In my last post Path Differences I analysed a scene of  the movie 'The Matrix'. I now understand this is known as the 'helicopter scene'. At least typing in 'helicopter scene' provides you with a lot of information about this scene.
However, in this post I will provide you with more information about 'The Matrix', which will be three intriguing facts of the making of the movie.

 Maybe already well known but none the less still interesting is a slow motion technique called bullet-time photography. This technique is used to display a certain motion in different speeds. A bullet may move fast at first and then slow down, or someone jumps high in the air fast, slows down and finally the motion of the actor has nearly stopped. He now may accelerate again. The following clip will illustrate this very well:



My last bit of the making of the movie is about the so called "green rain". When I saw the movie about ten years ago I immediately was concerned about the falling green letters which appear when the movie starts and sometimes later in the movie. According to imdb.com, where they are called glyphs, the letters "consists of reversed letters, numbers, and Japanese katakana characters".




Having read the above and knowing the movie, anybody certainly will be able to assign the genre of the movie to the action partition. Yet, imdb.com also mentions adventure and scifi and I've read some can see thriller elements in "The Matrix".

The following clip which I've created from the scenes shown above, display what I've found out in particular: the green rain, the way of cutting in the helicopter scene (see Path Differences), and the applying of the bullet-time photography in "The Matrix":

The difference between knowing the pass and walking the pass.A weeklycreate about analysing movies.It is always so annoying to me to analyse artwork, especially when being given a set of rules. I thought about skipping this, but then my "Facebook Oracl...

It was Web Week and for me it has revealed beautiful stories I alone could not have told.Still, you can start here with a story I made up with the help of some dailycreates and the magic of linking pages one to each other.I will not explain how I've cr...

So you've come back, child.I can see you've made your way to a big car.You can start the 'Wise Web Wandering' anew here.

Just one of these magic horses will enable you to follow a "Story of Wisdom".

Storify It.You can watch the story directly on Storify.[View the story "Looking for a Real Princess" on Storify]Continue by using the scroll bar on the right!

Imag[in]ing the Streets with Google Street View

With the help of Google Maps I now will try to reconstruct a weird experience I had some time ago. If you do not know about the passages, just believe me. You also have to believe me that it was not a passage which brought me to the first place below. This is the real secret of my story and I will not rest until I have found out.

At first I did not know where I was, really, I just became aware that I must have left Moscow. I can not remember how I got here.



I could feel the intensity of the place, the energy, which told me it is one of the passages. Eyes closed I stretched out my arms and contacted the powers, that will transport me across time and space. I felt the energy filling me and then a short weird emotion. I appeared right next to this beautiful cathedral were I will now enter and will meet brother Nikolei, who may be able to tell me what brought me to that strange place I have been.

Storytelling Within the Web.Creating this page was fun (: If you do not know them look here. Since I have started using the internet and came up to lists of photographs supplied with names, I had the idea of making some de...

Summary of week 7 and 8A long, long time ago I've started week 7. I started with making a rough script for my radio show. I also created a bumper to announce the show and a commercial to invite people to the next show of Radio Earth.For the first ...

Here I've made some weather on my desk. I took a cardboard box and put some toy pieces in it and moved all around. This became a thunder. Then I took some paper clips and dropped them into the cardboard box.I guess you don't believe this thunder sound ...

Four years ago I joined facebook. This was an interesting experience for me and I tried to make out what unwritten rules I should consider here. It was a long time until I dared to participate in any conversation. Now I use one of my first tries f...

A post about my daily creates during 7th week, spring break and 8th week, which are:
writing about glasses and a mermaid wearing some; videos about garbage, bubbles and an old man; an origami heart and the create letters; all thought out while looking into the sky out of my window:

 The writing assignments are always interesting to me and this time two of them have been even more interesting. First I wrote about an underappreciated object, which I chose to be my new glasses. Later my new glasses had its say.


After this I decided on drawing a mermaid with glasses, which was not the most important issue for this daily create, but to settle a mermaid into a real world place. I've put her into my bathroom, reading, wearing glasses. Maybe she is also an elder mermaid which is difficult to see with mermaids. Have you ever realized a mermaid as old? Reality tells me even mermaids have to grow older.


