly, couldn’t find an audio file in my stock list of jingles and stingers in GarageBand that fit the bill. I’m still giggling though at finding the Medal Ceremony (LoDown3) and Broadcast News (LoDown 5) clips. I hope Scott will be just as amused and want to use them for DS106 Audio Week. 😉 I’d highly recommend anyone who hasn’t worked with soundtracks to try something like this. You gain a whole new understanding and appreciation for the emotional power of sound.

One last note: I’m sure most of us have run up against the powers that be and have had issues with YouTube or Facebook taking down our videos (or highjacking them by adding product advertisements – grrrrr) because of Copyright Infringement. My way of addressing this from the beginning is to use the Vimeo Music Store to locate tracks I can use legally without question. You can even create custom tracks that perfectly fit your videos. It’s a great resource and there is a lot there. There are free creative commons, $1.99 personal use licenses, and $20+ commercial use licenses available. I’ll test a tracks suitability and mood by having two windows open on my computer, one playing the slideshow the other playing the music file on Vimeo. Then when I find something I like, I pay the $1.99 just like on iTunes, and download it. Check it out.

[Other Radio Bumper projects I’ve completed: Obruni Podcasts, Mashing for DS106 Radio)]

Mashing a DS106 Radio Bumper

10 Replies

Thanks to my fellow DS106 students who made sure they clicked on the “Allow Downloads” button in SoundCloud, I was able to mash this DS106 Radio bumper. It’s short and sweet, just like this post. AudioAssignments36

Big kudos to my unsuspecting contributors….

Dylan Gott – Brooke Parker – Kristen Lamb – Jennifer – Rapt’nRent

Podcast Bumpers for Obruni Series

3 Replies

For an earlier audio assignment to create a 90sec story out of at least 5 sound effects, I used sound effects that I already had on hand from a series of podcasts I am producing with my daughter, Amber. As before, I’m again making a slight tweak on the formal assignment description for DS106 Audio Assignment 36, “Create A Ds106 Radio Bumper”.

What is a bumper? It is a short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into.

It’s still a bumper, but for a podcast, not DS106 Radio. There are three different audio files posted in the series.

Track 1: “Intro Music RLProductions” is used like an abbreviation or I what I like referring to as an Audio Icon for anything associated with Rockylou Productions. I’ll digress just a minute hear to say that I know I’m mentioning Rockylou Productions often in my posts. I’m not trying to promote myself, this just happens to be my personal playground of creativity where I spend much of my free time, and I have material I can easily pull from to complete the assignments in a more compressed time frame. I then have time to create tutorials for the assignments that can help others.

Back to your regularly scheduled program…….

The Audio Icon is used at the beginning as part of the intro and at the very end. We also use this chord as part of the final credit sequence for some of our videos. It was made by recording myself playing a simple “D” chord on my 12 string guitar. Then I used GarageBand to layer 5 different tracks by playing around with different effects. It was a fun morning putting that together. I just kept trying this or that, until I stumbled across a combination that I felt was memorable.

GarageBand screen shot of the layered tracks for the Rockylou Productions “Audio Logo”.

Track 2: “Obruni Bumper Start” is an example of the template and style we use for our intro. The chord plays to let you know that you’ve arrived. Then I welcome the listener and give a short introduction of the podcast they are about to hear. We want this to be short, but descriptive enough to grab the listener’s attention and they’ll want to keep on listening.

Track 3: “Obruni Bumper End” is an example from another podcast in the series, “Transportation”. But the format is always the same. At the end of the spoken text of the story I increase the volume of the soundtrack that we have associated with the Obruni podcasts.(See note.) I then fade in the the audio credits – like who it was written by, an attribution for the soundtrack music, and anything else that may be needed. At the very end you hear the familiar Rockylou Productions chord strum that lets the listener know we have now “left the building”.

Note: I had to track down the publishers to obtain written permission to use the Fanti music, Apatampe, so that I wouldn’t infringe on copyright issues. It took some digging, but I finally found the publishers and they were very nice about it. As long as I included an attribution and I didn’t use it for commercial purposes, it was fine to use for my projects.

Up, Up, And Away

3 Replies

Meet Rochelle from Pixar’s movie “Planes”.

