My next assignment this week was to recycle some old media from DS106.

We had to use five different pieces of media and two different kinds (image, audio, or video).

I chose six photos and two sound clips.

I didn’t want to include text, so I hope the story comes across anyways. I used pictures from campus because I’m feeling rather sad about graduating — even though I’ll be living on campus next year, I won’t be taking classes here. So a female student is walking on campus to get to her class on a beautiful day. She parks her bike under the same sign every day. One day, she comes back and sees it has been burnt up by a smoker and screams!

Tutorial using Popcorn Maker

1. Find your media!

I used the DS106 media bin. I looked around for a few minutes and tried to connect pieces. If you’re limited in your media, like I was, I would try looking for the sounds/video clips first since those will usually be the most scarce. I found two sound clips: birds chirping + a clip with fire burning something then a woman’s scream. With those two in mind, I looked at the photos and images and tried to build a story around it.

2. Upload the media somewhere.

To use audio and video with  Popcorn Maker, you have to upload the media to YouTube or SoundCloud. I only used sound, so I uploaded both of them to SoundCloud.

For the images, I found that Popcorn Maker was being moody and kept rotating my images in weird ways. So, to remedy this, I uploaded them to Imageshack. You can use whichever site works best for you, though.

3. Once you have your media uploaded, you go to the Popcorn Maker site and hit the Start a Project button to create a new piece.

4. Add your music and video first under the Media tab. This way, you have somewhere to put your pictures so they can relate to the music/sounds.

5. Add your images under the Events tab.

Because my images were rather small on the preview, I enlarged them by clicking and dragging the corners.

6. Arrange your images to create your story on the timeline.

7. Once you are finished, you hit save, and voila!  A finished Popcorn Maker story.