Just a quick screenshot from #mONkEyhouse106 in Camp Magic MacGuffin. I’m still mostly hopeless in Minecraft but my bunk mates built an entire tree house. Not everyone came to tonight’s social but those who did learned a ton! Led by Andrew Forgrave, we managed to add basic bunks for everyone, and some nice torches for light, and we began adding on more tree branches while dear Shannon forged ahead alone making a spiral staircase that runs up the trunk of our giant tree from the deck level to the top. At some point Kathleen and I learned how to rid pigs (in our tree!). Unfortunately neither of us could get back OFF so we kind of messed up the house for awhile, but it’s all back in order now, and the pork chops were delicious. Shout out to Tim for turning day to night and doing a few teleportations of lost campers. And to camp director Alan who managed to join our social for a few minutes before heading to dinner – come back and visit anytime!

I recorded this just before hitting the bunk bed in my cabin at Camp Magic MacGuffin, a family legend about my dad. I saw him pick up a handful of dirt and crush it into a rock. I have the rock to this day. You might say that makes this Doo Wop Girl gullible, but I say I have a life enriched by my imagination and an incredible family story.

This is what I see on my keyboard while listening to #ds106radio from work. Tripper Harrison is spinning some lovely today through the Magic Macguffin PA system.

Fortunately this joke arrived in my inbox two days ago courtesy of my mom. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a joke to tell!

Looks like rat turds. There will be panic!

What are you doing for New Year’s Eve?!

big hair, big glasses, big smile

Michael encouraged me to share the rocker chick photo of myself that I thought would make him laugh, but I have no idea where it is, so instead I scanned this one, which is, I have to say, the biggest my hair ever got, and don’t you love my nerdy glasses? I really had it all going for me.

I’m supposed to be introducing myself and instead I’m sort of riffing off Michael’s post. I think that’s okay – you’ll get to know me as we go along.

Michael talked about those moments in life where so much is happening, and you’re taking it all in and really feeling those momentous shifts, and time slows down or speeds up in a way that those periods of time become distorted. High school is everyone’s forever ago, and your kids were born a few weeks ago even if they’re on their own way into high school.

And then there are some moments that get frozen, or repeat, or echo through time.

I went on a month-long trip through Great Britain, courtesy of my mom, the summer after I graduated from high school. I guess when you spend that amount of time away from your normal life, without the same responsibilities and daily grind, and when you spend those days making epic memories, well, those things tend to reverberate around in your personal space-time continuum. Back in 1987 during that month of travel, I saw so many places that have a lot more known (to me anyway) human history than anywhere in the United States. One place in particular stuck out as pretty incredible to see with my own eyes, and that was Stonehenge. It knocked the wind out of me when I saw it in person. I was just awestruck at the almost tangible feeling of how long it’s been there.

I’ve always been grateful to my mom for making that experience possible for me. I was really excited to take her to visit some of the same places I saw in 1987 when we went to Great Britain together this summer, 24 years later.

But my mom had a knee injury during our second week that kept both of us from doing any traveling at all for about two weeks during our trip. We shared the experience of being scared at facing an unknown medical problem in a foreign health care system. We shared stress and frustration and a slow healing process, too. We felt happy and lucky to be together no matter where we were and what was happening. But we were both a little crushed that we didn’t get to see many of the things we had planned together.

On our last travel weekend, we managed to rent a wheelchair, and Mom braved the long train and bus trips, and we went to see Bath and then Stonehenge together. When I saw Stonehenge from the bus window I burst into tears. It felt like such an epic journey just to get back there, and such a privilege to share it with my mom. Goosebump city.

Why am I writing about this? I guess Michael’s post makes me a little sad that I don’t have kids of my own, but it also reminded me there are plenty of wonderful experiences and memories for me with the family and friends that I do have.

Mom and me at Stonehenge, 2011, yes the British wheelchair came with the plaid blanket

Oh, and you better believe I wheeled Mom all around the monument as I babbled out every single thing I could remember about it from art history and British history courses.

victory photo at Stonehenge, 2011 - smaller hair, smaller glasses, bigger hips... but still fabulous

Most of the students within our Study Abroad program are in Paris right now. Two students, my mother being one of them, chose not to go to Paris, and it was my duty to stay behind and lead them on an excursion somewhere in the UK instead. So today the three of us went to York. We had a blast, and some of the sillier travel flubs that my mother and I made will likely wind up as funny stories for #ds106radio in a while.

