Category Archives: Thoughts and Ideas

DS106 is #4Life AND #4Work

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00_Rochelle3MThumbYou haven’t seen much of me the last couple of weeks, but it’s all good.   I’ve been busy applying DS106 to my income producing job at 3M.  Because of what I’ve learned over the last few months, some directly from the CogDog himself, Alan Levine  behind the scenes, some from the DS106 course work, some from other on-line participants, I have been able to incorporate several new digital communication tools like Storify, Twitter, blogging, WordPress, HTML and GIFs to increase my effectiveness as a business opportunity and technology analyst.  Here I was thinking I was “goofing-off” and having too much fun with my DS106 obsession.  Then wham… the week before I leave for my annual fall meditation retreat up in the Rocky Mountains everything falls into place.

  • My boss likes what I can do with Storify and has given me permission to try out the business level subscription for a couple of months.
  • I built a new WordPress website in just two days that will provide an excellent user interface and location for me to organize the company analysis information I gather for my business group, Energy and Electronics, at 3M.
  • I’m establishing a new external on-line presence as Rochelle Lockridge the professional 3M employee: (@rllockridge Twitter handle) which is separate from my personal digital presence as Rockylou.  RLLockridge@mmm.com will be keeping up-to-date on what’s happening with the technologies and companies she needs to follow.

Without this course and the people who make it what it is, I never would have been able to do all of this.  Everything has come at the right time, with the right people showing up in my life, when I didn’t even know I could benefit from this kind of help.  I’m glad that I read about DS106 while studying about MOOCs for a 3M project and got in touch with Alan Levine.  The rest is history. 🙂

So that brings me to the present and moving into the future.  I’m in the process of co-organizing a final project for the 3M-DS106 Salon around collaboratively creating a video documentary (for lack of a better term) that shares our experiences and projects that we will then post to YouTube.  The group has lost momentum over the last few weeks as the greater DS106 community was working on audio.  This will perk them back up. And I’m hoping even some of the 3M “lurkers”, as we’ve been calling them, get involved too.

My plans are to ask them what else they want to learn about and practice with respect to digital communication tools and our internal social platforms, and then build that into the way we create the video.  We will most likely be using many of the same sorts of collaboration tools we used during the making of the DS106 radio programs- like Google Docs, Google Hangouts, Skype, Twitter – but with our internal 3M versions of the tools: share drives, Level 3 Global Crossing, SPARK, IBM Connections Communities.  It might be fun to have a few other DS106ers who’ve been following my little experiment and have been commenting to participate in some way too.  Maybe creating a video clip or doing a recorded Skype “interview” with me that we can include.  If you’re interested contact me.

If this goes well, it will be made public and it might be of value as an introductory tool for others who plan to be working with industry “inside the firewall”. Or perhaps as supporting data  if you need to show your school administrators why the skills taught in DS106 are relevant when your students graduate and enter the business world.

DS106 has made a significant impact in my life that makes me want to share it with others.  This is yet another way to do that.  Oh… by the way… I do plan to keep the 3M-DS106 Salon open and run this again.  Hopefully with another external course going on, but will do it on my own if need be.

Know-It-ALL Thru Storytelling

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Rochelle and John at 3M

“It’s the undisclosed knowledge- the anecdotal knowledge.  It’s the stories that are missing. There’s an efficiency in story telling that you can not get from just the written text and then recorded videos.” – John Woodworth, 3M IT Manager

I am currently in the midst of coordinating  the 3M-DS106 Salon in coordination with the Fall 2013 “Headless” DS106 open on-line digital story telling course. One of my favorite technologies that we work with is audio, and I’ve been curious as to how or if podcasting might be an unexplored opportunity at 3M. So… last week I sat down with one of our 3M IT managers, John Woodworth, to discuss and record his thoughts on how vignettes and story telling can be used as an effective and often quite efficient mode of communication and knowledge transfer in the corporate environment.  John is an avid story teller who illustrated many of his points by telling a story.  As you can imagine, the time flew by and we talked for almost an hour.