Still enamored with creating GIFs, I stayed up way too late last night creating this animated movie poster from the movie Planes by Pixar to be released in theaters August, 2013. (DesignAssignments313)

Let me give you a little background on why I chose this particular movie poster. My name is Rochelle, and it’s not a very common name in the United States. I met only one other Rochelle growing up, and that was in High School. I’ve met maybe 5 others my whole life. So when a Facebook friend posted on my timeline that Pixar would be introducing a new character in their upcoming movie about planes, I was beaming,

“I have a cartoon character named after me?”

Now this assignment would give me the opportunity to create something out of a real movie poster that had my name on it. How cool is that? If I liked it, I could see using it in other circumstances around the web. I do like my final product, so you might see it popping up again.

Keeping with this week’s design theme, I studied the poster to understand what is being conveyed in the image. Since the movie isn’t even out yet, I read the Pixar synopsis of the movie and more specifically the plane character, Rochelle. (voice of by Julia Louis-Dreyfus)

Excerpt from Pixar site:

Rochelle

(voice of Julia Louis-Dreyfus)

Rochelle is a tough racer and the pride of the Great White North. Always confident and capable, she got her start running mail to small towns in Quebec, picking up home remedies for mechanical maladies along the way. She also developed a knack for fast travel that ultimately inspired her to give air racing a try. Rochelle never looked back (this competitive contender doesn’t need to). She is relentlessly pursued by charmer El Chupacabra, but steadfast Rochelle is much too focused on winning the race to return his affections.^[20]

I would also need to keep in mind the file size limitations of a GIF, how many frames I’d be allowed in my photo editing software, and since I didn’t want this project to consume my life for days, the number of frames I’d actually have to create. I decided that the important elements of the poster to focus on would be that this is a plane, and then illustrate something about Rochelle’s personality. My first overly ambitious thoughts were to have her fly on the poster. Moderating my initial exuberance with a dose of reality, I admitted to myself the work required to make the plane actually fly in or out of the poster was way too complicated to pull off. My rational, although still very creative self, went with animating the propeller props, and giving her a wink. I’m not totally at peace with the symbolism of her winking, since the character synopsis says she is steadfast and much to focused on winning the race to return another plane’s affection, but I’ve seen the blinking effect used in a lot of other GIF projects (Ben’s “The Colorized Zone” was a big inspiration), so why not give it a try.

[An illustrated detailed process of creating this animation will be documented and posted as a tutorial eventually. Until then, you can view a tutorial example with only one animation zone.]

A summary of the process using PhotoShop Elements 11 for the Mac:

1. I used the lasso tool to grab an image of each of the propellers and the eyes/windshield of the plane. This was pretty painstaking while I experimented with which parts of the propeller would work best to create the rotating effect. I then duplicated the propeller images and rotated them 30deg and 60 deg. I ended up with 3 different propeller images for each side of the plane.

2. For the winking eye I used the lasso tool again to capture just the left half the windshield image. Then started stretching, erasing, copying, pasting, aligning… until I had something that looked right.

3. Once all of the individual image layers were created, it was time to merge the appropriate layers to create new combined images that would animate correctly. Oh my was this a chore as it became closer and closer to midnight. I was creating a total of 3 animation zones?! My brain just wasn’t working as well anymore and I was having a hard time following tracking of what went where. And remember that ambitious enthusiasm I spoke about? Well I added in an additional challenge to have each of the propellers appear to be spinning a little differently. And believe you me, it was no walk in the park to properly align everything so that those parts that were supposed to be still remained still. I didn’t want any distracting jumping around of the animation.

4. The timing of the animation sequence was also important. I didn’t want her constantly winking, yet I wanted the propellers to be moving at a quick rate to provide a better spinning illusion. I was able to create the effect I wanted by duplicating more of the image layers for the propellers and sandwich the winking effect in the middle. All-in-all I ended up with a total of 14 frames: 8 propeller frames + 2 winking frames + 4 propeller frames, all running at 0.2 seconds per frame.

As I mentioned above, this post only gives a high level synopsis of creating this GIF. The tutorial will have much more detail with screen shot images and examples at each stage as I move through the creation process.