We spent most of the day wandering around York’s city center and enjoying ourselves. When we got back to Nottingham my mom made up this dessert, pictured above, from ingredients obtained while exploring York, and she decided to call it a York Biscuit. Here is how to make one:

Go to York. Walk up the Shambles to the Little Shambles Tea Room, have an English breakfast for lunch, and then go out into the open air market near the butcher shop and buy some locally grown fresh strawberries and some clotted cream. Tip the purple man so he will move. Have Constantine direct you to York Minster and have a look around inside. Note the health benefits of bile beans. Take a walk on a fortress wall. Enjoy afternoon tea at Betty’s, and buy Chocolate Orange Crisps on your way out. Take all purchased food home with you.

Once home, top a Chocolate Orange Crisp with a generous portion of clotted cream, then top with strawberries, and you have a York Biscuit.

Walking around Nottingham this 3rd July, I noticed someone had dropped and then abandoned this ice cream cone and thought it would make an interesting context for a street photo. I didn’t get it straight, but I didn’t try a second times since I was in the way of many pedestrians. I still love this image because it tells a story, and in a way, I kind of like the slight skew.

I’ve had a hard time keeping up with my faculty duties and #ds106, and unfortunately that has meant not keeping up with #ds106. My heart is with you, you incredible crazy community! I miss you all terribly. I will be trying to keep up a bit. We have no wifi in my classroom or I would try to broadcast one of my class discussions. I may try recording one if it doesn’t freak my students out too much.

Meanwhile, many apologies for my lack of comments on your work. We’ll see if I can begin again.

I will head out to Cardiff, Wales this weekend to see their storytelling museum and meet one of the original Capture Wales team; more on that forthcoming. For now, I’m due in class shortly so I’m off.

#ds106forlife

@DailyShoot – #ds592 – What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word “deadline”? #ds106

This is actually the second thing I thought of, July first, my imminent departure for the United Kingdom, and all the things that must be completed before then.

The first thing I thought of was an EKG flatlined, the ultimate deadline. But I don’t have access to one for photography, so this calendar will have to do.

Smooth, flat, horizontal shapes give us a sense of stability and calm.

Vertical shapes are more exciting and more attractive. Vertical shapes rebel against the earth’s gravity. They imply energy and a reaching toward heights of the heavens.

Diagonal shapes are dynamic because they imply motion or tension.

The upper half of a picture is a place of freedom, happiness and triumph. Objects placed in the upper half often feel more spiritual & important. An object placed there has greater pictorial weight.

The center of the page is the most effective. It is the point of greatest attraction.

White or light backgrounds feel safer to us than dark backgrounds because we see well during the day and only poorly during the night.

We feel more scared looking at pointed shapes. We feel more secure or comforted looking at rounded shapes or curves.

The larger the object is in the picture, the stronger it feels.

We associate the same or similar colors much more strongly than we associate the same or similar shapes.

We notice contrasts. Contrasts enable us to see … through our associations and perceptions.

Try one or more of these out in your next design assignment. Pick on that supports your purpose or intent and incorporate it into your design work.

I kind of cheated, because most of the audio was recorded and mixed by a professional at a real studio back in 2001 (backstory and original audio clip here). Incidentally that was before I ever became a teacher. I don’t ever really sound like that in a college classroom.

All I did was drag that mp3 into a new GarageBand project, plug in my USB mic, and record myself saying “listen to your ds106 radio” on a new vocal track. To get the echo I added the Vocal Reflection to the recorded track. Then it was as simple as selecting Share > Send to iTunes from the menu bar. Since I had pre-set iTunes to import audio as a 64-bit stereo mp3, that’s what I got. In iTunes, I right-clicked the new file and chose Reveal in Finder, dragged it to my desktop and uploaded it at http://www.dropitto.me/ds106. I’ll be stoked if I actually hear it on #ds106radio!