This segment of my podcast experiment at 3M captures the second portion of our conversation specifically focused on story telling.  The first half on vignettes was much longer and needs to be edited to a more reasonable length or split into a couple of episodes.  If you find this interesting and would like to hear more, let me know and I’ll work up and post the remainder of our conversation.

  • +  Know-it-ALL thru Storytelling

 

Music Attribution: “Skirting Boards” by Bleak House (Creative Commons License)

NOTE: I want to apologize to John Woodworth and my listeners for the poor sound quality of the recording.  John sounds off in the distance with some annoying room echo.  I am still learning how to use my audio equipment (a Samson Meteor Mic plugged into an iPad using the Recordium App) and what room environments work best. (Definitely not John’s office with my set-up. I’m even wondering if I was actually recording through my iPad mic instead of the nice Samson.)  I did my best to try and fix it during post-production within GarageBand.  Most of the advice out there in Google Land was to trash it and start over again.  But one guy talked about how he adjusts the noise gate and EQ settings, and that it might take a second pass. I gave it a valiant effort, trying all sorts of different effects as well as what was recommended, and will do better next time around. What can I say in my defense… I’m a technical person by heart and enjoy getting out of my comfort zone to experiment with new technology. That’s one of the traits 3M hired me for!

Me In Week 3 – Telling Stories

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Weekly Summary Checklist

Here’s a run-down of what I accomplished in DS106 Headless 13 Week 3 – Digital Storytelling.

First Things First:

Rockylou_HeadlessWhat is a story? What is storytelling? What is digital storytelling? Wanting to understand and become a better digital storyteller is what attracted me to DS106 in the first place, so I’ve been doing some serious pondering all week.

In my professional life as a strategic business/technology analyst at 3M I am often presented with a great deal of data and information that needs to be communicated to a variety of audiences with different levels of interest and familiarity with the subject matter.  Sharing the raw data, as it were, would almost certainly be a waste of time for everyone.  It’s my job to “COMMUNICATE” that information, not just gather it and spit it back out again.

I am paid to be a curator of information AND a storyteller. It is the story I create and tell that is based upon that data and information that is the key. Even the media I use to tell the story has an impact on the effectiveness of communicating the information. With a global asynchronous audience I can’t rely on personally sharing the story in real-time with a live person in attendance who is engaged in the moment, that can ask questions, get clarification, etc. Mastering the art of DIGITAL storytelling is a must for me. Read my complete blog entry Whatsa’ Story! for more. And here’s a cute tappable digital story from Nathalie using the Tapestry app I learned about in our DS106 Google+ Community. (If you see a great big blank space below, refresh your screen and try again. Embedding the Tapestry stories is buggy.)

And from one of my 3M-DS106 Salon Members: “Storytelling Used in Poaching Talent (3M-DS106 Repost)” shares how 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.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories:

StoryShape_WormsCrawlIn_EditI chose a favorite childhood song that my mother taught us to sing as part of her master plan to keep us kids from fighting, “The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out”.

“Did you ever think when a hearse went by, that you might be the next to die. They wrap you up in a big white sheet. They bury you down about six feet deep.  The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. The ants play pinochle on your snout. Your liver turns to a slimy green. And puss comes out like whipping cream. Your eyes pop out your teeth decay. And this is the end of a perfect day.”

 

Vonnegut’s video was entertaining as well as informative, and I could easily understand how to apply his theory of common graph-able shapes to stories. But mine didn’t quite fit until I had looked at the infographic created by Maya Eilam and discovered the “From Bad to Worse” story shape.

Here’s the video I made for a past daily create TDC577 singing through this sorrowful story shape.