I first draw a mermaid with colored pencils. I already knew I will it make look suitable to the color drawing effect of my camera, so I outlined the drawing with different colors. After this I took a photograph of part of a washbasin with the above mentioned filter and I also took a photograph of the mermaid drawing without any filter. In a photo editing software I used the layer mode 'Darken Only' to combine the photographs. I suddenly thought about some bounds which are able to protect the mermaid, for it is a so private place to be photographed in. I added a border for this. I like the dreamy result.

While mention the privacy of the mermaid it is a good link to the videos I've produced this three weeks.

I first was intrigued by the idea to make a video about garbage and recycling. Because garbage is a really private matter I tried to let it appear a bit more impersonal by striving the topic everyday garbage recycling in Germany.

Come & Listen...

to what part of my family story during World War II has inspired me to produce a little radio drama.

My parents, both are born 1937 and this way have been children during the war. They have told me about this unfortunate experience and I decided to use this assignment to work this out for me.

Further more my grandma was an illegitimate child of someone who was remembered to be Italian and Jewish and my grandpa really was worried while having to live in Nazi-Germany with his beloved wife. He actually listened to a station which was forbidden to listen to. You even could be put to death for this crime. My mother was about five years old when she actually sang the sound of BBC London in the streets, but ... fortunately nothing has happened to them, accept from my grandpa was very angry with my mother. They all survived war without being arrested or being hurt during an air raid. Yet it was a hard time for children, even harder for my dad who has to flee the parts of Germany which has been overwhelmed. He saw dead very early in his live.

I also did work for a friend and scientist, who did research about four clergy man, who actually were put to death because of radio crime. One child of one of them is still alive and can report of how it was when her father was arrested and killed. The Nazis sent the family even a bill concerning the execution.
However, nothing like this happens in the following show.







To be able to produce the show I did the following:
After I wrote myself a rough script, I started producing the show by thinking out some dialog, which is entirely spoken by myself. I simply did not manage persuading some friends to lend me their voice. They are all very busy and really very often have to help me out for my artwork.
Anyway, it is possible in Audacity to change the level of a voice. I used this to create voices of a child, a man and some women.
For some reason I suddenly had the idea to produce the show using two languages. This had made it more interesting to listen, yet it is more difficult to follow the content. I acted out the story in German, the native language of the protagonists, and laid over it a voice interpreting the dialogue.

Whenever I have finished dialogue which belongs together I thought about sound effects and atmosphere. Some I recorded myself, but most I have found on freesound.org. I have listed links to the sounds at the end of the blog.

I used Audacity to produce the entire show. When I started I did not know too much about the software, but I know now. At the beginning I often did unnecessary steps, for there have been tools and possibilities I did not know about. Like this to the end the process has fastened, which was good, for I did run a bit out of time and energy.

I can not say if all the work was really fun. I would need some distance to the process of producing to say this, because it was an intense experience. In the end I was proud, but I also compared to professional produced audio books, which have generally a kind of fuller rounder sound. I presume they have further software and hardware possibilities like sound proofed rooms and very good recording facilities and, yes, experience. Yet I like so much the experimental touch of my work, which always is interesting and exciting.


Líst of links to the sound I have used:
spring atmosphere 1
spring atmosphere & piano
piano improvisation 1
dishes
door
footsteps 1
children playing
ticking watch
footsteps 2
place atmosphere
market atmosphere
old radio music
noise find station
BBC London announcement
knocking
unlock door
piano improvisation 2
air raid atmosphere
after air raid atmosphere
waiting room atmosphere
soft running
spring atmosphere 2
steps on grass
piano melody 1
piano melody 2
piano melody 3
piano melody 4

Here I got some live into a piece of the silent  movie "The Circus" with Charly Chaplin. First I thought it will be impossible to add any foley sound here, because you have to know in advance were to add sound of steps or noises of the c...

To have some rest and relax during spring break I folded a more extensive origami piece and by doing that had the idea of making this the basis of a poster for my radio earth show.

