Dear Village Committee,

I keeping with my assignment at your village this summer. I have started investigating the signage around the village and recreating them in square format. There is a significant amount of research to indicate that square signs correlate positively with increased conformity. 

I am consulting with our resident Dreamer by numbers, jjgifs, and he has offered the hypnotic blue backgrounds to this week’s quotes from the 3 dossiers you gave me to study in the Archives for this week. His research shows that this background colour and complex shapes supports this committee’s aim to keep all residents wondering ‘whose side are you on?’ in order to instigate uncertainty and enable our residents to give the committee the information they need. It appears these subliminal background messages work over time to increase compliance and extraversion. It is early days in this DS106 special assignment at the village and we hope that this work will evolve into kinetic typography with sound to enable even faster acquisition of information from residents. We are researching this process thoroughly and hope to offer a sophisticated technical innovation that will allow all residents to create their own compliance devices. Here is a prototype for your approval. 

I hope that this week’s work meets with your approval and added to my viewing of the 17 dossiers that tell the full story of this village and it prisoners residents last week will suffice to be paid the Credit Units I need to continue my very important work at the hospital this summer s your resident psychiatrist.

Be seeing you.

Well, I have been told by the committee that once I resigned I need to produce…I spent the afternoon trying to turn this animated gif into my Twitter avatar for the start of DS106 Themed The prisoner. All the workarounds I tried failed. APIs that promised to do it did not, brute force ( just change the extension and upload) did not work. I am swimming like the blazes to get away from the village, production here is hard. Where is the beach? And what does the new Photoshop mean with Save For Web (Legacy)? All the other new options don’t seem to have preview or allow me to play with colours. WE WANT INFORMATION! Update: if this Save for Web glitch matters to you. Complain!

Gearing up for a busy summer of DS106 I decided to turn today’s daily create into my first proper assignment. It is called Splash the colour and I had a little help from the lovely Jack Hylan to get it done. He made a tutorial to make it easy and enjoyable. 

The prompt for the daily create asked us ‘see beyond the buildings’. I looked out of my office window to see the beautiful roses outside. I wondered if I could take a photo from the inside that would show the window (building) and focus on what was beyond it (the flower). I did that. 

Then I wondered if I could make one of those photos where everything is black and white and only a splash of colour. I used to have a cheap camera that did that automatically, I still miss that camera. 

Then I remembered Jack and his towel. All I did was follow his tutorial exactly and then add my tacky pink frame, I could not help it. I wanted the pink to highlight the roses. 

Well, that is me dusting the blog up for this DS106 summer!

Wrote an article about online pedagogy on Medium  and made this video to highlight the importance of relationship in teaching online or offline. This is the DS106 version with spooky music added. I played with video actions on ScreenFlow to get the effects. Fun! And I made an infinite loop with it too because I can. 

I am not feeling like work today, so I made time for the daily create. Spent a long time looking for images and was shocked at how many sites are charging big bucks for images that are as old as time. And they site I did use to find this lovely poster to edit ‘cannot guarantee this is a public domain poster’. As it is a 1942 poster, I will took a wild risk and used it. We really need to sort out copyright law people. I also reflected on how I struggle to do ‘easy’. I thought the poster looked just right with minimal changes. The Daily Create today asked us to do a poster to elect a class president. I decided the only president should be DS106 #4life. So there we have it. A few layers and blending in Photoshop and it was cooked.

Talky Tina laid down the challenge and I have been wanting to try another gif the portrait for a while. So I looked for high resolution portraits of our jimgroom on the google, as Tina suggested. Then got to work as per Ryan Seslow’s excellent tutoring on this lovely way of making gifs last semester in CT101. I think that there is the ghost of another in this gif though…. 

Another great example of DS106 Collaboration

We started with an old beer commercial found by Karen Young. I decided to turn it into a DS106 themed commercial and wrote the script. Jim Groom kindly recorded his lines and emailed them to me. So did Karen with added burning dinner sound effect. The Headless Inkspots provided the music. I edited it all together, adapted the poster and bingo! We premiered the commercial as a trailer to ‘Noir on the Couch: An interview on the Femme Fatale in Film Noir with Prof. Young’ on the DS106 Good Spell tonight. This segment is part of a whole show ‘The Fabulous Femme Fatale’ to be premiered soon on DS106radio and sponsored by Rockylou Radio. Date to be announced. 