Daily Creates:

tdc611 An Interesting high contrast B&W image of an easily overlooked object:

Lamp

tdc613 Photo representing TDC idea of regular exercises of creativity.  The write-up for this photo included a blog post on the The Chemistry of Creativity: Riding The Dopamine Wave

Riding the DS106 Dopamine Wave

tdc614 an Alien Inspirational Greeting Card

Alien Inspirational Greeting Card

I love the surprises and inspirations I find by following other DS106 blogs and accounts. For the alien greeting card daily create, Bill Smith’s image inspired me to rif-a-GIF.

DS106 Hijacking. View Oiginal Image Here

Shared from rockylou22 using Embeddlr

 

 

tdc615 Idea of Clarity

Clarity

As a bonus daily create from week two, tdc607 –  the movie trailer for my website, was finally completed with A Trailer for Two.

Telling a Story in Photos:

Creating my Five Card Flickr Story ,”Five Card Poetry – My 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…..

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.

Participating in DS106- It’s not just ME!

Participating in DS106 continues to be a rich learning experience.  As I am facilitating a concurrent version, the 3M-DS106 Salon at my professional workplace, it permeates all areas of my life.  I have found my direct interactions through blogging, commenting, reading, and sharing with other DS106 participants to be more valuable than the lectures or texts shared with us.  This was unexpected. I had wanted to learn about digital storytelling and thought I just needed to get access to the “professionals” out there who could define it for me.  I was mistaken.  Don’t get me wrong. The videos, graphics, texts, etc are helpful, but I learned the most simply reading other DS106ers explain and illustrate their definitions for what a digital story is. Here’s a list of those I could link back to.

3M-DS106 Salon

And sometimes I am totally surprised and delighted with what I find when I pop in to leave a silly comment like when I witnessed a touching father-son interaction in Bill Smith’s post,  Art Making

Website Always Under Construction

ConstructionSign_1

I’m always working to improve the experience of visiting my blog – for my guests and me personally.  This week I…

 

  • Added the Flag Counter and Revolver Maps widgets after seeing it on Ary Aranguiz’s blog, All The World Is A MOOC.
  • Continue to debug my comments interface.  I’ve really appreciated people letting me know they are having problems when trying to leave a comment.  I need to know about stuff like that so I can fix it.  Thanks!

Sorrowful Story Shape

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Link to Worms Crawl In Video

DS106 Headless 13 Week 3 was all about the basics of digital storytelling. Part of our assignment was to watch a video of Kurt Vonnegut humorously illustrating his rejected master’s thesis in anthropology that showed how the journey of a story’s main character can be graphed to reveal the story’s shape.

Maya Eilam created an infographic that illustrates these story shapes beautifully with examples we can relate to like: The Twilight Zone, Jane Eyre, and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

I was glad to see that she had a few more story shapes than what Vonnegut had shown in the short video segment since the story I wanted to use didn’t seem to fit.

After watching this video, write a new blog post and explain a story that you’re familiar with in terms of Vonnegut’s approach. Pick a movie, TV show, book, poem song, etc. The idea is to outline the shape of that story in a visual and descriptive form. Use some kind of media to do this, make it drawing or video or whatever you like. Be creative!

StoryShape_BoyInHoleAt first I was going to simply say that my story was a modified “Man In Hole”.

But lo-and-behold, my childhood song “The Worms Crawl In” will nicely fit into the “From Bad To Worse” story shape – starting off poorly then getting continually worse with no hope for improvement.  For an August DS106 daily create tdc577, my movie trailer for a favorite childhood song or nursery rhyme (embedded at the top of the post)  has me singing this song.

As you can clearly hear the poor soul my siblings and I would raise our voices to in song, under the guidance of our mother, was in bad shape and was only getting worse.

“Did you ever think when a hearse went by, that you might be the next to die. They wrap you up in a big white sheet. They bury you down about six feet deep.  The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. The ants play pinochle on your snout. Your liver turns to a slimy green. And puss comes out like whipping cream. Your eyes pop out your teeth decay. And this is the end of a perfect day.”