Obruni Arrives in Africa – Sound Effect Story (Slight Variation)

4 Replies

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/94573148″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Amber arrives in Ghana, Africa. The new “Obruni”, or white person, both delights and scares the young children of Takoradi, and she soon discovers the way music can transcend cultural divides. Listen to the original full length podcast episode the sound effects were taken from at http://rockylouproductions.com/2010/10/18/obruni-take-it-up/

Audio editing is not for the faint of heart. Especially if you can be a perfectionist or have a tendency towards OCD. [Guilty as charged…] You can fiddle around and fine-tune forever. (Note: The audio clip attached happens to be an updated version from what I posted earlier this morning. I didn’t like that the car racing by in the beginning was inaudible on my iPhone. So I fixed it!) But it can really be worth it when you come back months later to a piece you created and go, “Wow, I did that?”

Inspired by LoDown episode 8, I jumped in to create my own sound effect story – Audio Assignment 70 with a slight variation of having a bit of spoken and sung text. The assignment asks us to create a 90sec or less story with at least 5 sound effects. I decided to use sound effects I had from a podcast I had created with my daughter, Amber, in the fall of 2010. We really didn’t know what we were doing back then at moving her stories off the written page and making them audible. I didn’t have any experience with sound editing software, and I didn’t even know what a Podcast was. Amber had to suggest listening to StoryCorps and WYNC’s RadioLab to help me become familiar with the genre we were embarking upon.

I’m a big Apple fan and went with GarageBand as my sound editing tool. I wasn’t up to the VERY steep learning curve for the more professional stuff. (And I hadn’t heard about Audacity. I’ll have to check it out at some point during the course.) I have plans for a future blog post (possibly a series or a LoDown co-hosting gig) that will go through the creation process for the entire podcast episode, but for this post I’m going to stick to the sound effect story.

A story needs to have a beginning, middle and end- now doing that in 90 seconds can be a challenge. Finding the right sounds, keeping in mind copyright issues, [link to my YouTube playlist on copyright and creative commons] is also a big challenge. We used freesound.org, pulled sounds off of creative commons YouTube videos, and even created some of our own sound effects if we couldn’t find what we wanted. But again… that’s a story for another blog post. My storyline for my sound effect story could be an audio trailer for the larger podcast. The over arching story is about how the people of Takaradi, Ghana reacted to this new white person in their midst and how she responded.

Let me take you through at least a portion of my process. Below is a screen shot of the final GarageBand file. I like to build my layers (technically called tracks) from the bottom up when possible. That way I know where I’m at, and it makes sense to me as I layer on my sounds. So that’s how I’ll be referring to them as I move along.

GarageBand Screen Shot of sound effect tracks only

Setting the Scene (track 1 & 2) To set the scene we used a lively chaotic market place sound effect that is actually a combination of two different sound effects grabbed from freesound.org. (Called Market Place 1 and Market Place 2 above.) Neither of them sounded right alone, but the combination was just what we wanted. Experimenting with different combinations is a great way to find just the right sound you are looking for.

The first “event” in the story was the addition of a car racing by on track 3. Remember I’m counting from the bottom up. If you listen with headphones or good speakers you’ll be able to hear the stereo effect as the car goes whooshing by. There are things happening in and around the market place.

Our story gets more personal when track 5 brings in the children laughing, while track 3 changes over to shouting out “Obruni”. Both of these effects were pulled from YouTube videos. So… why you might ask don’t I put each sound effect on its own separate track? (Track 3 has 3 different effects.) Because it’s a visual nightmare when you have to keep scrolling the screen to see where you are at. I try to limit the number of tracks I need to what can fit on my computer screen. For our big podcasts that almost never happens -but we try. And labeling your larger tracks with something you understand, as well as the individual clips, is a good practice. All things we learned the hard way!

With track 4 we hear a child crying and Amber fading in, softly humming “Amazing Grace”, to soothe the little one on track 6. Track 6 continues and morphs into Amber actually singing. With track 7 the choir joins in. Amazingly we found this little, slightly off key (just what we wanted) choir with a YouTube search. A set of congo drums joins the party on track 8. Then it’s back down to track 3 with the audience applause. Our final track 9 brings the story toward a close with Amber singing alone again.

