This weekend I took a backyard photo safari. As I assembled the images a story of my past life as a wife and mother of two young daughters revealed itself. For DS106 Visual Assignment 426, Is that a ….GHOST! I decided to use one of the photos of an abandoned swing set to produce a new image of my daughters haunting their old playground equipment.
Little Halloween Ghosts
This was easy to make now that I have more experience with my photo editing software, Adobe Photoshop Elements 12. Using an old family photo I had taken proudly showing off their Halloween costumes, I used the magic lasso tool to select what I didn’t want and deleted it from the scene. I copied the ghosts only picture as a new layer into the swing set photo. I sized the girls appropriately for their ages in relationship to the size of the swing set. Then reduced the opacity of the little ghosts down to 60%. New picture and assignment complete. 3 Stars for me.
I went out this morning to capture images in my backyard during a time of day I knew would avail interesting shadows and lighting for a DS106 Photo Safari. What I didn’t expect was that through the process of my editing and choosing the photos, a story of my life as the mother of two now grown daughters, and the ex-wife of a gardener would reveal itself. The images tell of a time well past: A child’s swing set neglected and overgrown with weeds and trees, a prolific garden abandoned and no longer tended to, a bleached antler reminding me of the 9 foot electrified fence my ex-husband erected to provide a barrier to free meals for the herd of deer traveling through our backyard, discarded odds and ends left behind when a family dissolved. While this phase of family life has past, a new chapter has begun as an over-joyed “Nana” of a vivacious two-year old grandson. And who knows what stories my backyard will tell 10 years from now.
Bygone Backyard Photo Safari
A backyard of memories revealing their story of a family long past.
Abandoned Childhood
Forgotten Swing
Left Behind Garden Gate
Bygone Box
Bare Bone
Block & Bottle
Ousted Oilcan
THE MAKING OF….
All photos were taken with my iPhone using the Camera+ app. It is a powerful app that can do a lot if you know what you’re doing, which I don’t yet. I experimented with setting the white balance and selecting a focus zone. Neither of which proved to be successful. I think it’s time to read and watch some tutorials. Next, I uploaded the photos to my desktop with the Photo Transfer app. I love this little app. I can very easily upload and download photos and videos over WiFi or bluetooth to any of my Apple devices or even my PC.
Fallen Fence – Photo too cluttered.
I had taken almost 90 photos, and challenged myself to get it down to 5. With a quick look at the images I could see most of them weren’t all that great. The lighting was bad. The images were cluttered and/or blurry. Some just weren’t interesting at all. I then opened them up in Photoshop Elements 12 for a closer look and to do a little photo editing if needed.
Mossy Log Shadows- interesting to look at, but no story
As I worked I noticed a set of photos emerging with single objects dominating the image. I also had some very interesting natural environment shots with neat shadows and lighting, but they didn’t tell a story. They were just nice to look at like this one of a mossy log that had been used to frame the sand box under the swing set. I’m pleased with the results of reducing my photo safari down to the best seven photos with the single object focus, and leaving out the nature only shots.
Writing the intro paragraph was an additional unexpected challenge. In my head it sounded simple to put my thoughts down on paper, but that wasn’t the case. I struggled for quite awhile as to what and how I would share the memories and stories embedded in the photos.
Finally, I used the WordPress Slideshow plugin to add them to my blog post. Then by editing the HTML code in the text view the borders and shadow effect of the final two images were created. Learn how here.
I did it. I successfully pulled off a live broadcast on ds106 radio this morning. Christina Hendricks and I were going to rebroadcast our DS106 Headless week 4 audio review, but our open-online course mates had already listened to it through our earlier blog posts.
I decided to not let this free airtime go to waste. What a perfect opportunity to mess around when no one is listening. Although it did turn out that Cathleen Nardi caught the tail end of my broadcast before Nicecast severely degraded my sound quality until I paid for the $59 software license. I signed off amidst static, but plan to come back on the air again with the entire Obruni podcast series in week 7 (Oct 14 – Oct 20). I may also pop in from time to time with some of my acoustic music. I’ll let you know.
As a bonus to this blog post I’m including my first ds106 radio “futzcast” (as TalkyTina refers to it) aired last week 9/20/13. Dead air, sound level issues, talking to myself as I work through things, keyboard clicks during music… I can hear improvement this time around. 🙂
Here are the songs played in the my futz cast with videos I’d made a few years back for two of them.