StoryShape_WormsCrawlIn_Edit

There is one final uplifting phrase at the end “… and this is the end of a perfect day.”  But I think that was just an add-on by some well-meaning parent who needed to make the story shape into the more familiar things-all-work-out-in-the-end “Man In Hole”. WarmsCrawlIn

Come to think of it, there were quite a few stories and songs with the “From Bad To Worse” shape in my youth.  Hmmmmmm…. I wonder what Vonnegut’s anthropological lens would have to say about the culture I grew up in? 🙂

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.

The Chemistry of Creativity: Riding The Dopamine Wave

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TDC Surfer

Surfer Dudette Riding the DS106 Dopamine Wave for TDC613

DailyCreateWebPicAlan Levine has been updated and tweaking the DS106 site quite a bit the last few weeks.  He’s been asking for people to test things out, trying some new formats.  You know… things like that.  Well yesterday’s DS106 Daily Create, TDC613, asked us to take a photo that represents the TDC idea of regular exercises of creativity.  It seems the current photo the site is using at the moment is getting stale.

I thought about this challenge throughout the day, but nothing was presenting itself to excite my creativity.  Then last night, at 10:30 pm, inspiration struck.  Man… I was planning on going to bed early…. but no…. my brain chemistry had now shifted into creative mode.

BrainChem_500px-Dopamine2.svg_-300x139

The chemistry of creativity – Dopamine on the brain

“Our brain chemistry is without doubt an unpredictable force and influence on our mood and, therefore, how creative we feel….Dopamine is the chemical that allows our brain to wonder and think-up new ideas (Flaherty, A.W* )…. It is known that dopamine gets trapped in tense muscles. Regular (and even gentle) exercise can help release this dopamine back in our body and brain.”  [Chemistry and Creativity]

SurferThat nice boost of dopamine inspired a repeat appearance of Surfer Dudette last seen surfing her way through my first stop motion video for tdc567.

The image I chose to create for tdc613 has quite a few layers, figuratively and literally.  Figuratively, you can tease out:

  • TDC SurferCreativity can be like riding a wave. You are focused, relaxed, alive, not really sure what’s coming next.
  • The DS106s could be seen as that wave of creativity that she is riding on.
  • She is sitting atop my old Nordic Track.  Real exercise helps to release dopamine trapped in your muscles back into your body.
  • The plant? Not sure… I placed it there as background to hide the fact I was taking the picture in my basement and wasn’t keen on having the furnace, ironing board, and dryer in the background.  Any suggestions on what it could represent?

As for the literal layers… I made the composite image in Photoshop Elements 11 for the Mac.  I keep on-hand a PNG image (They maintain transparency unlike a JPEG) of the DS106 logo downloaded from the website.  I made 3 copies and rotated them slightly so they would align with the bar of the Nordic Track.  By dialing down their opacity to 80% they looked more natural.  At one point I became disturbed that I hadn’t dusted and cleaned everything before taking the photo, but it actually looks quite appropriate with the cracked overlays of the DS106 images. Everything looks a bit worn and not used in awhile.  Maybe I should add another layer of interpretation – that it’s time to dust ourselves off and get our creativity moving again.

TDC Surfer_deletes

Deleted sections of image in white

To make the DS106s appear as if they were stickers attached to the bar, I used the magnetic select tool to select various parts of the exercise equipment.  I copied and pasted each into a new layer.  Leaving me with a base image that had blank spots.

The three new layers were then placed on top of the DS106s.  For some unknown reason the new image layers turned out to be slightly smaller than the space where they were selected and copied from.  This has never happened before.  So I had to slightly increase their size.  Weird….

I’m almost “quite pleased” with my final product. It seems a bit off center to me. That golden ratio thing not optimized or something.  I tried to crop it, but couldn’t get it to look right and keep the exercise equipment in the frame enough that you knew that’s what it was.  I’m hoping design week will help me work on things like that.

TDC Surfer

 

Whatsa’ Story?

