John – Page 22 – 106 drop in

What’s the story?

What Comes to Mind for You?

What do you associate with the word storytelling? Before you do anything this week, use this as an opportunity to put down in words what your current concept is. There is no right or wrong answer here- this is to set up your current concept of what story means.

Do not go look anything up online — We are looking for your ideas.

from: Headless ds106 Week 3: What Mean Ye Digital Storytelling?

I found it quite hard to think about what I think about this, until I saw a great image from Mariana Funes.

That got me making some notes and knocking up the image above:

Storytelling: compelling and weighted communication.

Communication of sensory data, feelings/emotions and thoughts.Transported & impeded by words, sounds, pictures.

Augmented/refined/amplified/impeded clarified and confused, confused and clarified by language, accent, emphasis, voice, technique.

Digital adds layers to this rich cake, layers that can help or hinder.

I though about an image of my own and noted:

Image idea layers, zeros & ones; code; stage instructions; adjective & adverbs; core words
Lighter — darker
Layers skewed into 3d mixed with images
Once upon a time…
Fire, smoke, mist and mirrors
Sailing ship
Spaceman face mask with reflection

I didn’t get all the elements into the image, stopping before it got to confusing (hopefully).

A Diverting Week Two

The scheduleHeadless ds106 Week 2: Getting Through Bootcamp / Personal Cyber Infrastructure steps things up a wee bit.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences and watched the video a couple of times (luckly my car was in the garage for an MOT and I was on the train on Thursday). I had planned, in notes and my head a fairly detailed response. As I started to write it up I searched this blog to see my previous response, it turned out I’d not really had any new ideas since DS106 Assignment 2 A personal digital space. I would recommend anyone interested in educational technology to watch this video. It is a wonderful talk filled with rhythm and humour.

I was thinking I’d manages a few daily creates this week, but looking back not as many as I thought:
I did manage a Keychain video. Cris Crissman left a nice comment about liking the line: “I don’t keep my stories locked up in my keychain.” which is what I started with when thinking the video out. Could have been better if I’d tried more than one shot.

Here are my other tdcs on flickr:

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

My other daily creates ended up diverting me a little. I had commented on Stefanie’s wonderful Animated Skull Chain which provided the first major diversion, blender.org – Home of the Blender 3D I lost a good few hours on that this week, luckily the first tutorial (145 pages of pdf!) gave me the submarine daily create this week, and eventually I finished the project:

I lost most of Saturday morning on tutorial 2, getting stuck quite near the beginning. I think I’ll play with blender a bit more but might wait until I’ve a bit more time.

I also left the tracks with headless ds106 portrait ending up with a gif and now a tutorial on how I did it:

One thing I’ve been aware of this week is how time poor I seem to be. I am making sure any daily creates I do take no longer than 10 or 15 minutes, I would have liked to do Create an exciting movie trailer for your ds106 web site. Use The Voice. but didn’t even have time to think of a good idea.

My final activity was the animated gif I posted earlier today. I might as well add a few gifs I made along the way.

replicant-eye

A beautiful face

Part of week 2 in the headless ds106 is to Say It Like the Peanut Butter.

Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.

I’ve done a few of these and made a wee tutorial last week for doing it with Fireworks. At first I had another dig through blade runner and La Belle et la Bête, but wasn’t delighted with the results.
Then last night I went to the movies to see The Great Beauty, which was a beautiful movie in all sorts of ways. I was a fan of Toni Servillo from The Consequences of Love and Il Divo and this increased my admiration. So here is his beautiful face, ripped from the trailer on youtube.
I duplicated the very short segment and reversed it to hide the seems. The gif started out a over 2mb and I crushed it as much as I could, eventually resizing down to 360 pixels. I am going to scale it up in the html here.

beautifulface-360