I very purposely chose segments of the sung lyrics to coincide with an event in the story or a feeling I wanted to impart. The child is crying, Amber hums then sings, “that saved a wretch like me.” Amber is then saved by the choir joining in. I could have used the humming again at the end, but concluding on “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound…” was just too much to pass up. Like a good poem, there are many layers of meaning that can be interpreted by a listener.

At the very end the market place sounds coming back into auditory focus to take front and center stage. Life continues on with one final master fade out.

Fine Tuning: But least you think we are finished… Oh No… you would be wrong. You can consider this version of the audio file a rough draft. But at least these aren’t just end-to-end clips. I’ve talked about some layering here. How these sounds are in relationship to one another is a big deal. Blending one sound effect into another and adjusting the volume balance between clips can add a lot to your story. Panning the sound effect into one ear or the other or the stereo effect like the car racing by are nice details to add. You have to be careful with this though. You don’t want to end up making your listener dizzy because what they are listening to doesn’t make sense. With the screen shot below I’ve opened up the track volume areas so you can actually see what I’m talking about.

GarageBand file with volume track shown

Track 1 & 2 market sounds fade in at the very start. We don’t want to alarm our listeners with an abrupt beginning. The idea is to create and maintain a listening experience that someone wants to join and hang-out in. If it feels “chunky” (as Amber & I refer to it) anywhere in your audio file your listeners will pick it up. Maybe not consciously, but they’ll know something isn’t quite right. Choke back the false pride and fix it! You’ll be glad you did.

I made sure the track 3 car sound effect faded out nicely so you knew the car was fading into the distance. And the clip we used for the kids laughing on track 5 had an erratic volume level. It was too soft at the beginning, so I bumped it up and brought it back down toward the end of the clip.

When the child is upset and crying (track 4) at seeing this person with a different color of skin than her own, she cries full on. Then her effect begins to trail off as Amber’s humming effect on track 6 crosses over. At this same time I reduce the background market audio (tracks 1 & 2) so that the listener is able to focus on the next event in the story. But since my story takes place in a market place, I don’t want to mute it completely.

As Amber is singing (track 6) the people in the market place gradually join in (track 7) and then someone fades in with a beat on drums (track 8). I get a sense of a subliminal cadence that I follow to get the timing just right. (When that “chunky” feeling pops up that I mentioned above, I’m most likely out of step with the piece and keep tweaking till it feels right.) We then linger here just a bit on this climactic moment of the story before the the audience claps. (Back down to track 3.)

The clapping trails off, and Amber returns alone,(track 9) but this time with a more ethereal sounding tone. That’s why this clip was placed onto track 9 instead of remaining on track 6 with the other Amber clips. I wanted to modify the basic sound effect to give the feeling of a dream or fade away into the distance.

There is more mixing and “Mastering” of the final audio that happens next to give your audio file more life, but I’ll save that for another post. As well as going into how to export your file so that you aren’t shocked at the low sound quality that you disappointingly ended up posting. Scott Lo and I are contemplating a LoDown episode for audio week 3 entitled, “How come what I posted doesn’t sound like what I made?” Any interest in that topic? In short it has to do with the audio file compression you need to do so people can download and listen to them on your mobile device. This 90 sec story uncompressed (AIF) is 23 MB, while the compressed MP3 that you listened to above is only 2.9 MB. And it could be even lower if I used the standard bit rate compression of 192 KB rather than 256KB which I prefer.

Typical “High” quality compression rate settings for GarageBand.

Okay… That’s going to wrap up this post. It’s time for bed. Let me know if you have any questions or would like me to explain in more detail how I did something. Hopefully I’ll have the time to write up more posts on the subject.

Week 1 FIREHOSE Summary

2 Replies

DS106: What was I expecting? [Original Image from “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham]

Oh my… What was I thinking when I decided to sign-up for this course? I’m taking this class, DS106, as an open online student, and I wasn’t expecting the level of work requested by the instructors and the speed at which the material and assignments are rushing by during this summer version of the course. I’m planning on doing what I can now and participating again during a future full semester course, hopefully this Fall.

Although warned when first reading over the material that this was not something to take lightly, I was still not prepared. My own enthusiasm has surprised me with wanting to fully absorb the material being taught, completing the assignments and taking the time to do them well, and my desire to interact with my fellow students There is so much good information, as well as the technical skill learning, that I feel I just don’t have enough hours in the day to digest it all. Writing up this weekly summary is a huge job in and of itself. Any suggestions on how I might streamline the process? Is this time well spent and appreciated by the instructors or my class mates if I’m just an open onliner?