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What is a story? What is storytelling? What is digital storytelling? Week 3 of DS106 Headless 13 has us asking these questions and exploring this for ourselves.

What do you associate with the word storytelling? Before you do anything this week, use this as an opportunity to put down in words what your current concept is. There is no right or wrong answer here- this is to set up your current concept of what story means.

Do not go look anything up online — We are looking for your ideas. Just write a blog post to represent a starting point to outline what storytelling means to you.

Wanting to understand and become a better digital storyteller is what attracted me to DS106 in the first place, so I’ve been doing some serious pondering all week.  And being challenged to NOT read anything about it before writing up my reflections has definitely been a challenge. I want to “get it right”, quote my sources, rely on the words and thoughts of others to form “my” thoughts and opinions. It’s hard for me to wing it like this.  But my DS106 participation (now winding its way through my private AND professional lives in a big way) continues to reinforce it is through taking risks and allowing myself to be appropriately vulnerable that I stretch my boundaries thereby allowing real learning to take place. I am not just learning new tools and techniques, but learning who I am and what I’m capable of.

So what is a story? And I’m supposed to do this with words only? But images are integral to a story, right?! Yes, images are integral. But they don’t have to be something seen with the physical eye.  Images formed in your minds eye are just as important if not more so. And visual images themselves won’t necessarily a story make.

In my professional life as a strategic business/technology analyst at 3M I am often presented with a great deal of data and information that needs to be communicated to a variety of audiences with different levels of interest and familiarity with the subject matter. Sharing the raw data, as it were, would almost certainly be a waste of time for everyone. It’s my job to “COMMUNICATE” that information, not just gather it and spit it back out again. I am paid to be a curator of information AND a storyteller. It is the story I create and tell that is based upon that data and information that is the key. Even the media I use to tell the story has an impact on the effectiveness of communicating the information. With a global asynchronous audience I can’t rely on personally sharing the story in real-time with a live person in attendance who is engaged in the moment, that can ask questions, get clarification, etc. Mastering the art of DIGITAL storytelling is a must for me.

Storytelling is usually associated with entertainment.  But you are still communicating. It’s not just a bunch of random words, images, or sounds strung together. They are brought together in a way that creates meaning for the creator and the audience- whether it be to entertain, relay information, or my preference, both.  A good story take us on a journey. We are engaged.  We are impacted by its telling.  A story has meaning to our lives.

DS106 Invitation to 3M

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This invitation was posted on my internal 3M blog inviting my colleagues to join a DS106 experiment I wanted to run from behind the firewall of a corporation. 

Your Invitation

FdeTroyLectureMoliere_DS106-3M

Coming soon! DS106@3M

Want to have some fun improving your 3M digital communication & collaboration skills? This is your invitation to join me in creating our first 3M DS106 Salon*. Where we’ll develop our digital presence and learn the power and responsibilities that come with good digital citizenship – more important than ever as our digital lives blur between private, public, professional, and proprietary. The goal isn’t just to learn the technology.  It is to do something much larger by using these tools as resources to improve our positive impact and effectiveness inside and outside of 3M.  You can participate as much or as little as you like, drop-in, drop-out, drop back in again, as we create and collaborate alongside the 15-week open-online course in digital storytelling, DS106 headquartered out of Mary Washington University, which begins August 26, 2013. 

* A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation.  [Source: Wikipedia  Salon Image Source ]

Intrigued and want to learn more?

Try a link or two…

Still interested in joining the fun?

 Contact Rochelle Lockridge ASAP to let me know you’re interested.  Feel free to use your favored communication mode: e-mail, spark, text, phone, blog comments, etc..

image 

   

Chicken Heart Terror – Behind the Scenes

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"It's going to eat you up!!"

“It’s going to eat you up!!”