I’ll Fly Away (3:00) hymn written in 1929 by Albert E. Brumley
Comes A Time (10:25) by Neil Young (Oops, forgot I’d already played this one, and put it in again for the “real” broadcast.)
1. To start with we took quite a bit of time scouring the ds106 Google+ Community, #ds106 Twitter feed, and ds106 linked blogs to find completed assignments. We kept track of links and comments in a shared Google Doc.
2. We had contemplated doing the show live on DS106 Radio, but neither of us had the experience to pull that off. Eventually we’ll get there. But first I have to figure out how to route my system sound through Skype, so the person on the other end can hear the additional audio I’m playing at my end. I’ve read a bunch of tutorials, corresponded with experienced ds106 radio broadcasters, and have become quite friendly with the Skype test call lady testing a multitude of settings to use with NiceCast. Nothing has worked yet. I’m beginning to think that my Mac hardware and operating system (10.6.8) might be the culprit.
3. We finally settled on “simply” recording our Skype conversation and turning it into a podcast to play on DS106 Radio next week. For recording I use:
It allows me at the click of a button the option to record each side of the conversation as audio and video on separate tracks. It also provides a number of translation tools so I can combine them as needed.
4. It took us almost an hour to get ourselves set-up to record the conversation. We tested levels and other settings to make sure we were good there. We had all of our audio tracks lined up and ready to go as quickly as possible in real-time. This would lessen the post-production editing time. Dead air and click, click, click as we find something on our computer doesn’t make for a riveting podcast.
5. Our 53 minute conversation went smoothly, except for three spots we had to edit when:
My little dog Abby was scratching the floor so loud Christina couldn’t concentrate.
Christina’s husband decided to pop in to get something from the fridge.
I pulled up Stefanie’s DS106 Rap too early in the sequence. (This caused me to move the segment to later on in the podcast, which resulted in some jumbled conversation as noted in Christina’s comments below. Oops!)
6. Once the recording was finished, then comes post production. We had both thought the review would be about half as long, and I wasn’t keen on using up half of my remaining minutes on my SoundCloud account to post the 50+ minute podcast. Christina also had restrictions on what her Tumblr blog would allow for media embedding. My inspired idea to post it on YouTube addressed both of our issues.
7. I used the movie translation tools with the Skype recorder app to produce a side-by-side video chat. This was loaded into Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac. Unfortunately, something went wrong with the translation or maybe importing it into Premiere which resulted in the sound and video being out-of-sync after only a few minutes into the conversation. I was able to keep our introductions, but the remainder of the video would have to be manually re-synced bit by bit, (which would be painstakingly slow and tedious). My fix? To overlay still images & GIFs in place of the messed up video.
To make it a little more visually interesting, I added the animated DS106 Radio GIF when we are playing an audio clip.
7. After the first draft was completed, Christina reminded me she had envisioned us including John Johnston’s Chicken Talk podcast material as intro and outro clips. Boy did I amuse myself. I used the Mel Blanc and Sound Effect Man- Chicken Farm Song. Then one thing led to another and John’s B&W chicken GIF and his Red cartoon chicken GIF became once again stars in one of my videos [First appearance in Star Spangled… WHAT?!] The B&W movie studio chicken brings us in, and a duet with the B&W and the Red chicken take us out. I think it’s really funny! Although after looking at it again, I wish that I had flipped sides so they were singing to each other instead of back-to-back. (See update below.)
8. Christina also noticed that our sound levels were unbalanced and at times she had difficulty hearing her comments when listening on her iPod earbuds. Unfortunately, it would have been a HUGE piece of work for me to go back in and fix it for the video. I should have used the Levelator before I began the editing. This is a free software app that helps to balance the volume of a recorded conversation. It was recommended by John Johnston in his audio post Levelling up the LoDown . (The tip is about 3:30 minutes in.) I tried using it after the fact and it brought her volume up, but also the background hiss. It didn’t make it easier to hear her, so I left it as is.
9. The finishing touches required me to add two additional DS106 Radio bumpers at the beginning and end. The first one is a mashup I created this summer.
The final bumper at the end of the podcast was produced by Ary Aranguiz.
10. But wait… there was more that wasn’t quite right…. an excerpt from an e-mail received while I was writing up this post.
The only thing I noticed is that when we switch to talking about Ary’s project, after we talked first about Stefanie’s, the wording gets a bit garbled and then jumps to “Ary”, then goes right into her sound effect story (at about 27:25). I expect this is the best that could be done with the fact that we had to cut something out! Just wanted to check that how it ended up is what you meant, as it seems a bit jumbled.