I submitted this as a #ds106 design assignment. This is something I assign to my ART100 students, and I ask them to make it say something about them. Check out their examples. It can be a really fun thing to do. Take pictures of yourself, or your family, or even each other. You can also mix in objects, like metal parts, tools, natural objects, animals, even sketches. Use an image editor to mash up the body parts and objects, etc. Let it say something about your identity. Heck, use it as your avatar. You can make it as goofy or deep as you want.

Hope you like mine.

Oh, yeah, you can get help with the technical details from this great open source textbook that I use with my class, Digital Foundations: Intro to Media Design with Adobe Creative Suite. What you want is Chapter 9, which walks you through step by step with pictures. My link goes to Exercise 3, which is where the Exquisite Corpse instructions start – you’ll just have to ignore the bits about the double exposure layer they have underneath their body parts. Or you could scroll up to Exercise 1 and add the double exposure into your mix. I hope you try it. It takes some time but I think the results can really be worth your while.

Maybe this would be best when we hit video assignment week. But because #ds106 is having this discussion about what media can be, I feel strongly that you should see this same sort of discussion underway in the videoblogging community circa 2005. Two things to view by my friend Michael Verdi, one of the first videobloggers, back before YouTube:

First watch Vlog Anarchy and then if you are fearless, and heeding all warnings, continue on to The Yang of Vlogging.

I think it’s cool that Neven Mrgan, who worked on The Incident, adds this to the discussion:

That cover is NOT the original photo, downsampled. It’s a hand-crafted, precisely drawn interpretation of the source.

And, at the same time, he gives a wicked cool example of the hand-pixelated aesthetic. I am totally itching to try this. I hope some other #ds106ers try it out; it will be a few days before I can do this kind of work, if at all (unless I break down and take my laptop to the UK – I don’t think I can do this sort of work on the iPad).

Update: I am a dork for not noticing D’Arcy Norman linked to this in his post. I guess I glossed over that because I’d seen it q few days earlier. Sometimes the Internet is a small world.

Here’s my take on the #ds106 “I Can Read Movies” design assignment. I tried to riff off of the work and aesthetic of spacesick as instructed in the assignment, and to me that meant bring in a simple pattern and iconic image from the film. There are so many iconic images in this film I think I could do all four visual assignments just making different book covers for America Beauty.

To do this one, I found the scene of the paper bag blowing in the wind on YouTube and made a still image. I pasted that into Illustrator and traced the outline of the paper bag using the pen tool. I made a large black rectangle for the background. Then I searched for and downloaded a simple free vector brick pattern and brought it into Illustrator and changed the colors. I could have drawn the bricks by hand but this was faster, and I need to go fast today. I used Adobe Garamond Pro in bold for the movie title and Helvetica Neue for everything else. I recreated the little projector graphic from simple shapes (ellipse, rectangle, polygon). Here’s how it looked when I finished in Illustrator.

Here’s an illustrator tip: if you want to draw a triangle use the star or polygon shape tool. Click and drag to begin drawing your shape, and while holding down the mouse button press the down arrow on your keyboard to reduce the number of star points or polygon sides to 3. Tada. Triangle. If you don’t like the triangle shape you get, use the direct select tool (white arrow) to move the corner points to reshape your triangle.

From Illustrator I saved a .png file and opened it in Photoshop. I downloaded Paper Texture 1 by pareeerica and placed that on a layer above my book cover and set its layer blending mode to Multiply to get the paper texture onto the book surface. Then I used the burn tool with a large feathered brush on the book cover layer to darken the edges a bit.

If I had more time today I would have introduced more wear and tear to the cover. But unfortunately it’s time to put most of my tech away and pack it into a bag to carry to England. I start teaching a digital storytelling class on July 4, but I leave on July 1 and there is a lot of stuff I need to do before I leave. I’m afraid my #ds106 participation will have to diminish over the next few days while I’m in transit, but I’ll be joining in as much as possible once I settle in to my temporary home in Nottingham, England.

@DailyShoot – #ds589 – Make a photo around the number three today.

So what are the three? Well in my mind, they are the Devil’s Claw (an Arizona plant I’ve always loved), the dried gourd, and the eye of the sculptor who thought to combine them with stain, carving and painting to make something wholly other.