The It’s Going to Eat You Up! animated GIF [DS106 AnimatedGIFAssignment1162 ] was definitely fun to create. It combines two very fond childhood memories: The old campy Batman & Robin television show and the Bill Cosby comedy routine Chicken Heart . But the bulk of the project time and energy was put into on-line research to locate and link the images, audio files, and relevant websites that provide the story behind the story. Here are the Why’s and How’s of producing the GIF.

Arch Oboler recording "Lights Out".

Arch Oboler recording “Lights Out”.  (Photo Source)

During audio week of the UMW DS106 summer 2013 on-line course in Digital Storytelling, I was introduced by our audio mentor Scottlo to the Arch Oboloer The Devil and Mr. O radio plays.  As I started listening late one night I found that Oboler had created the “Lights Out” radio play Chicken Heart, which inspired the infamous comedy routine by Bill Cosby from his Wonderfulness album that my little sister and I would recreate playing inside an old gutted radio cabinet.

Excited by my find, I eagerly began what turned out to be a fruitless quest to locate the original 1937 Oboler recording. Sadly, I discovered it was one of his lost episodes. 🙁 Recordings of the original radio play and rebroadcasts in 1938 and 1942 are lost or unavailable, although he later recreated the episode for a record album in 1962 – which I couldn’t locate.  There is an 8 min abridged version that many mistake for the original.  And amazingly while researching this blog post, I actually came across a December 31, 2008 recreation of the entire Chicken Heart radio play by the Post Meridian Radio Players.

From Wikipedia:  Arch Oboler made effective use of atmospheric sound effects, perhaps most memorably in his legendary “Chicken Heart,” a script that debuted in 1937 and was rebroadcast in 1938 and 1942. It features the simple but effective “thump-thump” of an ever-growing, ever-beating chicken heart which, thanks to a scientific experiment gone wrong, threatens to engulf the entire world. Although the story bears similarities to an earlier Cooper episode (about an ever-growing amoeba that makes an ominous “slurp! slurp!” sound), Oboler’s unique choice of monster was inspired by a Chicago Tribune article announcing that scientists had succeeded in keeping a chicken heart alive for a considerable period of time after its having been removed from the chicken. Recordings of the original radio broadcasts are lost or unavailable, although Oboler later recreated this episode for a record album in 1962.

Credits & Notes:

To create the GIFs and other images I first downloaded:

 

Listening to Bill Cosby's Chicken Heart.

Imagination at work…

Using Photoshop Elements 11 for the mac I created a composite image of a little girl listening to the radio by using the magic wand tool to copy out representative chicken heart images from the cartoons.  I then adjusted the transparency of the cartoon images to 80% to give the impression of an imaginative mind at work before I merged the layers.

 

Scenes from the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids "Fish Out Of Water" cartoon

Scenes from the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids “Fish Out Of Water” cartoon: Fast forward to 10:20 for the Chicken Heart segment.

It took more steps in the process than I was expecting to create the background image for the Chicken Heart.  It was important to make it clear that it was terrorizing the city.  In order to do that I had to shift the Batman & Robin images from the original center to the far right…

BnR_base BnR_Right

… and move the original Chicken Heart image to the far left. This resulted in a blank area on the right hand side of the image that was corrected by duplicating the Chicken Heart graphic as a new layer and sliding it over to right. 

ChickenHrt_Bkgrnd

GIF Background modified from original

At one point I had the blue car mysteriously hanging in mid air, which I promptly fixed. And the color mismatch you see above on the street is hidden behind Batman & Robin, but I had to be careful and align things properly.

BnR_ChickenHrt_01Sec

Once I had the background completed, it was time to merge it with each of the 13 provided Batman & Robin image layers.  For the full version of PhotoShop there is no need to merge the individual layers.  If there’s a way to do that in elements, I’d be oh so grateful if you’d share it with me.

To produce the final GIF:

  • File=> Save for Web.  
  • Check the animate option box on the top right hand menu
  • Change the default 0.2 sec frame delay to 0.1 seconds – Otherwise, as I found out, they’ll run too slow, and it’s not as funny.
  • Click save and give it a file name.
  • To view your GIF, right click on the file name and open it with a web browser.  

