John – Page 19 – 106 drop in

GLITCHaCHROME DS106 Glitch-Gifs

I am not sure what week it is in the Headless 13 season of DS106!
After moaning about google plus, I’ve used it more than any other way of keeping hold of the ds106 tale. I still do not like the locked in nature of plus, but have to admit is it easy to use.

There have been lots of interesting paths developing as riff in ds106, I got interested in Mariana Funes’ glitching and watch the first wee bit of a video that Christina Hendricks posted about glitching.

There are a lot of tutorials and explanations about glitching online, but I just messed about with the easiest way, this involves opening an image with a text editor and making some random changes.

I got quickly fed-up with the length of time it took to do this and though I could make a SuperCard project to automate the process, allow me to quickly create glitches, I then though it might be interesting to create some gifs from the glitches and added that to the project.

At the same time I was paying attention to Rochelle Lockridge’s GIFAChrome Camera. Rochelle was making some lovely careful gifs and wrapping them in a ‘custom film’. I decided to borrow the frame for my horrible careless gif changing GIFAChrome to GLITCHaCHROME.

icon I added the GLITCHaCHROME to the SuperCard project which has resulted in the Simple Glitch application.
The application is pretty simple, it should run on Mac OSX 10.6.8 or later, mostly tested on 10.9.
There are no real instructions in the application but it should be obvious how it works. I consider this version 0.4 beta, but have no real plans for further development unless I get another idea.

simple glitch download If you give it a try I’d be interested in how you get on.

Update: 29.11.13 now at version 0.4.1 Beta which fixes a bug for 10.6.8 thanks Rochelle

Who Loves Ya, Cory?

So I am looking at Headless Weeks 13 & 14: ximeR and M@$#up, there is a lot of stuff to watch, read and think about. There is also Alan’s Triple Dog Dare for one is:

Remix a photo of Cory Doctorow

Which I’ve done before.

So I end up on my usual ds106 pattern, browsing through the assignment bank until I circle back to the first one (Cory). By this time I’ve forgotten some of the details, but I am busy dreaming and googling.
I start with Yul Brynner, and veer to Kojak. I’ve now forgotten all of the details and heading for a Troll Quotes. The idea in my head is a wonder, perfect photocopying, I’ve forgotten I don’t know photoshop and a searching flickr for a background.

Lower Manhattan Skyline, New York, NY, USA | Flickr – Photo Sharing! by Flickr: MD111’s Photostream
used under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

My imagined assignment is now better than perfect. Then it is all cloud filters, saturation for the brown ‘kojak feel’, a bit of a mask on Cory to try and get a drawn feel.
By bedtime I am delighted, in the morning I realise I am probably missing the target on a few levels, driving to work I decide to post anyway, maybe I could get a story out of the making?

The quote: Quote by Yul Brynner: We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone….

BrigaDS106

So at the start of this week I though I’d get back into the headless course and do some video assignments. I spent a while looking through them but this one looked like it would be fun:

Download different scene clips from one movie to create a short commercial for DS106. Clip, trim and remix them to let people know what DS106 is all about and how they can find us at ds106.us. Challenge yourself to overdub the audio to have the characters saying DS106 where it would be appropriate. Also try and add the DS106 logo onto an object in a scene. You can find an example at The DS106 Matrix

from: ds106 Assignments: Mash A Movie For DS106

Looking back at the description I see I’d completely forgot about the logo bit, I also didn’t dub the characters. Rochelle’s example is great and I started looking for some sort of SF connection, but somehow ended up in Brigadoon. Perhaps because cogdog visited Scotland last weekend.

Also because I only read the assignment once I got it into my head to make a trailer. I found the Brigadoon trailer on youtube:

Mt first idea was to find the clips used in the trailer without the text and recreate it shot by shot with new text and voice over, of course I could not find the same scenes on youtube. I did find a few clips and decided to go with the timing and titles from the trailer with different scenes behind.

I expected to do the editing in iMovie but quickly realised that its titling was not up to the zooms and swings on the original. I switched to Screenflow as I knew it could do nice transitions of text. There I found that the text could be animated nicely but not curved. So I opened up Fireworks to make transparent titles which I could animate in Screenflow.

By now I’d spent a fair bit of time on this with nothing to show so I only spent a few minutes realising that recreating the text accurately would take more time than I had. I just found a vaguely similar font and used that. I also used a brighter yellow that the original.

brig-title-04

The workflow was, copy a frame from QuickTime of the original trailer, paste into Fireworks. Add text, messing a little with the spacing. Then aligned the text to a path if I needed a curve, dropped a shadow, grouped and gave a quick blur. Hid the scheenshot layer and exported as a transparent png. I hide all the layers, added the next screenshot a did the next bit of text. All the graphics from one document for laziness.

Back in screenflow I edited the clips, animated the overlay and added a voice over. Screenflow is a pretty nice tool for this sort of thing and would be good and doing the animated typography sort of movie too.

This took a fair amount of time, if I had ben willing to spend more time it would have been less rough, the text could have been better, the voice over I just used the first take with my macs inbuilt mic as I did that bit at lunchtime in work. I had to extract audio from different bits of video and move it around, again I did a fairly quick and dirty job of this, trying to balance time and fun. THis is the final effort:

You might notice that some of the characters are aligned weirdly or rotated a bit, this was first due to accident, I could have cleaned up the path they were aligned to in Fireworks but left them in and made some more for extra klunky charm;-)

Where in the world is ds106?

Chatting to Alan Levine yesterday we had a wee idea about putting ds106 participants on the map. I suggested that it might be an idea to use Audioboo. The RSS feeds from audioboo have location data that can be used in google map mashups. I know I already had the code to put my own Boos on a map. I had forgotten that I’ve also got a page that will map boos with any tag. For example this page will show all boos tagged ds106

http://johnjohnston.info/where/ds106

I’ve recorded a boo that will show up on the map.

listen to ‘Where is ds106’ on Audioboo

I’d like other ds106 participants to do the same. There are several ways to do this.

How to

You can record a boo using the iPhone or android application. Make sure you tag it #ds106 in the description and that the phone picks up the location:

You can go to audioboo and record (needs flash) or upload an audio file there. Again make sure you tag with #ds106

You will need a free account to record boos that are limited to 3 minutes.

The ios app adds location data, I’d presume the android one would too. If you use the browser you can set the location.

audioboo-loc-580

I am wondering if this can be a mashup assignment, so easy it would only be one star.

A Transformation

So I’ve not giffed much recently. Last week I decided to join in with the ds106 offshoot, Giffi.us A Collaborative Story with He had to run for his life, this then helped with the design assignment from two posts ago.

Collabogiffing – Community – Google+

Given a bit of free lunch time time today I was musing on the idea and wanted to make a couple of illustrative gifs. A quick search on youtube for transformation struck black and white gold: The Transformation – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), what was great about this movie was the lack of a moving camera.
The_Transformation_Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde_1941
First I grabbed the transformation itself, then another couple of gifs. All very straightforward, crop to short selection in MPEG Streamclip (i an o keys are your friend), export to stills and pull into Fireworks.
In Fireworks, select all layers and distribute to frames.
run_hyde

The second two gifs I wanted to make look so I faded the figure in over the first couple of frames. To do this I copied a segment from the last frame where the figure was on the first. Pasted that over the first frame to hie the figure there. Duplicated the first frame a couple of times, making the ‘patch’ less opaque each time. Minimum work for quite I nice effect I think.

bridge