First, YES. Accept that creativity is a skill, not a genetic or divine predetermination, and that with practice you can get better at it. All you really need are effort and persistence. Persist! Please. I am begging you.

I appreciated hearing Jim talk about why he doesn’t send his kids to school. I can remember being in 6th or 7th grade, maybe even 5th grade. I can remember that once a day we got to go either to art class or music class for an hour. We didn’t get to choose, it’s just that those two activities were deemed not important enough to do both every day. And in those two places, I had a break, and space to breathe, and something joyous that I loved to do, and while I did them, the things I was learning in the more academic subjects got a minute to percolate around my cranium and associate with other things. I am telling you, I knew these things were happening in my head. I could feel it. Art or music hour always went too fast and then we were back listening to lectures or reading out loud from books or drilling our spelling words or pounding chalk out of erasers or whatever else we had to do.

I remember deciding, right in the middle of an economics or civics lesson, when my mind began to wander and I involuntarily started to hum that song we learned in music class, that instead of being a writer when I grew up, I would be an art teacher. Because I could see that I needed more time and encouragement doing creative tasks. I could tell it actually helped me learn the other things faster. And made it all much more fun. I could literally feel the droning on and on killing my soul, that’s what I thought at the time. I could see the solution, and I wanted to help.

I eventually did become an art teacher, sort of, but for college, not for elementary school. I do still feel like I’m helping, especially when students tell me that my class is the one they look forward to because they can play. They have no idea how much I can relate. Anyway, every semester I hear people tell me they aren’t creative, or artistic. My purpose in life becomes proving them wrong.

I liked Tim’s example of the coffee filter box, depicting creativity’s problem solving side. Also his example of the logo he saw in the urinal…. Since he shared that, I can share that he reminded me of my first trip to New Zealand. I had to buy supplies for “that time of the month,” and found that they had done something with sanitary napkin packaging that no one in the U.S. had the sense to do. Maybe the problem the Kiwis were solving was cranky PMS, or maybe they just wanted to make the whole experience more pleasant. The packaging was pretty, boldly colorful and playful, not pastel and clinical (and U.S. products are starting to go that way). And the little protective strip that you peeled off the adhesive was printed with jokes. Hilarious jokes! And the occasional fun fact or bit of philosophy. It made me almost look forward to changing a pad, just to see something new and funny instead of sitting in a bathroom thinking “ugh, ick.” It was like someone had combined feminine hygiene and Bazooka gum. Take notes, Kotex.

I was especially happy to hear Tim and Jim talking about the incorporation of pop culture into #ds106. I admit to being perplexed last Spring as I popped my head up occasionally to look in on what #ds106 was up to. I didn’t understand why people were doing animated GIFs of films, or four icon challenges summarizing films, or mashups of random album covers using images that weren’t theirs. I wasn’t considering that the point might be to practice doing something creative, or to learn how to make an animated GIF. And I wasn’t looking close enough to notice whether someone was actually using a GIF to make a comment on no more digital facelifts like Stella Meme did last week. From a distance, I saw disjointed riffs on pop culture fluff, and, like Tim says of reality TV, I saw no value in it.

Now I see that it’s play, and practice. It’s marks with chalk on paper as you learn technique. And it’s more, if you want it to be. If you want it to be, it can be layer on layer of art and commentary and riffing off one another, call and response in a great chorus. And, this is probably key, our #ds106 work isn’t necessarily supposed to be fully understood out of context and from a distance, the way I was looking at it. It’s a creative community, not a person working in a vacuum.

This is a really different approach to digital storytelling than I take when I teach it. I follow more of a Center for Digital Storytelling model. I spend several weeks helping students scratch a personal narrative out of their heads before starting working with digital tools. We literally sit around a circle and tell each other stories to develop them. We give each other feedback – non-verbal reactions while listening to a story, and verbal feedback afterward. We form a creative community, too, one where lifelong friendships develop sometimes. Then we move on to recording audio, and putting together book and video versions of our stories, supporting each other as much through the technical process as through the creative development. It’s hugely fun. Here is the first digital story I made following this method, in case you’re curious.