This post is meant to be both, the first scene of my radio show and a weekly audio assignment. The assignment demands reciting a poem, recording it and make it a part of a story. I have chosen a German poem by Eichendorf, which I have translated. Any a...

Below you can listen to a piece of audio, which is meant to be a commercial for attracting listeners to tune in to the next Radio Earth show.This one was interesting. Especially when I recorded my voice and spoke loud and clearly, but it doesn't f...

For a part of a imagined radio show I intend to produce a little story. The radio show is to be announced via a radio bumper which you can listen to below:I started with recording my voice saying "This is Radio Earth on DS106. Come and listen to s...

A script for my first radio show.

DS106 regular students are guided to produce a radio show. I think this is an exciting task for me, too. Today I even had an idea for the show and thought it might be good to write a script which leads me during the production stage.

I imagine 'Lisa's First Spring' is an episode of a weekly show called Earth Radio. Earth Radio presents narrative episodes which concern history and ethnology or other sciences. Core ideas of Earth Radio are that the little stories take place in all parts of the world and that they lead to changes in the worlds society. Here you can a sketch of the logo of earth radio:
But now let et us go  to the script of the story.

Lisa's First Spring
by Earth Radio (Stefanie Jeske)

Lisa was born in 1939 in Germany during World War II. Her mum, Erika, is an illegitimate child of an Italian soldier, who belonged to the Jewish community. Although Erika has never met her father, this made her an opponent of the Nazi regime.
Her husband and father of Lisa, Hans, was worried about someone suspect about the Jewish father of Erika. The uncertainty of what happens to people who are partly Jewish set Hans's mind, who loves Erika, against the Nazis, too.
Hans looked for help and support in his opinion and decided to listen to enemy transmitters. He knows how dangerous this is and that people are threatened to put to death for listening to BBC Radio.
 Lisa was just a little girl when she imitated parts of the signal sounds of the BBC Radio station. Afterwards Lisa's father was arrested for listening to an enemy transmitter. Erika even frightens about he will be put to death.
Early in the year 1945 Berlin had a severe air raid. Erika took her daughter and they ran for shelter, already arrived at the shelter Erika asked a neighbor to take care of Lisa, because she has to go back to the house where she has forgotten a pocket watch, which is highly valuable to Hans. Erika doesn't return.
After the air raid the neighbor takes Lisa to their parents house, but it was destroyed. Erika is missed. Lisa is brought into the country, where people offered to give shelter to needy children. An old Lady became her foster mum.
Lisa doesn't know about her father, nor about her mother.
She is now five and a half and the war is over, but providing is bad. Nevertheless while playing in the garden she enjoys the green leaves and blossoms on the trees. Then the old Lady mysteriously calls her into the house. Like behind a mist she realized two people who look like her parents. With barely audible voice Lisa asked Mum? Dad?

1. Lisa in the garden of her foster mum.

• Spring sounds
• rain barrel (sound)
• Lisa sings (LaLaLa)
• Foster mum appears mysteriously

2. Introduction into the world war ii situation.

• Voice over introduction

• Family situation Mum, Dad, Lisa talking
• Lisa's age (5)
• Mum partly Jewish, no one knows
• Hans worried (listen to enemy transmitter)
• pocket watch

3. Radio scene:

• Hans listening to radio (BBC intro)
• Lisa sitting around bored, starts imitating (faint)

4. Walk scene

• Hans for a walk with Lisa (film sound 1945)
• Lisa imitates BBC radio
• Hans gets angry

5. Hans is arrested, Lisa stood back

• some words of officials
• Hans says good bye to Lisa and Erika (embrace sounds?)
• don't worry, everything will be fine

6. Air raid scene

• air raid sounds
• putting things together sound
• running sound
• talk to the neighbor

7. After air raid scene

• mum hasn't come
• neighbor goes with Lisa to parent's house, Erika is missed
• neighbor tells Lisa that she will go to the coutry

8. Again Lisa in foster mum's garden

• voice over is telling: Lisa is brought into the country, where people offered to give shelter to needy children. An old Lady became her foster mum. Lisa doesn't know about her father, nor about her mother. She is now five and a half and the war is over, but providing is bad. Nevertheless while playing in the garden she enjoys the green leaves and blossoms on the trees.

