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  5. mdvfunes

    ds-ina: DS106 Daily Create for Aug. 31, 2013 (yep, a couple of…

    by
    | Syndicated
    September 2, 2013


    ds-ina:

    DS106 Daily Create for Aug. 31, 2013 (yep, a couple of days late!): “This is TDC 601! That is 106 backwards! Draw something 106ish backwards.”

    This one was challenging for me—I could make a video or a gif of something going backwards, but I was struggling with how to make a still image of something backwards. Okay, maybe draw the back of a kitchen monster that people created for TDC595.

    But then I thought…what is something ds106ish? well, me! and you! So why not take an image of me backwards? Thus the mirror.


    My original idea was to have my camera showing the ds106 logo on the camera itself, and then take a photo of that. Ha! In what universe did I think it would be possible for my phone to be using one application (to show the ds106 logo (on the web) and then also use the camera app at the same time? Not.

    So I took the photo using the camera app (of course), and then did a screen shot of the ds106 logo from the ds106 page.

    I opened both in GIMP as layers, and made a layer mask for the image of me so that the part inside the phone would be transparent and I could put the ds106 layer under that so it’d show through.


    1. First, I drew a selection around the phone display with the “lasso,” or “free select” tool, so I could go around my finger on the camera button.

    2. I then did Selection->invert, which makes everything around the camera display selected, which is needed for the next step.

    3. Layer->create layer mask, which made the phone display transparent and everything around the phone display in the image show up.

    4. Scale the size of, and position the ds106 layer so it’s in the right place, peeking out through the transparent hold in the layer of me above it.

    5. Because the dividing line between the two images around the camera display was pretty sharp and harsh, I used the blur/sharpen tool to do a little blurring around the edge of the camera display. I think I did bit much of that, but no time to go back and fix it.

    6. I also played a bit with the brightness and contrast and other settings under “color” for the ds106 layer—I wanted it to look a bit like it was glowing, shedding light on my finger and out beyond the display screen. That was a hard effect to get, and it’s not quite what I was hoping for, but upping the brightness did help.

    It’s not really a drawing, but I have yet to feel comfortable enough with drawing to do many of those. It’s one of the parts of ds106 I just need to force myself into to get more confident about it. Everything else I love doing; drawing, well, not so much.

    On my list to get better at gimping….

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  10. mdvfunes

    I watched this film a few days ago and it made a real impact on…

    by
    | Syndicated
    August 25, 2013


    I watched this film a few days ago and it made a real impact on me. From the trailer:

    Paris, 2020.
    A beautiful couple, a city over-saturated by holograms and digital stream.
    A polaroid camera.
    Tomorrow will never be the same. 
    An electromagnetic storm wipes out all our data, worldwide. The only thing he has left is an old polaroid she took before he left him for spending too much time on social media. 
    I put this together with a quote from Alone Together by Sherry Turkle:
    We are not in a position to let the virtual take us away from our stewardship of nature, the nature that doesn’t go away with a power outage.
    The moment captured in this image has been running in my head for days so I thought I would do some giffing. I did not want it to loop forever, but to stop and give the sense of it all breaking up when it ended. However, it looks like this will not work with Tumblr so I slowed it down a little and looped it forever.
    Followed Michael’s tutorial again, and experimented with a few more settings in GIMP. I did want the glass smashing to make more of an impact. I need to play with it more.
    However, I want to end with Alan Levine’s comment on watching the movie:
    Hard to empathize with a digital dude who did not make local backups of media ;-)

    Update: I am submitting this gif as an assignment for the assignment 'saying it like peanut butter'. I did it a few days ago, it was one of the first gifs I made properly (i.e not with an automated tool) and it was inspired by a film that moved me. 

