(Silent) Young Adult Wolf! 

I decided to spend tonight relaxing in my bunk and working on a Video assignment. I chose Alan’s “Return to the Silent Era” challenge.  

I really had no idea what movie I wanted to do. Everything I thought about seemed like it would be kind of flat. And the, out of the blue, I settled on a movie that I don’t even really remember liking but that is a quintessential symbol of the decade I grew up in: Teen Wolf. 

To do the assignment, I started by using SaveVid to download the trailer from YouTube. 

Then, I pulled it into iMovie. I knew I wanted to make it black and white and use the iMovie “Aged Film” effect. But, unfortunately, in my version of iMovie you can’t apply to effects to a clip. So, I did the B&W effect, exported it, and then imported it back into the program. Then I was able to add the “Aged Film” effect.

 Next, I began thinking about where I wanted to insert cue cards. The trailer soundtrack is mostly a voiceover with bits of dialogue beneath. Strangely, they seem to show each of the scenes the dialogue come from, but they are lined up together. I was able to pretty easily figure out, however, what dialogue went with what scene. 

I wanted a realistic cue card graphic, so I did a quick Google image search and came up with this one (which is free to anyone to use!). 

I pasted that image in wherever I thought the cue card should go, and started typing the dialogue straight from the movie. It was pretty easy to settle on a font that looked right. I did have to play with the title effects so that the text didn’t fade in and out (which wouldn’t make any sense on a cue card). 

At this point, I felt like something was missing. I decided to see if I could replace some of the language in the movie dialogue with more “authentic” slang of the silent movie era. I found a bunch of Web sites with 1920s slang dictionaries. This PDF was probably the most thorough and useful. The translation isn’t exact in some cases, but I felt like it added some kind of additional authenticity to the project. 

Next, I worked on the music. I knew I wanted to use ragtime piano, and I found this great radio show on the Internet Archive that was available with a Creative Commons license. 

There’s a point in the original trailer where Teen Wolf turns on the car radio, and the music in the clip changes. I used this point to switch to a different ragtime tune. I’m not sure if the music works that well, but it is authentic! 

Finally, I decided to speed up all of the video a bit. It seems to me that silent movies often have the quality of speed being off, so I thought this effect might work. I think it’s okay.

I added an opening and closing cue card, and that’s basically it! (Note I changed the title because the term “teenager’ didn’t come into use until after 1930! I’m not sure “Young Adult Wolf” is as catchy, though. :-)

Enjoy!  

Dear Beloved Family,

Well, week four has drawn to a strange close here at Camp. 

The camp theme for this week was “design” and we asked all of our campers to go on Design Safaris, as they searched the world around them for examples of different elements of design. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete my design safari due to another incident that I was embroiled in. 

About a week ago, I borrowed a camp camera to document some events here. To my surprise, the person who had last used it had been a bad digital citizen and had NOT cleared his old photos off of the device. I couldn’t help but look at what was there, and I found a set of strange, inscrutable shots of a grown man gleefully going down a small child’s slide. Who was this man? Why was he so joyful about sliding? Was there some hidden agenda at play? WERE THESE PICTURES LEFT HERE FOR A REASON FOR ME TO FIND THEM?!?!

In order to better understand the situation, I tried to reconstruct the original incident: 

I wish I could say the exercice helped, but it really just left me with more questions about this mysterious character. I nicknamed him Slide Guy! and decided I needed to do more to understand him. 

I created a new assignment in the DS106 assignment repository (did you know anyone could do that!!??), and asked others to help me spot this man and solve the mystery of his affection for sliding. So far, over 23 other Slide Guy! incidents have been identified. And, let me tell you, Slide Guy! has gotten around. Jim Groom spotted him going over a huge waterfall! Andy Rush discovered that he once starred in a movie! Mike Berta saw him in a bunch of places, including a jar of fermenting yogurt! 

But then things got REALLY weird, when Slide Guy! was spotted IN CAMP. I don’t know how to feel about this. I mean, we try to be very open and welcoming at CMM, but we do have rules, you know?! No one fitting Slide Guy!’s description has officially registered here at Camp. Is he crashing? Does he have some underhanded intentions? Will he end up threatening us all with power tools and locking us in hidey holes underground?!?! 

ANY WHO, in other news, we had our first campfire meeting around the actual camp fire this week.  I took some shots of the event so that you could see just how magical this place is (and how strange some of our campers look). We were joined at this delightful event by the one-and-only Cheryl Colan (aka Doo Wop Girl), who is a designer herself. She gave lots of good advice and we had a fun and free-ranging conversation about design, in general. 

Over the course of the week, I really tried to keep up with my own design assignments, and I’m quite pleased with my work. I think the one I’m most proud of is my reimagining of the cover of The Girl Who Played with Fire: 

I think it turned out well, and it captures a certain VIBE that we have going at Camp this week. 

But, really, the biggest turn-of-events was what happened on Saturday! I was all set to sit down and spend the weekend continuing to build duPont Hall at the camp site. (It’s coming along very nicely, as you can see below): 

But then I received an unexpected memo from the head of CVI (Camp Magic MacGuffin’s holding company), telling me they had three new campers that were going to be arriving that evening, whom I needed to devote special time and attention to. 