Oh, and I just listened to the end, b/c I hadn’t had a chance to do that yet, and your last words are: “I had fun…I will” and then it jumps to the music. Not sure if you wanted to end it there?
But hey…this does not have to be perfect, and I don’t want you to put any more work into this if you don’t feel it’s necessary…so feel free to say: Christina, it’s just fine as is!
And in the end… that I decided to NOT INDULGE MY PERFECTIONISTIC TENDENCIES and let these go is a good sign. I’m getting more comfortable allowing myself to be seen in the world as a work in-progress, blemishes and all.
UPDATE: I tried…. I really tried to let it go. But when I heard the HUGE error with Ary’s radio bumper accidentally playing over a part of our conversation – I HAD to fix it. It turned out I had moved the bumper clear up to layer 8 while adjusting something else and forgot about it. The error was towards the end, and I hadn’t taken the time to listen to the entire 51 minute audio file before I posted it. Lesson learned? Either make my projects shorter or listen to the whole thing before I decide to release it to the public. I may’ve let it be played on DS106 Radio, but when Alan Levine decided to add it to the week 4 assignment page, so that future students could hear it, there was no way that mistake was going to remain for posterity.
Since I was going to edit the file anyway, I decided to fix the rest of what I could.
I essentially started over by separating the two audio tracks, which allowed me to boost Christina’s volume and apply a noise reduction filter to her audio only.
Alan Levine & John Johnston had recommended that I dial down the audio quality from 256k to 128k to reduce the file size. John said he’ll even go as low as 94k. My comfort level with the lower sound quality isn’t great, but I’m willing to listen to the voices of experience here.
Alan also suggested that I add meta data to the mp3 version so that when it plays on DS106 radio people will know what it is.
Remember my concerns about the length of the 51 minute audio file and where to post it? Once again Alan & John came to the rescue offering me advice on uploading the file via FTP to my own website and embedding that file into my blog post. I use Cyberduck for the upload and followed the directions for the Compact WordPress Audio/Music Player settings to get the cute little player button at the top of this post
What the heck… I flipped the chicken images too. They are now singing their duet to one another.
Rochelle’s sound effect story: [Headphones highly recommended] Spend a summer day at an island cabin in Northern Wisconsin. Wake up to the sounds of loons on the lake. Spend the day enjoying all the amenities that no running water or electricity can provide. Fall to sleep to the rumbling of a thunderstorm. And don’t get me started on the MOSQUITOES!
Over the past year, I’ve reinvented virtually every aspect of my life. It has been incredibly rewarding and invigorating. Storytelling has been a feature of virtually all of the changes. This post seems like a good starting point for future blog entries. I’ll capture the essence of the ideas now, and with the hope expanding on them using the tools I learn in future weeks.
Personal change – My biggest personal change has been difficult for family, friends, and colleagues to come to terms with. How I tell my story to each person has been important – consider the audience. Equally important has been listening to the stories of others. When you share the deepest parts of yourself, many people then trust you with their deeply personal stories.
New friends and acquaintances – My “friendscape” and my circle of 3M colleagues looks entirely different than it did a year ago. First meetings and new friendships are all about stories.
Career change – I’m actively seeking a fresh challenge within 3M. I’ve been revising my resumé and mock interviewing. This is the work of defining myself for prospective employers through careful storytelling.
Storytelling is remembering, or is it?
One additional thought I’d like to explore in the future is remembering through storytelling. I recently listened to this show on public radio: TED Radio Hour – Memory Games
I’ve heard the assertion that we don’t remember actual events, we remember the last time we told the story. Over time, the stories we tell change as we make sense of them and fit them into our lives as they exist now. As more of our stories are recorded in “permanent” and non-changable digital form, what will this do to the shifting of our stories? Also, how permanent will our digitial stories actually be? Will we really be able to access them? What if we do and they conflict with the stories we tell from our human memories?
Look for expanded thoughts on these themes in the coming weeks. Feel free to share your experiences as well!
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COMMENTS:
“AH”: How can I enhance my storytelling about each of these changes using digital tools?
“HC”: Now that you reinvented the various aspect of your life, you can project yourself the way you want to be with your online presence. There is not a single tool that will do everything you need, so you have to know what is it about the story you are telling and then use the appropriate tool to highlight it.