THE BLOG: I started late in the game (Thursday of week one) and creating my new blog site was the first hurdle. I unsuccessfully attempted to create my first blog site with the RapidWeaver software I have been using for the last couple of years. After hitting my head against the wall for a couple of hours I decided to try using WordPress, since it was being used for the UMW students anyway, and I knew I could get additional help if needed. GREAT DECISION! My web hosting site, BlueHost, had a simple script download option for WordPress that worked great once I got out of the way with my RapidWeaver obsession and let it do its thing.

I liked and used the free 2012 theme that was offered. Then customized it with the banner header and background color I use at my Rockylou Productions website. (The tree logo was designed by my daughter Amber.) I love all of the widgets and how easily I can update my pages and blog entries with WordPress from any computer or mobile device. I’ve used all of my Apple devices at some point, my iMac, iPad and iPhone. I watched the tutorial videos for week one on setting up your blog, checked out the Embedding Media in Your Blog Tips page and happily followed all of the recommendations, as well as TalkyTina’s requirements for becoming her “true friend”. I will definitely be changing over my current blogging tool for Rockylou Productions to a WordPress template when I finish up the course. I’m continually tweaking my DS106 blog design and pages (especially my About page as I learn more about its purpose and importance), and updating past posts with new links when it seems useful. I’m not happy with the Twitter feed formatting though, or the recent comments format in the sidebar. I’ve seen some better formats on other blogs and will be asking for suggestions soon.

GETTING SOCIAL: I’ve had a Twitter account, @rockylou22, for at least 3 years and finally tweeted my first tweet this week. YIPEE! Learning the proper etiquette and how to utilize the hashtags correctly has been quite a learning curve. I don’t think I’ve got it right yet since I don’t always see my posts at the #ds106 feed. I had my privacy settings to restrictive at first, but I thought I fixed that. I’ve also had a Flickr account for quite some time, but never posted anything until now, just used it to gather creative commons photographs for some of my video creations that I post to my YouTube channel. I not only created my SoundCloud account, but uploaded a podcast that my daughter and I had created a few years ago to see how it worked. (Link to the rest of the podcast series. ) No issues there. Oh… and I almost forgot. I created my gravatar too.

DAILY CREATES: I’ve enjoyed playing with these, but since I’ve had to play catch up they are all posted to one blog page. But I’ll get into the swing of things this week.

Daily Create Assignments: Introducing Myself, Alien Rochelle, 500th Daily Create Celebration, Life, Love & Laughter with my grandson, iPad + Toes = FunFunFun

VISUAL AND DESIGN ASSIGNMENTS: Again, it’s unfortunate that I didn’t learn about the course sooner so that I had time to complete the required number of assignments. I’m hoping when I have a whole week to work on them it will be different. But with a full-time day job as a Business/Technology Opportunity Analyst at 3M, I’m not sure if I will be able to. If not, I’ve decided to prioritize those assignments I choose as enjoyable and worth while for me personally. I’ve not had too many technical issues yet. I’m pretty well versed in the technology needed to complete the assignments I’ve chosen so far.

ManyMe In Spring Multiply Yourself: VisualAssignments943 (5 stars)
Splish Splash Splash the Color: VisualAssignments340 and VisualTutorials340. (3 stars) While I was at it I thought I might as well create a quick one-page tutorial on how to make one of these photos with Photoshop Elements. Do I get extra points for that? 😉
Go Daddy…. Wheeeeeeee Required GIF VisualAssignments920 (4.5 stars). This was my first attempt at creating a GIF. FUN!FUN!FUN! I used one of my own videos to cut down on the time required to find a clip I could easily use. I felt the downloading and watching a Twilight Zone episode was better spent on learning how to create the GIF itself. I loved this assignment.
GIF Evolution of ManyMe Photo It Like Peanut Butter: VisualAssignments347.( 3 stars) I enjoyed the GIF assignment so much I wanted to use my newfound skills for another project. I started to make it and realized that maybe there was an actual assignment heading I could use. Yep… there was. Killed two birds with one stone. I had fun with a new skill and got to claim it as a completed assignment. You’ve no doubt noticed the creative GIF I made for this post? 🙂 Any extra stars for that one too?

