#ds106 Assignment 1: Tell a Story from Jennifer Jones on Vimeo.

So, here it is my response to the first #ds106 asssignment (which, to be honest, I’ve been wanting to try for ages but not had any good reason too apart for my own lawls.) We’ve to tell a quick story that happened to us recently (so I don’t know where 4 years of photobooth photos fit in) but I’m quite interested in the abstract concept of this.

Background:

My laptop has travelled with me over the last 4 years, it almost feels part of me – it certainly has taken a physical and mental battering from yours truly (I got knocked over by a bike whilst it was in my bag within the first month of getting it – remarkable, it survived with minor scratches which were replaced with apple care 2 years later) It was my only company when I decided to move to Leicester in 2007 (packing two bags and giving myself a week to decide where to live) and it’s taken the best part of my post-graduate education, not having much time for anything else but it (and should hopefully see me through until the end of the PhD, where I will treat myself to a brand new one as a gift for completion) – and it’s documented my god awful selection of hairdos that I have sported in such a short period of time. The laptop remains the same, but the places and the people it has captured, has changed – and that’s quite why I’m quite glad I’ve got into the habit of taking random pictures of me making stupid faces (although the last year has been decisively lacking.)

It’s awesome to see your life kind of whizz past like that – some images remind me strongly of things, others make me appreciate how much of a better place I am now. It kind of puts me all out there (which I might have not done at the time of some of the pictures when they were take, as many of the pictures never went online to begin with) but in this context, it sort of tells a story for me. Also I really need to get used to speaking to a camera!

How I did it:

First of all, I have to arrange them in chronological order – no mean task with over 1k photos. Some of my photos were stored in my old hard-drive, the others were moved to different areas of my laptop. Furthermore, when photobooth was updated with snow leopard this time last year, it changed the file name from “Photo X” to a date stamp (much better) – so when I initially tried to dump all photos in imovie the first time round, there were some rogue images that looked out of place.

So using iphoto first of all (which noms metadata) I created a photo album containing all the photobooth images together – this made the initial transition to imovie much better.

I then followed the instructions on how to stop-motion in imovie here – specifically trying to get the gaps less than a second (iphoto slideshow was going to be my first choice by it was too slow, I didn’t one any one photo to take precedence) – I then exported it, the sped it up further once the slideshow became a video file.

The rest was straight forward edit. Now, enjoy!