Well hi, how are you? My name’s Daniel Ellison, although if you ask anyone around here they’ll call me Danny Keys. I’m not real tall or broad, but I can hold my own pretty alright. I’m a pianist, the finest – but maybe not the best – in my good town Heatherton in the lovely state of … Continue reading Meet Danny Keys →

Vonnegut tells us that our favorite stories start at the lowest end of the Good-/Ill-Fortune scale and end in infinite happiness, just like Cinderella. Naturally, not all stories end like this. Not many of our western stories this week find such an appealing path in the remotest sense, for the West is a harsh place … Continue reading Drawing the Line →

Lawmen, drunks, women behind men, and bad guys – all of these are common tropes in the western genre. The two stories I chose to read, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “Ice Man”, both had these tropes at the forefront. In the first one, written by Stephen Crane, a town marshal comes home … Continue reading Power and Prejudice →

This week, I was assigned to help put together the photography section of this course. After writing my suggestions, I made an assignment which asks you to recreate a scene from a film on your own. I can’t wait to see what people come up with! While mulling over this assignment creation, I picked out some … Continue reading Week 2: Wild Pictures →

What would Dances with Wolves look like if it were like The Wild Wild West show? A little more drawn and patriotic, probably. The design assignment for this project asks for a comic-style creation of scenes from a Western, which should look drawn like the show’s cutscenes. I chose to use Dances with Wolves because it is one of my favorite movies … Continue reading Dances with Wild Wild Wolves →

Welcome to a tiny bull chase, featuring two inked-in cowboys and a round little bull. This GIF assignment, which has you draw an animation sticky note style and convert it into a GIF, gave room for plenty of creativity. In my own version, I wanted to capture something like the cowboy’s biggest issue in the Wild … Continue reading Paper Riders →

Everyone, meet Clint Pixelwood, a pixel rendition of one of Clint Eastwood’s most famous Western images. I made Mr. Pixelwood during the completion of an assignment that encouraged the making of a pixel image with only a 16×16 resolution. Since I’ve never made pixel art before, this proved to be a bit of a challenge. … Continue reading Clint Pixelwood →

This week was filled with grasping at what this course is about. I spent most of my time pondering what I should do for each social media aspect — Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, soundcloud, and the very subject of the course — and didn’t save too much time putting down what I was picking up along the way, which … Continue reading Week 1: Hardy Introductions →

I admit, I don’t do much with digital media aside from consume and observe, and this is my first fully online course, so this week has been more or less of a rocky start. I’ve been trying to keep up by researching, reading, and thinking, only to realize that today, Friday, I haven’t gotten around … Continue reading A Rocky Start →

Here’s a post to see if this feeds onto the site well!