I was okay with that, of course! After all, welcoming people to Camp is my job! And I love nothing more than orienting newcomers to the magic and light that is MacGuffin. But the three campers that arrived at my doorstep, were NOT what I expected. The oldest is only eight years old! The youngest is three! 

I think this is a bit young for MacGuffin campers, don’t you? Does this symbolize some new business venture of CVI? Why are they recruiting such young members? 

As you can imagine, my hands were full entertaining, feeding, bathing, and tending to these three new arrivals. Right now, I just put a film on to keep them occupied so that I could get this letter written! I’m not even sure how I’m going to record the weekly video with Alan later today (he, by the way, has gone MISSING AGAIN!!! On Twitter he just tells me his sharing his “voice” up “north.” Whatever THAT means.) 

Anyway, here’s a picture of our newcomers entranced by Peter Pan. I’m taking them off campgrounds later this afternoon for chicken nuggets and french fries (not sure how CVI will feel about that, but I’m all out of PB&J in the cabin). But after that, I’m going to make them start creating animated gifs. Nobody gets a pass at Camp Magic MacGuffin. NOBODY. 

Til next week,

Your Beloved Martha 

I completed the Big Caption today for another design assignment. The idea behind this one is that you take a photo from the Big Picture Web site and you recaption it so that you completely change the original meaning of the shot. 

The original caption on this photo: 

A worshipper lights a candle as she attends Sunday Mass led by Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill and Bulgarian Patriarch Maxim in Alexander Nevski cathedral in Sofia on April 29, 2012. 

I actually played with the styling of the thought bubble quite a bit to try and reduce the cheesiness factor of putting the words in an actual thought bubble. 

In any case, I’m pleased with it. It makes me giggle. 

For my next design assignment, I decided to do the Lyric Typography Poster. However, I did go a bit beyond just using text, and added a very basic vector graphic. I was really inspired by the examples at Music Philosophy — Especially when I saw how adding just a very simple graphic could be so effective. 

The lyric I picked was from the traditional Shaker song Simple Gifts. It’s a particularly meaningful song for me because it was one of the songs that was played and sung at our wedding (10 years ago this summer!). The song is really meant to be a simple dance, and the last lines of the song (which I didn’t use) is, “To turn, to turn will be our delight,/ Till by turning, turning we come ‘round right.” I wanted to evoke that sense of movement a bit in the poster. 

It actually is a song that encompasses what I strive to make more of my personal philosophy: looking for the simple, coming back to where we were, finding the gifts in the things we already have. Really, very beautiful, yes? I’m not sure my poster is beautiful enough to capture this sentiment, but I had fun doing it and thinking about this song again. 

Note: The original image came from The Noun Project (a fantastic source of free, CC licensed simple vector graphics) and was created by David Goodger. It is shared with a CC Attribution license.  

I decided I wanted to do a design assignment today, so I started browsing the Assignment Repository. There’s so much great stuff in there (although I do think some of our “Design” assignments need to be re-categorized as “Visual” assignments). I settled on Alternative Book Cover. 

To get inspiration, I started browsing my digital book downloads on Amazon. (Yes, I know I’m the loser who pays more than eBooks are really worth, but, goddammit, I’ve read more in the last 18 months than I had in the last 8 years thanks to my Kindle and iPad). A few years ago I ploughed through the Stieg Larsson series and loved it. It’s not fine literature, but it’s riveting and the characters are pretty fascinating. I decided to do an alternative cover for The Girl Who Played with Fire. I thought I’d find some cute kid shot of a kid. . playing with matches. Then I realized that wasn’t so cute; it was scary. 

THEN I started to think about scary kids and fires, and I remembered conversation Jim and I had yesterday about our favorite Stephen King novels. Aha! I decided to photoshop a picture of Drew Barrymore from Firestarter onto a book cover for The Girl Who Played with Fire. 

THEN I thought about the animated magazine covers that Jim’s been doing, and I knew what I needed to do: 

This was pretty tough for a few reasons. I wanted to stay as true as possible to the original cover of the American edition of the Larsson novel. It’s a pretty stark layout, and the letters are heavily fragmented. But, with some work, I was able to clean them up and add a dropshadow that matches the original. 

I did have to change the spacing of the title to make room for the image. In the end, you can see how the text design of the Larsson book works great on THAT cover, but it’s not nearly as effective on this cover. 

That’s okay, I still think it’s a cool cover. 

I have two problems with it, I guess. First, it’s way big: 2.2MB. Second, the animation doesn’t seamlessly loop, but to do that I’d have to add more frames and the file would just get bigger. 

Dear Beloved Family,

I’m writing you following the third week of camp here at Magic MacGuffin. Above, you’ll see a postcard that I created that reflects my feelings this week. On the one hand, camp is a blast, and I wish you were here. On the other hand, I feel a strange, blurry darkness descending and I fear what will come next. 

Allow me to explain. 