A daily create I really enjoyed making. Full story on Flickr. 

Paul Miller disconnected from the Internet for a year. At the end of that year, this is how he says he felt. Discuss.

Animated Gif by gifadog from original film footage by In Limbo TV.  See better version on Gfycat 

Relaxing with a daily create gif tonight. Tried Todd’s quaint way and I like it! 

It had to be done. I am so sorry.

It started with a DS106 daily create, of course. I then saw this precious little gem from Kathy Onarheim which reminded me of Brian Bennett’s excellent 'Roll it Baby!” and then I remembered 'The most boring mash up ever'. 

The scene was set. The most boring plumbing commercial ever had to be remixed. I have been giggling for the last hour whilst making it, worth the smile I reckon.

Gifadog and I are trying to learn how to restore old classic cartoons. 

It is hard! I asked the Interwebz for help and bionicteaching helped with a Photoshop Tutorial and advise that it is slow work. It seems that my dream to find a way to clean up a whole video is now about learning to clean video frame by frame. stefaniesophie suggested learning painting technique. As I understand this, it is to learn the nature and type of different types of painting to enable you to restore old frames accurately. 

So I turned to the animated gif for help. I took an original classic cartoon from the public domain, edited in a movie editor to get only the scenes that I wanted to improve and then started to make animated gifs of the frames and clean them up.

There are an incredible number of parameters that can be adjusted in post processing with Photoshop and Premiere Pro. I have little idea of where to start. Above are our early attempts. I must admit to feeling a little like the proverbial dog with too many balls. 

A writing Daily Create based on the Art Assignment prompt: “The one that got away”.

This was fun! 

Daily create today asked for a shoefie for Howard and I decided to do it.

Yesterday’s daily create prompted us to reflect on 'the one that got away' and I struggled with the prompt for all sorts of reasons.

Today I put the two creates together. 

A few years ago, when I was too old (according to whom?) to buy pink Timberlands, I bought a pair. I loved these shoes so much, but I rarely wore them. I was worried that people would think I was just ‘too old’ to wear such shoes. 

They stayed in their box for a long time. One day a friend was searching for a pair of shoes for his daughter and we happened to be the same size. I gave them away. 

I still miss them. 

So my pink Timberlands are the ones that got away and also my ‘shoefie’ for today. I wanted to add a flavour of the ‘worst possible taste’ which we also had on the Daily Create this week with our worst album covers remixes. I searched for the ugliest frame I could find to add to my creation. Voila! 3 Daily Creates in 1:

"The worst ‘shoefie’ of the pair that got away"

For howardrheingold

rockylou22:

Rainbow Flower Power - take 3 for GIFFight and Gif it Up 

Flower source image from the Museum of New Zealand

Background image “Rainbow” by Evan Leeson by-nc-sa 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/eovqWK

“radioactive” turquoise caterpillar GIF (CC-By-SA) courtesy of Alan Levine (@cogdog)

Art on the couch critique

What strikes me on first seeing this lovely gif are the changing colours of the flower which pick up the background rainbow colours. The lines of the rainbow flow in the same upward direction as the flower and complement it.   I notice the colours as they seem other-worldly and contrast strongly with the neutral flower stem and leaves. The rainbow adds depth to the composition. As your eye is drawn to the changing colours in the flower and the rainbow, the caterpillar surprises you and appears to create balance. A 3-way attention point: Rainbow, flower, caterpillar against the neutral stem. The fine threads in grey around the flower add contrast in stillness as the flower inside bursts with life. 

The movement of the caterpillar seems important and adds realism to an otherwise ethereal composition. What gives it the ethereal quality may be that the colours chosen by the artist do not exist in nature. We recognise a flower and a caterpillar yet the colours do not belong. It seems as if the natural elements put a barrier up for the viewer, we cannot reach the end of the rainbow. This effect is added to by the blurry nature of the rainbow. Then there is the creation of depth by the caterpillar appearing in the corner and seeming to go ‘into’ the picture nearest to the viewer. This makes it seem like the flower is behind the caterpillar and this in turn adds to the sense of the rainbow being unreachable. 

Given the title one assumes the choice of colour was intended to give the composition a pop-art style. The flower is out of any context, there are no frames to locate the work, adding to its detached feel. I imagine it as a flower that would belong in a biosphere 2 experiment of the future or a science fiction movie. My alternative title: ‘Life thrives anywhere’.