I’ll say right now, I don’t think my way is better than what we’re doing with #ds106. But I will say that I do still value the personal narrative aspect. Or maybe that term is too confining, because I also enjoy the personal snippets, the little expressions of the now, the micro stories, even if they last only an instant. I got into this media literacy / digital storytelling / art making stuff because I am mostly sick to death of mainstream pablum produced by people with a lot of money who have something to sell. I am not nearly so interested in watching you make a four icon challenge summarizing a movie like, say, Friday the Thirteenth part 666, as I am in learning more about who you are and watching you explore your interests. The more you that you put into your #ds106 work, the more I will love it.

And that’s the best thing, the thing I love most, about listening to Tim and Jim discuss #ds106. Part of what motivates me to teach digital multimedia classes is that I really want to hear or see something unique for a change. It’s about damn time that higher education, heck, all education, stopped wholesale ignoring that we don’t need gatekeepers anymore. We don’t need some film or music (or whatever) producer with a fat wad of cash and a slew of investors to greenlight what we have to share. We don’t need committee approval. We don’t need anyone but us to decide that it’s good enough, and to make it, put it out there, and let our work find its audience. We just need ourselves. And I really want to see and hear this stuff. Our stuff. Not another vapid sitcom or remade movie. Not another infomercial or staged reality show. Just you, your ideas, your voice, your experience, your art, your stories. Get to it, everybody.

The assignment description is:

Reimagine the scene in a road sign. What is going on outside the iconic depiction in the sign itself? Find a road sign image online or photograph it yourself. Redraw it to show the rest of the scene you imagine, and show us the before/after on your blog.

Before

After

Credit: To create the finished version I used Photoshop and Illustrator to create a mashup of my original photo plus Michael Jackson Silhouette by munchester2cool.

How To

Illustrator purists get annoyed with me for showing anyone how to use LiveTrace, but I don’t care, I think it’s a really useful alternative when you just need to get a quick and dirty vector image. I suggest you don’t rely on this technique as a crutch though, because you can make much cleaner paths by working with the Pen Tool, and it is well worth learning. Also, LiveTrace does not work well in all situations, but for this assignment it is nearly perfect.

Watching the YouTube version is your best bet; it should look good played at full screen (especially if you switch up to 720p). The QuickTime version is included for anyone who subscribes to my podcast via iTunes.

So, this tutorial should be useful for either the Reimagined Road Signs assignment or the Four Icon Challenge. Anytime you want to make an icon actually. And it covers:

• Advanced image searches using Google (to find images licensed for reuse)
• Illustrator: LiveTrace for pasted or placed pixel-based graphics, Rotate, Erase tool, working with Layers
• Photoshop: Quick Select and Magic Wand tools, Threshhold adjustment, Transform (skew) tool
• And much more!

I hope this has been useful. Your feedback on the tutorial would be awesome. Share and enjoy!

@DailyShoot – #ds588 – Make a monochromatic photo.

My mother-in-law’s embroidered rendition of basil.

@DailyShoot – #ds587 – Make a photograph today that illustrates attraction.

My big fluffy cat is attracted to the lap of anyone wearing black.

Then today came Lou McGill’s post Layers, which took the idea to a whole new level. I still aspire to make something as wonderful as the final image of his her dad. But that’s not the direction I went today, though I did push this averaging thing a little further along in a different direction.

It was Tim Owens’ averaging tutorial post that pointed me toward the work of Jason Salavon, in particular his portrait project. I am crazy for these things, these “atmospheric meta-portraits”.

As it happens, I had a ready-made image series to experiment with. In summer of 2009 I took a Drawing I class, and our final project was this: dress up as your alter ego, shoot a bunch of photos of yourself, pick the best one, crop it to the right proportion, print an 8×10, and use that as a reference to enlarge and redraw at 16×20 inches using our choice of media. We could draw black and white or color images. I chose to create mine in color using art markers. So you can see the photos I started with, here is a video I made documenting that drawing assignment.

So from the photo shoot from the drawing project, I had 62 photographs that were of similar composition. I decided to make an averaged portrait. I followed Tim’s tutorial. When I saw the result I was happy with it, but I still wanted to try adding it to another photo, like Lou McGill did. I tried some other photos in my catalog of images but I just wasn’t happy with the juxtaposition for any of them, and then it hit me:

Animated GIF.