I’m finding that my life at camp is beginning to get the better of me. I am so deeply embedded in the virtual and real world of the Mountain that I cannot clearly distinguish what is real from what is unreal. 

Yesterday, I lost my glasses. I searched my entire cabin for them. They weren’t anywhere! I was really getting stressed, so I did what I usually do when I need to FIND something. I went to Google: 

At the time, I was really mad at Google. The results it was giving me were TOTALLY unhelpful. But then, later, I thought perhaps Google isn’t what I should have used? I mean, I can’t remember if that’s how I usually search for lost things. I’m so confused. 

Then, I was reading some amazing new posts from some of the campers on my iPad. I was so engrossed, I reached around to turn the page. But, there was no page to turn!  Did iPads used to have pages? How I am going to keep up with the camp reading if I can’t turn pages, anymore?! Am I missing something…?

My head hurts. 

Then, this morning, I woke up from an amazing and insightful dream about camp. I thought, “I have to blog about that!” But then I remembered that I had installed the DreamPress plugin, which automatically blogs your dreams, complete with dreamshots. BUT, when I went to check my site later, I couldn’t find the plugin anywhere! I couldn’t even find it in the official WordPress plugin repository. 

Someone is obviously playing tricks on me. I hate to say it, but I suspect my co-director, Alan. He’s been very mysterious lately. He SAYS he’s at camp, but I can never FIND him. Sometimes, I hear him around the campfire, but when I turn to look at him, HE’S NOT THERE. 

Today, he’s supposed to meet me at Shed #4 and introduce me to “Marco.” Does anyone want to come with me? I’m nervous…

On the bright side, we had a great week at camp learning more about photography and visual storytelling. I’m most proud of this picture I took after hanging my hammock outside of my cabin. I didn’t have the energy after putting it up to climb into it, so I lay down on the ground underneath and took a nap. When I woke up, this was the view: 

Lovely, I think. I think. I think. I think I’ll take a nap. 

Until next week,

Martha

I think the notion of “embedding” photos on blog posts is causing a few DS106 students to stumble. Let’s see if we can make this all a bit clearer. 

Let’s say I’ve uploaded a truly awesome photo to Flickr, and I want to share it with the world. There are a couple of ways that I could reference this photo on my blog: 

1. I could link to the Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marthagrace/7363496548/
   
   See what I did there — I copied and pasted the actual Flickr page URL (which happens to show the image on it) into my post, and I turned it into a link to that same URL. Generally speaking, this is a poopy way of referencing a photo. As your reader, I have to look at that ugly URL (although, if I wanted to, I could make the link a prettier phrase or sentence) and then I have to click away from your truly awesome blog to do see that actual image. Then, when I get to the page you’ve linked to, I can see the photo but I have to see a bunch of other Flickr interface stuff to.
   
   But, most importantly, the Web is a visual medium. You’re taking a class on digital storytelling, which means you’re learning how to use digital MEDIA to create stories and narrative. What’s the point if you’re not actually using the images in your posts? 
   
   Yuck. 
    
2. I could link to the actual image file that I uploaded to Flickr: 
   http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8010/7363496548_890c0e5fbf.jpg
   
   See how that link also points to another URL, but this time it ends in “.jpg?” That’s because I’m literally linking directly to the image. If you click that link , you’ll only see the image, not the whole kit-and-kaboodle of a Flickr page. 
   
   How did I do this?! It’s like MAGIC! No, it’s not really. What I did was right-click on the actual image in Flickr and then chose “Copy Image URL” in the menu that appeared (depending on what browser you’re using that menu item might be worded differently).
   
   Here’s a Pro Tip: In Flickr, if you go to the “Action” menu on any image page, you’ll see an option to “View All Sizes.” This is nice! I get a whole selection of image sizes to choose from, and then I can right-click on the image when I get the size I like to grab the right URL. Isn’t Flickr cool?!
   
   BUT this is still sucky. I still have to look at that ugly URL and I have to leave your lovely blog to go see the image. Blech.
    
3. I can EMBED the image into my blog post. This means the image actually APPEARS in my blog post, instead of just being a link. In WordPress, you’ve got an icon above the main post edit box to “Add Media” (it kinda looks like a camera). If you click on it, you have two basic options: “From Computer” (which means you’re going to upload it to WordPress) or “From URL” (which means you are going to simply point to the image somewhere else — like Flickr).
   
   Now, you COULD upload the image to WordPress and embed it that way, but you have a limited amount of space on your Web host, so why waste it? And, if you’re already uploading stuff to Flickr (like your Daily Creates), why duplicate the effort and upload it somewhere else? Instead, chose the “From URL” option, and paste that image file URL I talked about in #2. 
   
   Also, with this technique, you can theoretically embed images from ANYWHERE on your blog — all you need to know is that right-click trick to grab the image file URL. (Of course, you want to make sure you have permission and provide adequate attribution if you’re embedding someone else’s images on your site.)
   
   When I EMBED, I get this:
   
    
   
   Isn’t that so much nicer?  Embedding images is #4life. Learn it. Use it. Love it. 

Slide Guy! in Space.