TDC16: Ugly–>Beautiful

I went out into Ann Arbor (walking to campus, for work) not really knowing where I was going to find the ugly to make beautiful. What I started to do, was I started taking pictures of trees. I centered the trees in the picture, tried to get different kinds of trees, different textures of bark, not really thinking, just shooting.
Then I found the locker (is that a locker?) in the lower right, tagged up, right outside a kind of beat up looking building on the Old West Side. Then I got the idea for a triptych of graffiti, including my new shot with some old; then I put my camera in my pocket and headed on to work.
That’s when I found the greeny-white guy (lower left), right on Williams Street. I took it, not sure if I’d use it, but when I started messing around in Gimp, four seemed better. The graffiti characters are catty corner to each other, and the signature tags are also arranged on the diagonal.

Graffiti as art, as something beautiful, isn’t new. At all. That idea, totally old. But I thought that arranging these various tag pics from around Ann Arbor gave a different sense of them, and of the city. It seems more playful, to me, and the way the characters play off of the signatures sort of makes me think or re-think what tags are, what they’re trying to say to the reader(s), to the owners of the buildings/structures, to the community. The arrangement makes them seem more innocuous, I think. Whether they deserve that sense or not is up to the beholder(s).

TDC17: Vlog about your keys.

Bagman!

I’m pretty locked in, at this point, it seems, to the two draft process for video. This one had a short, short, two shot first draft–a shot of bagman fumbling with the camera while looking into it, and a shot of the keys explanation. That was done on my digital camera.

Then I went back to my webcam, re-recorded the first part, and almost left it there. I couldn’t figure out where to splice, or whether I wanted to bother with trimming video at all. So I got the idea just to do little skits for all of the keys, all of the references (or almost all of them; I’d still like to take Bagman to the American Legion to play basketball sometime…).

The middle sections were done using my digital camera and the final scene was done using the webcam again (I’m not sure why the audio gets squirrely, except for the fact that I was sitting on the opposite side of the laptop when it was recording). That scene featured two characters, and so the video had an opening section and an end section which needed trimming (I used MPEG Streamclip to clip the ends off). Then, I made the transition jpegs with Gimp–the font is Champagne and Limousines, the same one used in those (pretty?) famous Star Wars minimalist travel posters, just white letters on black background. The ending was too abrupt so I added the FIN.

It’s getting super fun, seeing comments and tweet shouts and everything. This community stuff is pretty cool.

TDC 18: Make a video of an object in motion.

Took this video of a couple of fat squirrels having a stare-off (do squirrels count as objects?!). I was planning to get traffic on Williams Street, but then I caught these guys.

And I didn’t make this one today, but I really liked it as an object in motion. I like how the tracks are changing, giving a sense of motion, and of course the mirror seems stationary while the landscape shifts around it. Perty.

Web Learnings: How I learned to stop worrying and love the WP.

So this week I also learned about the difference between Pages and Posts, thanks to Prof Groom’s Tuesday class. I’ve updated my personal info so people can access that, and also created pages for the most used categories I use in blog posts, so people can sort the Reading Life stuff from the Gimp stuff from the DS106-only stuff and etc.

My twitter tools plugin isn’t posting out, though, which is bothersome. I’ve spent a few hours looking around on the interwebnets, but can’t find any answers. Any thoughts from other peeps on Twitter Tools posting fixes?