I could give a suggestion about using digital tools for your career progression (career change is too negative) – although I don’t know how well it would work. Tell the stories about what your interests are and tell the stories about what your skills are. Create a graphical CV? I don’t know how hiring managers or talent management would see a reference to your blog where they can see who you are and then have a deeper understanding than just a few pages in your CV/resume.
What 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:
I 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.
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.
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.
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
I’m always working to improve the experience of visiting my blog – for my guests and me personally. This week I…
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!
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!
At 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.”
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”.
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? 🙂
Thanks to a recent post by John Johnston “Flicking a Five Card Story” I brushed aside my anxiety, took the leap and dived into the HTML. Well, let’s be real… I just dipped my toes in the shallow end… but I did it. I created borders around all of my images in my 5 Card Flickr Story post, 5 Card Poetry – Sharing My Story YAY!!!!!!!
I’d been wanting to do this since my first WordPress based blog post. It was very easy to do when I was programming my websites using RapidWeaver. I just clicked on a picture formatting box, chose my style, and it was all done for me. That hasn’t been the case with this blog. Maybe I just haven’t located the right WordPress widgets and plug-ins yet. But I agree with John (and Alan Levine) that it is good to know how to work directly with the code. What was it Alan said? “Code or Be Coded”. Let me show you what I did. And then you can give it a try too.
I wanted to take this image I had taken in February 2010 outside a small cafe in Salisbury England, and give it a border and a shadow to produce a more finished 3D look.
By opening the text editor tab, I located the code that inserts this image into my post.
What I needed to do was to add an extra bit of HTML code to add some STYLE to the image. I found a quick tutorial on-line on how to create borders around stuff at: http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/borders-pt-1/
For a border around an image, you insert a style definition between the img and the src tags of the image code: <imgstyle=”border:1px TYPE #HEX;”src=[etc. etc.]
TYPE refers to the border type (solid, double, dashed, dotted, outset, inset, groove, ridge). You can see examples here.
Then I opened John’s post so that I could view his source coding. He did things a bit differently by doing something with the CSS code I think, but I haven’t touched that yet. I could still locate where he added the HTML code to create a shadow though.
Giving me this beautifully red bordered and shadowed image.
or alternately by changing the Hex color number to #6E6E6E I can produce a dark grey border.
If you are really ambitious and want to learn how to program with HTML and CSS I found this site http://www.w3schools.com/ helpful a few years back when I was just starting out. Once I started “programming” with RapidWeaver I didn’t feel I had a need for it until now.
I crave community. Do I need to be flashy and bright to be seen? Do I need my words set in stone to be valid? Is it okay to have fun and learn along the way? With heart, body, and soul my story can be shared.
Creating this Five Card Flickr Story wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. I was way too literal at first. I started by reading the directions and figured this was going to be a piece of cake- just pick out 5 photos and tell a story ‘about’ them. (ALERT: “about”) I tried a few hands, picked some images that seemed to follow a theme, but none of them told a story. I finally chose the above deck and started writing a narrative about how we are social beings, and that storytelling has always been a part of who we are as human beings, that it is our way of sharing with the present to make an impression on the future. blah…. blah…. blah… BORING. No story was making its way into the world.
I then contemplated just pulling another hand, but decided instead to hang in there. I went back and looked at examples. Oh… that was different than what I was thinking. They were continuing to flesh out their stories in a poetic rather than a prose format. The photos were telling the story, not me telling a story ABOUT the photos. Back to the drawing board. This time I got out of my literal mind and engaged my heart and soul to sense what was here. Then the story revealed itself.
I crave community. Do I need to be flashy and bright to be seen? Do I need my words set in stone to be valid? Is it okay to have fun and learn along the way? With heart, body and soul my story can be shared.
I’m glad I decided to hang in there with the original photos and relaxed into letting my creativity and intuition flow, instead of staying stuck in my literal mind and trying to get a set of images that I could logically put together into a story.
My struggle to tell the story of these five cards reminds me of how it took until my early 40’s before I could “understand” what poetry was all about. I knew I was missing something & really wanted to “get it”. So at my request a wonderful minister friend sat down with me and took the time to teach me what poetry was all about. She read different authors to me, had me read them to her, shared how you have to let your mind go, see and feel the images the author is conjuring up for you. This wasn’t a logical mind thing. A black chair is not just a black chair. There is a whole story beyond the literal black chair that you tap into to “get” what the poet, photographer, writer, artist, digital storyteller,… is trying to say.
Here is one of my first poems written after my heart was opened to the beauty of poetry.