9. Lisa meets parents

• Lisa hears faint talk, enters house

• quiet, Lisa whispers to herself, makes funny noises, but also noises of uncertainty
• foster mum tells that there are two people who wants to see her
• quiet
• Mum? Dad?

summary of week 6

This has been an awesome week for me. Although I am familiar with doing artwork without any consideration, this week I were lucky enough to experience more consideration than usual. Many thanks to Alan Levine's post on twitter which included my blog URL. He also includes me in one of his blog posts about social communication in the web. Let me be a bit ironic when saying I didn't know how touching I can be (:
Yet, I do appreciate that injustice of the kind that happens to me becomes public. And being part of social networks gives  me opportunity to communicate my situation rather than asking German friends and acquaintance for compassion. They are closing their eyes and saying it is all my own fault.

Back to creation, this week was all about design and I started exploring what Design is by checking out the material which was provided, that is pages and examples concerning design elements. This was exciting to read but then I wanted to start doing the designblitz assignments to grasp what is meant by looking for design in my environment and taking photographs of it.

A second task this week was to choose from the assignment bank assignments which have in sum 15 stars. Shame on me I just managed 14 stars:

• Creating Life, the six word story of my life.
• Good new from DS106, where I redesigned an American propaganda poster of World War II.
• Four Icon Movie. Here I sum up a movie with four icons I have designed for this.
• LadybugButterflyDuckFrog, an illustration of an imagined animal.
• I am like a Superhero, where I tried to animate a comic cover but finally just added an animated Gif. I may try it again and actually animate parts of the cover.

Naturally I also did some dailycreates which you can find all together on the blogpost About Fruits, Pastry and Passion.

The regular students of ds106 have to realize a radio show as a midterm exam. I am thinking about to do something similar to this. Whereas students have to form groups to design a 20 minute radio show I may create a 5 minute show on my own. The theme may be Spring and the type Radio Drama. My logo may be this,

Week 6 dailycreatesFor this week dailycreates I have decided on taking a photograph of some cooking I did, to write a little story about I am a pastry, and to capture a photograph with an opposite title.Take a picture of something you made, be it food,...

For the designblitz assignment of week 6 the suggestion was to carry around a camera during the week and to take photographs of designed examples around. I tried and succeeded on two days of this week. Though I felt somewhat limited in my skills to take photographs while carrying bags or having a cloudy day or not being able to carry around my good camera which is too heavy. I like eleven of the pictures I was able to take.


I mainly were attentive to rhythm:

Part of a poster on a column.

Stones arranged into a sidewalk.

A sculpture.

A streetcar station.

Other pictures for different design elements are:

minimalism:

Here someone imagines Europe in the future and adds symbols for presumed agrees, constitutions and peace treaties.

A sad Graffiti on a staircase.

color:

Colored Houses.

Colorful lights bhind glass and snowflakes.

typography:

Design of a Subway station.

secret messages:

Maybe this contains a message which I can not decipher because I have not enough information.

These messages you can find all over the city, who knows what they mean.

Learning about design was interesting to me, because I could add to my knowledge I have collected as a fine artist and story illustrator. Design items seem to be more neatly put together and are more often signs and symbols and letters, which may be a naïve view to design. It is just a quality I realized concerning design this week. I may be able to express this more accurately in some time.

Here I provide a Gimp  tutorial according to the visual assignment Multiply Yourself.

• Go to the File Menu and choose Open.
• Again go to the File Menu and chose Open as Layer.

 Now we will add a mask:

• Right click on the top layer and choose Add Layer Mask. (You can also find this in the Layer Menu)
• In the pop up window choose white (full opacity).
• Click the Add button.

Next we will choose the brush tool and we will make sure that the chosen color is black. You also have to set the size of the brush.
Then you reduce the opacity of the top layer, so that you can see something of the underneath picture.
(Don't forget to reset the opacity to 100% when you have finished the masking.)
Finally you will paint on the mask to make parts of the picture transparent which causes that parts of the underneath picture become visible.