MEDIA REFLECTIONS:

Scottlo’s Podcasts: I haven’t found them especially informative yet. So I’m listening for style. I found his vivid description of the beach in episode 4 to be a good audio technique learning moment.

Gardner Campbell’s essay and video Key take-ways:

“No digital Facelifts”, Open education is not just open to content, but open to other ways of doing it.
I am the architect of my own digital life.
The objective is to be a participant AND a producer. Narrating, Curating, Sharing.
3 levels of openness: Open to the world, open to each other, open to ourselves

Michael Wesch’s presentation (Part 1 , Part 2): Now this was some powerful stuff. I had to keep pausing the video to take notes. I didn’t want to miss a word. A few key take-ways:

Learning to BE rather than learning ABOUT
GLOBAL DANCE, GLOBAL COLLABORATION
The goal isn’t to learn the technology. It is to do something much larger by using these tools as a resource.
Media are not just tools, not just a means of communication. Media changes the way we connect with one another
Web 2.0 is linking people: Sharing, trading and collaborating. We need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.
“Long slow death of the middleman”, 10% of financial loans expected to be peer to peer.
A ubiquitous, context-aware, semantic, social network of things, people & information
All the reasons to learn to read & write are relevant to creating video now. Being a good citizen and having an effect on the world.
Moving from Information Literacy => Meta-media fluency => Digital Citizenship (Gardner Campbell)
Meaning Seekers => Meaning Makers
People think we are creating an unstructured environment, but we are actually creating a structure for participation
Creates possibility for more, but has darkside as well.
- Freedom < – > Control,
- Openness < – > Surveillance
- Community < – > Isolation
- Participation < – > Distraction

GIF Evolution of ManyMe

Go Daddy…. Wheeeeeeee

11 Replies

Grandson and son-in-law having fun last summer at the park.

Our only required DS106 assignment this week was to create an animated GIF from a Twilight Zone episode. Me bad… I didn’t use a Twilight Zone clip… But according to Talky Tina, who gave us the assignment, my GIF fulfills most of the other requirements. It’s B&W. And it’s capturing a really nice childhood moment.

“But that’s okay, because a black-and-white sequence makes for a smaller GIF anyway! Can you help me relive my childhood (and perhaps your childhood, or that of your parents?) with some nice, friendly b&w animated GIFs From The Twilight Zone and Beyond? Try to capture all of the really nice childhood moments! You know the really, really best and funnest parts!

I’ve never created a GIF before, so this was a bit of an adventure. I had to first figure out what these things were all about. Luckily my daughter was over for family Sunday dinner tonight and she pointed me to some fun examples at James Vander Memes. It turned out after doing some research on the web and viewing a few tutorials on YouTube that my Mac versions of Adobe Premiere Elements 11 and Photoshop Elements 11 software would work.

The clip I’m using was taken from a video of my grandson and son-in-law called “Playtime With Daddy” that I created and posted to YouTube at the beginning of the year. At the time I was acquainting myself with new video editing software and was having fun trying out new effects like changing the speed of the video and adding in an old news reel effect.

I had some trouble figuring out which format to publish the video clip so that it would turn into sequenced images. Publish+Share => Computer => Image (use for exporting still image) => open the advanced menu and choose “export as sequence” under the video heading, then save. My next glitch showed up as I was moving each of the still images into a single Photoshop file. For some reason my Photoshop Elements wasn’t letting me easily copy and paste the layers between files like I had done with earlier versions. I found a work around. Again, after some trial and error, when saving it to the web as a GIF I needed to check the sequence box. Then it would only play in reverse? What the ….??? After trying, without success, to manually reorder the layers I finally found a checkbox that said reverse on it, and I was on my way. Only to be stymied one last time when I previewed my blog entry and the original Flickr link didn’t work correctly. I ended up just inserting my own media. I’ll update my post if I get it working correctly.

I enjoyed this assignment and am looking forward to learning more about what others have done with a GIF. I wonder how I’ll be using this form of story telling in the future?

