May 2013 – 106 drop in

QuickTime for a Smoke

This is not a gif assignment.

qt_tools is a set of commandline tools for Mac that manipulate quicktime movies. One of the tools is qt_proofsheet:

QT_PROOFSHEET will take a QuickTime movie and render it out as individual frames in a grid. By default, it takes about 100 frames of your movie and fits it onto an 8.5 x 11 document, with timecode imprints.

from: qt_tools
By using different parameters you can make a strip of stills from a quicktime movie the one I am using here is 576 x 8208 pixels.
This is then animated with css. The qt-proofsheet adds the time stamp, you can minimise them but I found them useful is creating the animation.

For those interested, probably only a few, here is the code

The stills were grabbed from ‘Perchance to Dream’ an episode of the twilight zone.

I am afraid I am a bit sort of time so this post is a bit lacking in information, but this technique is an interesting take on the animated gif. The quality is fairly good and the file is 654kb.

Here is a more standard use of proofsheet:

Right-Click and open in new window to see at full size, this could be useful for analysing film.

Jim Says, Listen to the LoDown

Listened to a couple of the excellent ds106LoDown podcast on the scottlo radio blog this afternoon. I was delighted that a radio bumper of mine was plated as an example on ds106zone LoDown 009 apart from Scott’s usual wonderful voice and engaging content he is embedding some great audio information in the lodown podcasts.

So when I had 10 minutes waiting in my car I decided to knock up another bumper, this time playing with Scott’s reluctance to be a required part of the DS106zone.

jim-says

I used GarageBand on my phone, just messing with the sampler and then putting a hopefully suitable loop behind it.

Of course it would be better if I had a sense of rhythm;-)

gb1

DS106Zone Week 1

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

I am slightly late with this weekly review and it will be short on thinking. I had got a couple of posts under my belt before the official start date so was feeling fairly smug. I am also listed as a true friend of Talky Tina which brings a certain amount of responsibility, I don’t want to let her down.

I managed the required 4 daily creates, my first is probably my best.

The idea is that this is a computers view of me. I was riffing on a remix from the Mozilla Teach the Web Mooc, Here’s iterating at you, Chad which was working of an idea I saw on flickr sometime and had used in a blog post or two. Somewhat bladerunner I think.
I iterated this a bit more int oa gif for my first assignment Trapped in the Zone which is probably a better idea that it looks.

The only other post I managed was Roots for Riffing which combined a remix and a run at a new assignment.

This is my favourite bit of ds106 ~~stealing~~ borrowing from other participants.

It was Thursday before I watched Jim’s ds106zone: Introduction and Syllabus Review which is just a wonderful introduction into organising online learning, I’ve been rabbiting on about this model during discussions of the next phase of Scotland’s educational intranet, glow so passing this video on like mad.

I’ve also manged to listen to a few of scottlo radio blog ds106 LoDown podcasts which are pretty wonderful. I listen to Scott regularly and love his work. His voice is great and he manages to record where the background sound, kids playing football, cooking or arabic music playing on the radio adds to the rich mix. Sometimes Scott is just facinating while ruminating about what he is doing. Week three, the audio one, looks like being a great bit of ds106 this session. I’ll be away from home without a connection so I’ll miss that bit.

I’ve watched the odd episode of the Twilight Zone, A Nice Place To Visit did not really excite me, I ripped a couple of gifs from this, but don’t think they were interesting enough to post. Last night I flicked through Perchance to Dream part 1 which looks more interesting, again grabbed a couple of obvious gifs:
darkness

Was an easy one. The next with the eyes is a bit rough round the edges but I could not get it a smooth as I wanted despite quite a few edits, this one is at least 75KB small:
mirrorblack

Finally a nice spiral, the barrel could be fixed with a bit more time. I’ve not watched the episode through yet, but downloaded it in two parts from youtube and look forward to it.

As usual I used fireworks to edit the gifs after ripping them from the movie file with my own wee dingus.

I promised myself I’d try to do a good bit more commenting but I not done too well. Started to save the posts I commented on on pinboard but I missed a few. Must try harder!

Off on holiday for a week on Saturday so I don’t suppose I’ll get much done, hopefully return to the fray week 4. If I get a connection I’ll keep up tdc at least, but I’ll not be carrying a computer.

Finally although I’ve not comment much the flow is fast moving and exciting.

Roots for Riffing

timelapse_porthole DS106 seems to have got off to a roaring start, perhaps it is the compressed 5 week course but it is impossible to keep up with the flow. The 24 folk at UMW have turned out 127 posts at time of writing!

This is wonderful, not only for just enjoying the flow of ideas but for the invitation to Rif.

Last night I spent a happy hour, thanks to Brian Bennett’s invitation to rif his trip gif to no great result. (I may return, the one on the left took about 2 minutes this morning, but there are a lot better things to do with the material).

Just before bedtime I then read Mr Conway’s Twilight Zone Title Poems where he kick off a new assignment to make a poem out of Twilight Zone episode titles

I commented a quick verse:

A Most Unusual Camera,
Mirror Image, Miniature.
The Whole Truth: Mute,
Spur Of The Moment:Static,
The Silence: Dust.

Which could, with some generosity, be seen as being about the daily create…

Then I fired off another couple:

Night Call
I Am The Night,
Come Wander With Me.
Valley Of The Shadow,
The Bewitchin' Pool,
Sounds And Silences:
The Fear.

Night Call
Spur Of The Moment,
Come Wander With Me:
You Drive.

The second is almost a haiku. THis got me wondering about feeding the words in the titles into some sort of Haiku generator of which there are a few, some with recipes. Also wondering about some sort of auto animated titles from the zone…

Mr Conway kindly provides a doc of all the lines, I’ll pay that forward with a text file: the twilight zone titles.