Month: July 2012

flickring clouds

Rolling the remix dice I get: haiku it up [remixed]: Media Bender — Remix Machine

Original assignment: haiku it up For the writing assignment, take a random Dailyshoot photograph and create a haiku using that image Remix Card: “Media Bender”: Change up the media for the original assignment- take a video assignment into audio or design.

So I grabbed some images from here: Take a picture of a cloud and tell us what it looks like to you using A flickr CC search toy to get the ones with suitable licenses. I skipped the cloud pictures that had annotations or drawing and and was left with six strong pictures. I wrote a haiku to go with them, dragged the images into iMovie and added a voice recording and a by Kevin MacLeod.
Nothing that any primary 5 or 6 could not do. I am not terribly please with the audio, using a usb headset mic, recorded so many times my voice loses all meaning. Better mics not avaliable and I wanted to get these 2 stars down quickly and get back on the ds106 horse.

Flickr Photos by
Dare to dream7: Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License
@DrGarcia: Attribution-NonCommercial License
cogdogblog: Attribution License
Michael Branson Smith: Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License
Rowan Peter: Attribution-Share Alike License
Music: Kevin MacLeod

Back after AWOL

I’ve completely ducked out of DS106 for the last two weeks. Work, family and a week long conference meant I’ve not don anything for week 7, 8 or Week Nine: Remixing it Up — Camp Magic MacGuffin and didn’t do anything for the wonderful: Seven Day Daily Create Challenge.

I did see a tweet from Mike Berta inviting me to Radio campfire with stories and songs which I could not follow up. For the sounds of it: Digital Raconteur: Radio Campfire Show it was great. As I’ve been digging into Internet Radio at Radio Edutalk I would have loved to join in.

So I am going to try a few daily creates this week, I started yesterday:
Night fades into day
Two photos taken out my window with iPhone, layered and with a fade applied with photoshop touch on an ipad.

and I’ve made a quick one on the Remix Machine Tell A Tale On A Tapestry [remixed]: DS106-ersizing, whicxh turns out to be quite easy:

The Bildwirkerey von Bayeux looks useful: Create your own stories with the historic tale construction kit.


Hopefully heading for a slightly more creative week.

Impending Zombie Apocalypse

So DS106 weekly assignment for last week was: a group radio show which sounded interesting. I joined my Camp bunkhouse (Wäscälly Wäbbits (sic)) buddies: Mike Berta, Chanda Cowger, Ben Harwood, Kevin Murphy and Ciara Norquist, the task was:

In each group, each person is “responsible” for 5-7 excellent minutes of the radio show. If they want to work in pairs, the minutes add up (2 people = 10-14 minutes, etc.) Ideally, the final shows should then be between 25 and 50 minutes.

Mike Berta came up with the title of our show: Impending Zombie Apocalypse ala War of the Worlds, which I must say worried me a bit. A lot of DS106ers seem to be steeped in US movie culture and I am not. I am also not much of a horror fan.

I decided I would think of a few angles I could take and opened a google doc where I wrote:

I’d like to do a segment on ‘other zombies’ eg not movie or fiction including some of the following:

Thinking I could avoid the imaginative.

Mike Berta suggested: How about segments where we are reporting from our location what is happening.

This went down well with the group. We collected a bunch of links to audio, etc on the google doc and went our separate ways with the odd tweet, mail and update to the doc keeping us in sync.

I started working on a script of sorts, I focused on the music of Fela, and kept references to zombies vague, hoping that they could be interpreted metaphorically as well as literally. I tried to get in some links to ds106 but kept them vague too. This is what I came up with. Recorded in a straightforward way in GarageBand.

I got my daughter Christine to help with the recording, she was a great help as shew has a good ear for what will work and how to use voice. Recording a fictional piece (even writing one) was a bit of a stretch, I’ve recorded plenty of podcast but always non-fiction and without much attempt to build atmosphere.

It was then up to Mike Berta to put this together is some way. I had quite a busy week so didn’t pay a lot of attention, but Mike got an edit finished and it was played on DS106. As it was played at 3am here I didn’t hear it. I did download the mp3 file Zombie Free Radio DS106

I was impressed by how well all of my bunkmates contributions came out and even more impressed by how Mike had managed to weave them together into a coherent and compelling whole.

Later I listen to the whole Tuesday show which also had the Bunkhouse 2 contribution. This was surrounded by Alan Levine’s discussion, atmospheric build up and live chat with conversations with Jennifer Orr from Bunkhouse 4 and our own Mike Berta. Fascinating to see how very loose directions, make a radio show, between spatially and culturally diverse folk can come together.

Tech Tips

I was verery interested in how Alan wove together audio from iTunes, his browser, and live skype. We have done similar things over at Radio EDUtalk, but he added a killer feature, the skype folk could here iTunes in the same way as the radio broadcast. I tweeted out to cogdog and got pointed to this amazing post My Newest Rube Goldberg ds106 Broadcast Machine: Ladiocast + Nicecast – CogDogBlog, looking forward to implementing this for next sessions Radio Edutalk

A great assignment that I had more fun than I expected and has me thinking about lots of things.

Not Enough Recursion

I was having a look at The Recursive Camera — MISSION: DS106

You’ll need a camera. And you’ll need another frame. Hold the frame in one hand (don’t let you hand cover the side facing you), and take a picture with it in the center of the image. Then step backwards and take another photo just like it. Repeat until you are tired of making art. Nest the images in Prezi inside the frame of the next picture. Now make a zoom path. Record it with video capture software. Add some video editing (you’ll have to use multiple stacks(only so much zoom in Prezi atm) and splice the ends of them together to make it seem contiguous), and you have a trippy.

I though I’d give this a short test before I tried to make a whole movie.
I got it a bit wrong, I didn’t realise that the camera should show the last taken photo. I decided to see what I could do.

  1. Open fireworks and opened the most zoomed photo.
  2. Added the next photo as a layer.
  3. Cut out the screen
  4. Resized the first layer to fit into the cutout
  5. grouped the two layers
  6. Brought in the next image and repeated the process

I then tried to take the photo into imovie, and use the ken burns effect to zoom in or out. This did not work as I could not zoom in enough.
So I opened up my old copy of Flash 5 and put the image on the time line, I made this frame a keyframe and added another keyframe at fame 240 on the timeline. I scaled te start and end to get a zoo,
This seemed to work ok, so I though to try exporting to a quicktime movie, another fail. I ended up exporting to an image sequence, 241 images. This I opened in QuickTime and saved to a 1.1 mb m4v:

So although I’ve not managed VideoAssignments546 yet (so have not tagged this post) I’ve had a bit of fun, dusted off Flash for the first time in years, and have perhaps a better idea of how to go about this assignment. I’ve also added the sublimevideo plugin this blog.