SaveGIFWindow

 

TA! DA!  Batman & Robin terrorized by the Chicken Heart.

"It's going to eat you up!!"

“It’s going to eat you up!!”

 

The How & Why of LouDown #33

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On EP32 of the DS106zone LoDown, Alan Levine talked about how it was just as meaningful to him to know why we chose to do something as well as how we did it. Since I’m not formally trained in this area, I do a lot of my work by intuition and trial & error. This project was no different. I had three early posts of self-reflections that I could use as my base material. And as the case with anything I’ve created for this course, there was a very limited time-frame in which to finish the project. Here’s what went through my head producing DS106zone LoDown #33.

construction,under-128Kelli’s file provided a number of challenges. First off, she had forgotten to tell SoundCloud to allow downloads. But thanks to a tip from Christina Hendricks, I figured out how to use SoundFlower with my GarageBand software to record Kelli’s audio self-reflection directly onto my computer while I played it on-line. Unfortunately, I also had to deal with a sound level that was extremely low and there was a noticeable hum that only became more pronounced as I tried to boost the volume. I’d appreciate any advice on how to remedy this situation more easily than my trial and error attempts using various GarageBand effects until I found a combination that seemed to work well enough.

Once I had all three files loaded into GarageBand the real work began. As usual, I wanted more of a challenge than simply stringing the files together as-is. My initial attempts to have them commenting back and forth on similar themes didn’t work. So, I decided to stick with each person talking solo using soundbite length clips to tell their individual story instead.

Next, I wanted an audio background track. Sampling of stuff I had easily available on my computer lead me on a search for the right track in order to enhance the individual reflections and the overall theme/mood I wanted for the finished podcast. I tried various ambient sounds I had on hand recorded from my backyard, but none of them sounded right. Did I want serious? Did I want moody? Or Twilight Zone eerie? Oh my… some of those just didn’t work at all. The bluegrass, ramblin’ theme I finally chose came about because I had a few similar sounding music tracks from past projects that I knew worked together, and they fit well with the Rockylou-On-The-Road story arc I’d been using.

This is where I took a real risk. Instead of editing the small soundbite clips so that they gave the illusion of a natural continuos flow of conversation, (Which was going to be a particular challenge with both Kelli’s and Bill’s audio.) I opted to make each transition very obvious and pronounced. That lead me to going even a step further by synching the clips to the rhythm of the music. I like this effect here. There’s no trying to mask anything, and I feel it punctuates that these are the highlights. I’m curious as to how others perceive this staccato effect. Any and all comments are most welcome.

Next hurdle? Adding my intro narration. I wanted to use a soundtrack under my voice chosen from music I had personally recorded of my singing and playing guitar. Landslide is one of my signature songs. [Listen] The finger-picking style I use on my 12-string guitar lends itself well to the banjo picking of the other music used under the self-reflections. AND … this was one of those serendipitous bonuses I’ve talked about before…. the lyrics “I saw my reflection in a snow covered hill…” fit perfectly with the theme of the entire podcast. YIPPEE!!! As a matter of fact, if you listen close enough you can hear other lyrics match up with the speaker as well. Like when Claire talks about getting her act together the Landslide lyrics chime in with, “when children get older.” Cool, huh?

The placing of my narration and background music took some careful thought. I felt a need to break up and differentiate movement from one speaker to the next. But having narration as well as my music between each speaker, was too choppy and distracted the listener from the real purpose of the podcast – to hear the self-reflections of our class mates. I liked how Christina in Wednesday’s episode of the LoDown used background music in the beginning and end, and her solo voice with the personal narration in-between. That seemed to work well here too.

LouDown_RockylouSo that’s how LoDown podcast EP33 came to be. And while I still have you here…I’d like to learn more of the technical tools of creating a good podcast instead of relying so heavily on trial and error. I’m sure some of you can point me in the right direction. Thanks!