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).

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.

A Trailer For Two

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Link to Rockylou Productions Trailer

 

RLP_Creativity_GIFDuring week 2 the DS106 Daily Create TDC607 challenged us to create an exciting movie trailer for our DS106 website and use “the voice”.  Wanting to make the most efficient use of my creative time, I decided to modify the project so that I could use the art I created in real life.  So I made a more professional looking trailer to highlight Rockylou Productions as a whole and how it is actualizing our vision of cultivating creativity and raising visions.

I had started out contemplating how I could make the trailer with iMovie.  But the only semi-workable option was to use the version I had on my iPad. I skipped upgrading my desktop version to iMovie 11, which was supposed to have that functionality (I still have ’09) after reading the absolutely horrible reviews given by current users.  So I did a trusty Google search on creating movie trailers and found a YouTube video tutorial on “How to Create a Movie Trailer For Free“

That led me to a site called Flixpress.Com. There you could choose from a number of trailer templates.  I checked out the free ones and chose the Icy Spin T9 template which allowed me to have 8 images, and title text at the beginning and end of my trailer.  In theory this should have been a no-brainer. Just pop the pictures in and away you go.  But no…. that’s hardly ever the case.

Choosing my eight images was pretty easy.  I wanted to highlight the my Rockylou Productions projects that exemplified “Cultivating Creativity” and “Raising Visions”.  Once found I needed to format them to the requested 600 X 400 px within Photoshop CS5. But upon preview I found out the Icy Spin T9 template actually crops the images to 600 X 349 px.  Fortunately most of the images could be cropped without a problem.  Only one, Obruni, had to be modified significantly to make it fit correctly. I ended up creating quite a few draft versions before things clicked for me.  Maybe if I’d paid for the pro version I would have had more editing capabilities with my project, but for free I had to start over again from the beginning every time.  PAIN!!!

Saving your file puts it into the system for processes and in a minute or two they send you an e-mail that lets you know your video is ready for preview and downloading.  For free you get 640 X 480 SD resolution.  NOT IN MY WORLD! I ended up paying $2 to have an HD version made, since I wanted to import it into Adobe Premiere Elements 11 to add a music track and the Rockylou Productions animated Logo/ bumper at the end.  (I actually spent $4 because the photo order mysteriously shifted with the first purchase.) I made a conscious decision to not add “the voice” as I felt it would have been a distraction.  It reminds me of an anecdote I heard recently from a DS106 talk (sorry I can’t remember which one, either Gardner Campbell or Jim Groom) about a kindergarten teacher whose students always had the best art projects in school. When asked how she did it, she said she knew when to take it away.

If you’re interested I’ve included below an overview from previous post on how the animated logo was made.

I’m pleased with the final product and have already posted it on my Rockylou Productions page on Facebook.

Music: “Find Your Style”, Newline variation, by John Defaria
Smart Sound Personal Use License purchased from the Vimeo Music Store for $1.99

=>Rockylou Productions Animated Logo

RLP_Logo_27lvs_Bw-ColThe Rockylou Productions animated logo at the very end of the video was created by incorporating a dissolve transition between two logo images designed by Amber Lockridge.  Transitioning from b&w to color with a slight increase in the size of the color graphic by 1%  is meant to give the illusion of growth and expansion, an important value statement for Rockylou Productions.

The audio logo for Rockylou Productions was made with GarageBand and a simple “D” chord that I played on my 12-string guitar.  I took the original recording and added a Bright Guitar effect to the basic track.  I then duplicated the original track four times, and added dimensionality to the chord by adding a Lunar Bounce to two (panning each slightly left and right) and a Swirling Echo effect to the two remaining tracks, also panning them slightly left and right. With the addition of the Ambient – Wide Spaces effect to the master track the memorable audio logo for Rockylou Productions was born. 

RLPChord_GB

 

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

DS106ish Elegance

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For my week 2 DS106 Headless 13 summary I created a separate summary post for all of my daily creates from that week.  It’s not only highly recommended, but I find it helpful to my own learning to write-up my process while producing my projects and share those learnings with others. The bulk of the daily create projects were very straight forward or I was recycling a previous project that already had a process post.  But one of them, (actually two combined into one.) really should’ve had a full write-up completed and here it is.

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

DS106_Elegance_AThe photos were taken with my iPhone and the Camera+ app.  I used two photos. One with the iPad turned off while positioning myself so that the overhead lighting would cast my reflection in the screen.

 

DS106_Elegance_Yellow

The second photo was taken with the iPad on and the image of the backwards DS106 I’d drawn in the Paper53 app visible.  There was a problem though.  I didn’t know how to set and lock the white balance, so the second image with the DS106 had a very yellow tone that did not look elegant at all.

To make the GIF work I used the magnetic select tool in Photoshop CS5 to select, copy and paste into new layers, and then remove the screen from both images leaving me with a blank transparent screen.  The screens were placed into new layers and I used only the nicely white balanced photo as the base for the GIF.

DS106_Elegance_BlankBut another issue now cropped up. Look closely at the iPhone box on the left-hand side of the two original photos.  It overlaps the screen a little.  In the blank screen image it has been cut off.  To remedy this visual anomaly I used the select tool to select the overlapping corner of the box  then copy and paste it into a new layer.  That corner layer was placed atop everything else.

