Category Archives: Headless13

Five Card Poetry – My Story

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Five Card Story: Sharing my story

a Five Card Flickr story created by Rockylou22

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 crave community….


flickr photo by directrix291

Do I need to be flashy and bright to be seen? 


flickr photo by bionicteaching

Do I need my words set in stone to be valid?


flickr photo by Serenae

Is it okay to have fun and learn along the way?


flickr photo by bionicteaching

With heart, body, and soul my story can be shared.


flickr photo by bionicteaching

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.

 

EnglandRainChair

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.

WhenIAmReal

 

Free Vintage Calligraphy Clip Art: http://vintageprintables.blogspot.com/2012/09/calligraphic-frames-and-borders.html

You can also read about how I made the borders on these images.  I delved into the HTML code in the text editor.  It wasn’t that bad…. Really.

Storytelling Used in Poaching Talent (3M-DS106 Repost)

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HCHeadlessGIF

“HC” Headless Self-portraits

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 USED IN POACHING TALENT

By “HC” a 3M-DS106 Salon member

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.

HC_Canva_PitchDeck

Would a pitch-deck like this sway you from your current position (assuming you are somewhat happy with your job at the moment)?

********************************

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 Week 2?

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FdeTroyLectureMoliere_DS106-3MWhat 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.  🙂

HCHeadlessGIF

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:

DAILY CREATES

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

BeetleJuiceGIF_2

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.

Removing GIFFight for 3M 

Headless Over Heels In Love 

Shared from rockylou22 using Embeddlr

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
****************************
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

Brain_AliensFiguring 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.
  • Here is a direct link to the story in Tapestry:
  • Link to the story posted in Tumblr:


Shared from rockylou22 using Embeddlr
download/iPhone

State of The Daily Create- Wk 2

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It’s week 2 of the Headless 13 dS-106.  While we were finishing up boot camp and continuing to build and personalize our personal digital cyber-infrastructure, we were also having some fun along the way creating GIFs and doing some daily creates.

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”

REDUCE: I try to work smarter by choosing foundational media that will be easier to manipulate technically if I have limited time on my hands. i.e tdc609 showing the “coolness” of a refrigerator.  Lassoing that refrigerator was so easy, plus no need to extensively rebuild background with these images, that I ended up creating two photos. 🙂

What do we do with this thing? This long lost outtake from the opening scene of “2001 A Space Odyssey” wasn’t quite what Stanley Kubrick had in mind.

What do we do with this thing?

That 1969 refrigerator was so cool it was selected to fly to the moon with the Apollo 11 guys. But there were a few glitches in getting it hooked up.

Apollo 11 Fridge Debacle

I may choose to not make a big production out of a project, even though I could have for tdc603 when making a video to tell the story of my keychain that gives a deeper look into who I am.

I also continue to toss aside my perfectionism and let my technical vulnerabilities be seen in public as I shared with the world my limited ability to draw a 3D perspective for tdc606. I’m using the Paper53 app on my iPad.

3D Drawing Skills

I was quite pleased with my brilliant use of the reuse principle by combining two daily creates into one photoshoot.  tdc601 asked us to draw something DS106ish backwards in recognition of 601 being the reverse of 106. Here I’ve drawn DS106 backward again on my iPad with the Paper53 app.

Backward Glance at DS106

In combination with my submission for tdc602 capturing the elegance of Apple products that are designed with elegance in mind from the device to the packaging right down to the details of the insert materials.  It is an experience just to open the box for an iPad or an iPhone.

Elegance in the 21st Century

A very simple GIF was also added to the mix.

DS106 Elegance for tdc601

Shared from rockylou22 using Embeddlr

UPDATE: (9/10/13) The above daily create duo now has a project process posted: DS106ish Elegance. There were a few little tricks to getting the images and GIF to look nice that I thought should be captured.

REUSE: I use pieces of past projects too. Either from another ds106er, an on-line source like Microsoft Clip-art or free image and GIF sites, or from my own art collection. Like this photo of my grandson actually taken the day before tdc605 was announced.  I’ve captured the calm amongst the ever lurking emotional chaos of the typical two year old. My grandson DJ looks so sweet and adorable here. And he is… most of the time. But those tantrums can come & go at anytime.

Calm & Chaos at Two

Headless_Rockylou_3_GIF_Final_500RECYCLE:  Not sure if this would fall under Reuse or Recycle, but either way for tdc604 my headless self-portrait was created a few weeks back for one of @IamTalkyTina’s August GIF Challenges.

Read all about how I created the GIF and the image at:

Engineering Headless Rockylou

There was one final daily create, tdc607 “Create an exciting movie trailer for your ds106 web site. Use The Voice.” that I really wanted to do. But due to my youngest daughter getting married this weekend, that balance of personal time and ds106 weighed most heavily onto the family side.  I plan on doing it this week though.  I have some ideas floating around in my head I’m excited to try out.

It’s Showtime!

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BeetleJuiceGIF_2

“It’s Showtime!”

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]

And look at that… the official movie poster? Yes.  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!

Talk about perfect source material for completing the DS106 Headless 13 week two assignment, Visual Assignment 2 “Say It Like The Peanut Butter”  Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. 

This is not my first movie GIF, [See Ewww… Brain] so I’m pretty familiar with my GIF making tools now.  I’m also getting better and better at choosing the right kind of source material to work with to make things go smoother and faster in the production process.

For the video clip I knew this was a key scene and someone on YouTube would have posted this small segment and I wouldn’t have to search through my own DVD to find it.  Yep… there it was, and even better… It was an HD version to boot.  I downloaded the clip to my Mac with the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox.  I then imported it to Adobe Premiere Elements 11, located the 3 second clip and then exported it as a JPEG sequence at 10 Frames per second.

Publish+Share => Computer => Image (use for exporting still image) => open the advanced menu and choose “export as sequence” under the video heading, then save.

I opened the 36 images in Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 and placed them all into one file as separate layers.  The original images were quite large, so I reduced the image size to 500px which is the upper limit to post to Tumblr.

File => Save For Web => Click on Animate => Animation Frame Delay set at 0.1 => Save

That’s it.  Simple once you know how to do it.  Not so the first few times as I was learning how. [See Hula Hotseat]  For those of you just starting out…. hang in there.  It gets easier the more you practice.  [See Batman & Robin Behind The Scenes for a good photoshop elements GIF tutorial]

And a whole lot more fun is coming your way!  Soon YOU’LL be saying, “It’s Showtime!”

Video Source: MOVIECLIPS.com