• Go to the toolbox and choose the Brush Tool.
• Make sure the foreground color is Black, which is also the color of your brush.
• Set an appropriate brush size.
• In the layer window set the opacity to 70%.
• In the picture window with the brush paint over the parts where you are in the second picture, so that these parts become visible. (This will appear black on the mask.)
• (Be sure you have clicked the mask preview in the layer window, not the picture preview. Otherwise you paint black on your picture.) 

To make one picture out of the two layers you have to merge them. (You may like making further adjustments to make the two pictures look more alike in color and/or light before merging them.)

• Set the opacity back to 100%.
• Right Click the top layer and choose Merge Down.
• Save.

When I found this ds106 assignment called Animated Comic Book Covers I was at once very interested in the examples you can find there. In advance I  have to admit I am not able to create results like some of the artist there&nb...

I have choseen this for a weeklycreate of week 6's ds106 schedule which is all about design. The suggestion is to build an image of an impossible animal. A nearer description you can find here.

When I read about the week 6 assignments I thought this is a good opportunity to not just work with the computer but also try to outline on real paper with real tools. This way I have made the he assignment One Story / Four Icons an example&n...

DS106 Propaganda Posters

When I read about this assignment which was proposed in the week 6 weekly stuff to do, I was confused, because I thought just Germans used propaganda in World War II. I immediately looked up if Google provides examples of US propaganda posters and found one which was appropriate for changing it into a DS106 propaganda poster. I am indeed very pleased with the result.

Cool tool for #ds106 design projects, esp poster remakes - Use myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ to identify fonts used in images
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 19, 2013

Here you can analyse which font is used on the poster and just working with the text tool to change the meaning of the poster. Yet, the letters of the poster have a kind of texture. The nuances of red in the red letters varies. I did not know a better tool than the stamp tool to simulate this texture and make the letters fit to the rest of the poster.

How would you tell your life’s story if you could only use six words?
This is the question which was asked in the ds106 assignment "Six-Word memoir".

Yesterday I came back home right from a talk with a German official and they directly told me to rather give up hope to ever have a job in the creative professions. They want me to sell things or to work in a warehouse or maybe clean up other peoples dirt. I would die. I was just sad about this talk.
However, this was the right moment to create what is deeply true for my life.

Summary of week 5

This week was fun and I may have done more than students were expected to do, not from the amount of creations but from the amount of time I spend on any.

This is a good cue to write about 7 Gifs around the Spiderwick movie. This is motivated by the ds106 assignment bank titled Summarize a movie with Animated GIFs, which I did here.
I consider this the most beautiful thing I did the week, but I know I got a lot of credit from the makers of the movie. The pictures already existed and I just had to arrange them in my way, which gave me some new experience in the area of story telling and I enjoyed being with the beautiful images for a long time.

Also inspired by the assignment bank was dividing a photograph in several frames and arranging them in a new way. The result I named Winter Kids. This task not only made me thought about visual problems but also about what advantage it is in winter when you are a child.

I did a third assignment bank create, which was required for week 5: Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge. Here is what I have made of it.

To continue here is my post about the photoblitzing, which meant to take 14 photographs of 14 different and given content in 20 minutes.
Doing the photos was a bit of stress for me, but I liked looking at the photoblitzing photopool on flickr  and had some good experience when giving comments and getting comments myself.
On flickr I set up a set, which includes photos of mine which I like in particular.  According to this set I designed another blog post named Great Moments in Time.

Really demanding was the idea to work through a slideshow which includes advice to make better photographs and to choose some of the guidance to use it for future photographs. In my post so much to learn about photography you will find a link to the slideshow and information how this task worked out for me.

Last but not least I find some peace from very demanding weeklycreates in the dailycreates. The results I summarized in  the blog post Peace.

Mostly this week I have learned that I have to learn so much more. I still feel unsure about how to make good photographs or how to edit images or make good compositions from images. However I have become a great deal more skilled this week and I may have enough time to improve to a certain level. My ideas are faster then my learning. Maybe in future it is a good idea to do more demanding visual design together with friends. What could that be?

This about my daily creates in week 5 of the ds106 course. I chose to record five sounds from daily activities, to post a photo from a person that is not me and to tear up something and make a phot of this.Take a photo of someone other than you using y...