Next I created screen layers of the  with varied opacity in 10% increments. The animation duration for each frame was set to 0.2 seconds except for the full on and full off images which were increased to 1 second to allow the viewer to experience those images more completely. The GIF was reduced to 500px width to keep the file size down but I kept it at 256 colors to preserve the elegant look of the images.

One final note…. My WordPress theme wouldn’t embed a Tumblr post by just inserting the URL.  A search on the internet found a site, Embeddlr,  that will generate the embed code that I used above.  Handy little tidbit to have on hand.

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.

Headless Over Heels In Love

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GIFFight_MannequinsLove

Headless Over Heels In Love [Tumblr Link]

GIFFfight_ManequinsI’m joining the GIF FIght again.  This time we were given a pair of stark white mannequins to work with. I like to give some time to thinking about my projects before I start them. [Link to past example of my non-linear creative thought process. ] I had a couple of ideas in mind that would use existing GIFs that I could riff off of like Alan Levine’s (@Cogdog) blue caterpillar. It didn’t work here, but I’m going to use it someday. I then tested out what it would take to move the arms to have them hold hands.  It could be done, but with more work than I had time for. My daughter is getting married on Saturday and if I wanted to complete this DS106 Headless13 Week 2 AnimatedGIFAssignment1190 I needed to get it done now. graphics-hearts-230756I then had the idea of giving this lovely headless couple pumping hearts.  I tried my luck over at Microsoft Clip Art, but again nothing seemed to work.  A Google image search on animated heart and GIF was fruitful and led me to a whole bunch of free heart GIFs at:  http://www.picgifs.com/graphics/hearts/ Using Adobe Photoshop CS5

    1. graphics-hearts-741799I opened the animated heart GIFs which show up with all of the layers intact.
    2. Combined the two heart GIFs with the mannequin base layer
    3. Selected all of the layers for the hearts
    4. Moved them into place
    5. Enlarged the small heart layers to match the size of larger heart.
    6. Created the animation frames by selecting the appropriate layers.  There is no need for merging of layers when using the full version of Photoshop.
    7. Resized the entire image to 350px by 500px making sure it would be less than 1Mb so Tumblr would accept it.
    8. Previewed at 256 colors, liked it and saved as a GIF.

To complete the process I uploaded my completed GIF to my Tumblr account, wrote up this blog post, and posted to Twitter and our DS106 Google plus community.

 Past GIF FIght Entries:

Other links to animated hearts I decided  not to use.

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

3M-DS106 Week 1 In Their Own Words

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FdeTroyLectureMoliere_DS106-3MWhat better way to share an update on Week 1 of the 3M-DS106 Salon than in their own words. This digital story was created simply using verbatim snippets from salon members’ 3M blogs and comments written to one another.

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I am curious. I am cautious. I am anxious. I am getting started with 3M DS-106!

What is DS106???  I’m not sure I have a good answer for that…yet.  My understanding is that we are learning how to leverage the multiple different types of social media at 3M to connect and network with our colleagues.  That rang a bell for me in CRAL, as we work to further collaboration with our international colleagues.

It’s a peer collaborative course on digital storytelling as far as I can tell at this point, and I think it’s going to be great. The group just met (online and over the phone for me) for the first time this week and writing this blog is part of the course exercise to get things started. I am already liking the approach.

Hello! And welcome to my blog – 1st post!

A special welcome to anyone who is participating in the 3M-ds106 Salon. This is part of my Week 1 assignment– creating a blog. For those of you who are not participating, 3M-ds106 is a collection of people who want to learn more about the technology offerings at 3M by working with that technology and applying it to our current jobs. Stay tuned for updates on my progress!

I’ll use this blog to show what I’ve learned, and ask questions for ideas how apply what I’m learning to the greater 3M.  Wish me luck!

Initially people might not care (and they may continue not to care), but if we can start a culture of internal storytelling, we can be better story tellers to the outside world.  The outside world has heard the same stories about 3M ad nauseum so they would be happy to hear new stories.  If we don’t know the stories ourselves, how can we share it?

But then I see that I can’t do it all by myself and need to seek collaboration – not only within my own immediate team but also across different functions or different groups. OK, DUH, again!!! But do we really do it? I think we do, at least to a certain extent. Otherwise, 3M wouldn’t be 3M. At the same time, I know I could do better. I want to do better. Hence this course. Hence this blog.

Thanks for the info, H… I am always going back to re-scan my stuff because inevitably it becomes skewed on the scanner. I didn’t even think to try changing it on the computer because I figured we didn’t have the tools. Already 3M ds106 has been helpful!

I am happy that I was able to manage animated gif addition to my blog, and spice up the name. If you check it out, please give me some feedback. Thanks to the ‘leaderless class’ for encouraging and modeling. I am sure I would not have stuck my neck out this far without such a supportive environment, which did not happen by accident.

It’s going to take me some time at the beginning but I’ll get there. I just read the article by Gardner Campbell posted in the Week 2 blog and have already gotten much inspirations for how I want to apply it.  I am loving this!