I brought my final selection photo, the one I made my drawing from, and masked it using the Quick Selection tool to grab only my skin, feathering the selection about 60px and then turning that selection into a layer mask. I liked the Soft Light blending mode, but you could still see my face too clearly, so I reduced the opacity to 10%. Then I made an animated GIF, playing with the timing and whether the masked photo layer was on or off, varying the opacity when it was on. I only needed eight frames to get what I was after – a sort of flickering in and out of the more discernible version of my face.

So here is my final result, an animated GIF + amalgamated self-portrait using averaging. I’m liking it.

This image is a derivative work based on Chinese New Year by Brian Yap, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. Here is what the original looked like.

My random wiki page gave me “Tellef Wagle” as the band name. The quote I got was All science is either physics or stamp collecting. Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937), in J. B. Birks “Rutherford at Manchester” (1962)

Instead of using the random interestingness Flickr search that the assignment post suggested, I used FlickrCC, because it generates a random search of Flickr Creative Commons licensed images when you load the page. I chose the third image from that search per the assignment, and followed its link back to Flickr to get the full size image and attribution information.

I did a few image manipulations to the original photo in Photoshop:

I made three copies of the image to three different layers. The bottom layer got a Diffuse Glow filter.

For the middle layer I applied a radial blur. But I didn’t want to blur the whole image, I wanted the blur to radiate out from an oval approximating the shape of the umbrella, so the girl’s face would not blur, but the umbrella spokes would blur and extend toward the edges of the picture. To make that happen I first used the shape tool to create an oval and rotated it so that it more or less matched the shape of the umbrella. Then I CONTROL+clicked on the shape to load a selection of that shape, feathered the oval by 80 pixels or so, and inverted the selection. Then I hid the oval layer, selected my middle image layer, and applied a radial blur with zoom. Then I set the opacity of the middle layer to 50% so it would allow some of the bottom layer to show through – it just looks prettier that way.

For the top image I applied a gaussian blur of 10 pixels and set the blend mode to soft light. This softened the image but allows detail from the two bottom layers to show through.

Once I was happy with the image I worked on the text. The font I chose is called Defused. I sampled purple from the girl’s sleeve and used that to write the album name. Then I sampled lighter purple to make the stroke. I used my CONTROL+click trick on the text layer to select just those pixels, then used Edit > Stroke and applied a 3 pixel stroke using the lighter purple color. I like!

By the way I picked purple to contrast against the yellow and green color up there in the corner.

For the album title I added the text in four stages so that I got four separate layers. I rotated each one using transform and moved them where I wanted them. I sampled red from the girl’s clothing for the text color. I liked the stroke effect so much that I did it again for the album title, but this time I sampled near-black from the girl’s hair.

For completely random elements to start with I think it came together in a nice way. This was a fun assignment.

Made for and inspired by Kirby Ferguson and Everything is a Remix

@DailyShoot – #ds586 – “Make a photograph of two complementary objects arranged to show their relationship to each other.”

My daily shoot today isn’t all that visually. I admit to being tired, cranky and possessed of a terrible headache. But I’m really excited about the two objects!

I made my study abroad students this little pocket sized field notebook to use for brainstorming and sketching during our trip to the UK. It contains digital camera tips, digital photography tips, and a bunch of writing prompts, drawing prompts, photo assignments and even a few audio assignments. I also had these “Trust Your Story” silicone wrist bands made. They can be used to keep the notebook closed or worn as a reminder to create every day.

You may be wondering why I made a physical paper notebook for a digital storytelling course. I could give several but I think it comes down to the fact that our brain is hardware in our physical body that is out there experiencing the world. Sometimes writing or drawing is a great way to get past creative block, and it will work even if there is no power outlet nearby. Any drawings or collage work done in the book can be photographed or scanned later and become digital.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Creativity isn’t magic. Part three of this four-part series explores how innovations truly happen.

To support this project please visit: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/donate/

Buy the music at: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/part-3-soundtrack/

Nelson and Valdez of Wreck and Salvage each produced videos inspired by Part 3. Check ‘em out:
http://vimeo.com/25379446
http://vimeo.com/25382384

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