Splish Splash

5 Replies

DS106 Visual Assignment 340 asked me to emphasize details- remove all color from a photo, and then restore the original color to a single object. Here’s one of my favorite examples from a project I did a few years back along with a printable 1-page directions handout.

My partner is a singer/songwriter who also plays bass and guitar. He’s been a great sport letting me experiment with new digital story telling tools over the last couple of years. One day while in the recording studio laying down new tracks for his latest CD, he agreed to let me take photos of him in action. The original color image I use in this example is nice enough. It tells a story of a musician hard at work in the studio. But I wanted something that would really grab your attention. I decided to highlight the bass by leaving it in living color and tone done the rest of the photo by making it black & white. This was especially powerful when you see his black & white hands holding the colored bass. Talk about a SPLASH.

The trickiest part to accomplishing this effect using Photoshop Elements 11 is the use of the Lasso Tool. You can pretty easily select the bulk of the object you want to leave in color- or make it a B&W object for another perspective. The hard part to making this look nice is the fine tuning you need to do while using the Lasso Tool. I had to zoom in very close and use the add more and subtract options alternately to select only what I wanted. You then copy and paste the selection into a new layer. As long as you don’t move any of the images in the individual layers themselves they will all align properly.

ManyMe In Spring

2 Replies

I was cruising the DS106 visual assignment choices for something that looked fun and challenging – yet would only take a couple of hours to complete. The MULTIPLY YOURSELF assignment (Take two or more photos of yourself in the same location and combine them into one photo.) really jumped out at me. And it was worth 5 stars!

The project unfolded in three phases. (Animated GIF illustrating the image evolution)

Phase I woke me up in the middle of the night, my mind wouldn’t rest as it started planning how to set-up the shots so that the photo editing phase would be easier to handle. I initially contemplated enlisting the aid of my partner or daughter to snap the shots, but then decided to take on the challenge of doing this all by myself from start to finish. I decided to use my FlipVideo camera on a tripod to take video footage of me in different places in the frame. Then I’d capture still images on my Mac with Adobe Premiere Elements 11 and meld the images together in Photoshop Elements 11.

Phase II was all about setting up the location, shots and shooting the video clips. I tested a few different scenarios before I had something I thought would work. I added interest and personality to the mix by wearing something a little different in each shot. (As an aside, just in case I wanted to use the video later to make a “live” version of the photo, I made sure that I entered the shots from different places in the frame so that I wouldn’t cross over into another shot when I melded them together.) The weather outside cooperated by not being too windy, the overcast morning meant I didn’t have any shadows, but I still needed to work quickly as it looked like rain was on its way.

Phase III was spent putting it all together. I downloaded the video clips into Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac and selected several still images from each of the three “Rochelles”. I was a little dismayed that the resolution of the images wasn’t all that great. My decision to do this assignment without a helper or the need for a timed shot delay function was now suspect. I would have had higher resolution images if I’d used my regular digital camera on the tripod instead of capturing the stills from the FilpVideo. Alas, as I’ve found so many times before, creativity abounds when I’m seemingly “stuck” and need to find another way out. Not wanting to set everything up again, I moved forward with the “sub-optimal” material I had before me. I trusted everything would work out. Besides, I’m one of the online outside participants of the course, and there’s no real grade at stake here. 😉

I diligently went to work cropping and blending my three images into one. It was fairly easy except that the center pose lighting was slightly lighter than the two outside images. Why?? I haven’t a clue. I shot the entire video in one 4 min session and the lighting matches at both ends. Maybe the clouds thinned a little or something half-way through?? Who knows…. To fix this I used Enhance=>Adjust Lighting=>Brightness and Contrast on each of the 3 poses until they matched as best I could get. While playing around I chanced upon a combination of adjustments that slightly blurred the photo even more and suddenly it looked great. As usual I don’t exactly remember what I did to make it happen… it was “Magic”. Finally, I wanted to give the photo a border of some kind. I like to play with all of the dials and sliders to see what shows up. EUREKA! The combination of Edit Layer Style=>Glow Inner=> Yellow was perfect.

I now have a beautiful feathered yellow glow surrounding my ManyMe photo that matches the yellow jacket I am wearing. Yippee!

Watch an animated GIF visually illustrating the evolution of the image.

Rockylou's DS106 Blog

Cultivating Creativity. Raising Visions.