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  18. mdvfunes

    Killing 3 birds with one stone So I have been dancing with Jim…

    by
    | Syndicated
    August 22, 2013










    Killing 3 birds with one stone

    So I have been dancing with Jim Groom in every room of my home.
    Steady on. Strictly speaking I have been watching him dance on my laptop  in every room in my house. As a new recruit to the DS106 community and trying to limber up for Headless Ds106 about to start August 26, 2013. I have been splendidly failing at keeping up with the July challenge to do a daily create every day and with the August challenge to do an animated gif every day. Why? because I am learning to use new tools and they are hard!
    So I had an idea for this post that should catch me up a little. This post will take care of 3 daily creates with one post!
    For Daily create 585 we have to ‘share a recipe and a story of why it’s so special to you’.
    So the recipe ingredients are included here.
    What I do with the ingredients is put them all in a bowl and then wait till it forms into a lump which I throw in the oven for 45 minutes. That is it.
    Why is it so special, then? It was the first thing I learnt to make when I was told by doctors that diabetes was around the corner. I was angry at first, I like to eat when I want and what I want. But as a result of the diagnosis a few years ago, I learnt to cook. I now make time to buy the right food, cook the right food, and love doing it. Over the last few weeks I have been worried about my dog’s health and so had been neglecting the kitchen and my own health. He is now full of beans (healthy) again and so when this daily create came out my bread was coming out of the oven smelling gorgeous.
    I then had the idea to get Jim dancing in the photo I took of my bread coming out of the oven. I could make my first animated gif and take care of another of Talky Tina’s daily creates: Dancing Jim all over the world.
    Easier said than done. I made several attempts over a number of days with different photo editors. Hours and hours watching Jim dancing and trying to get him inside the baking trays, over the bread, wishing I could make him explode like John Johnston’s Headless poster, all to now avail.  I ended up feeling like my little animation above.
    But then my true friends came to my rescue on Google Plus DS106 space  I posted my failing gif, a couple of tutorials that had not helped me but made me feel stupid as they made it seem so easy!
    I gave up and then started again. As Piers Ibbotson, the theatre director, said to me last week: I am utterly uninterested in the fact that my actors get it wrong, i just need them to do it again and again until it works. So I kept doing it again and again until (drum roll) it kind of worked,
    And so we come the third daily create this post is covering: ‘Create an animated gif that Sandy Brown Jensen will respect’ 
    I posted my Greedy Jim on Flickr and here is my comment to explain why I felt this gif counted for this Daily Create:
    Sandy,
    I hope you will respect this one as it has taken my over 10 days and several photo editors to get to a (reasonable) shape. I love gifs, but I never knew what it took to make them. Now I do I can only say: RESPECT to all who make them. And greedy Jim dancing around my kitchen is just funny, or isn’t it?
    I know it is not great, the size is not quite right, and I had to remove one of the frames because I could not get it to line up. Sometimes it is not about the quality of the output but about what you learn getting there. I tried Fireworks, Photoshop and Gimp. I have settled on Gimp for the upcoming DS106 Headless 13 run.
    I bought PIxelmator before I knew it was not good for animated gifs, it looks like a great editor. I wanted to find an editor that would give me a large view of each frame rather than have me squint into a small side window to see which frame I am working on, failed on that. Fireworks seems intuitive, but has to be paid for monthly now.
     Along the way: I cracked the Gimp, found a tutorial that makes it seem like it should take me under 2 minutes to add an animated gif to a background and a screencast that taught me about frames

    And at the end of it all I felt like the minions in the gif above.

    So what have I learnt? I can kill 3 birds with one stone and (drum roll again) check out the use of the clone tool in gimp in my last photo above! There were only two birds in the original.

    Off to bed…have I signed up for no sleep during DS106? Having so much fun, but Tumblr is a bit sucky.

    Update: I am leaving this post as is as an example of what the technology affords. It does not make it easy to create post with media place where you would want it. I have found a workaround for this - but it should not be about workarounds.
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  21. mdvfunes

    Mariana Funes – Google+ – At last after days and days of grappling with differentâ?¦

    by
    | Syndicated
    August 21, 2013
    Mariana Funes - Google+ - At last after days and days of grappling with different…:

    theds106shrink:

    I present Greedy Jim! I will post here but not today. It has been a Jim in my kitchen marathon but I have learnt:

    • Layers and how to merge them
    • Paste as layer, damn it!
    • visible layers are the one with the little eye selected
    • Gimp has many options
    • I like Fireworks best of all the editors I tried this week but I cannot have it because I need to pay monthly for the Adobe Creative Cloud if I do

    Giffing take so much time to learn but I love it!!!

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  22. mdvfunes

    Mariana Funes – Google+ – At last after days and days of grappling with differentâ?¦

    by
    | Syndicated
    August 21, 2013
    Mariana Funes - Google+ - At last after days and days of grappling with different…:

    I present Greedy Jim! I will post here but not today. It has been a Jim in my kitchen marathon but I have learnt:

    • Layers and how to merge them
    • Paste as layer, damn it!
    • visible layers are the one with the little eye selected
    • Gimp has many options
    • I like Fireworks best of all the editors I tried this week but I cannot have it because I need to pay monthly for the Adobe Creative Cloud if I do
    • Giffing take so much time to learn but I love it!!!

    I finally made a dancing Jim Gif…..was it worth the pain?

    Read more...
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