Assignment – 106 drop in

Slow Subterranean Blues

Think that I might need some credits this week as I need some digging tools from the store. So I had a look through the assignment bank and found this:
ds106 Assignments: Sound to Visual with 3 credits.

Using creations you have already completed in #ds106 – select an audio project you were happy with and build upon it to create a video. Do not change or add any audio. Challenge yourself to create the images your sound story conveys. Use the sound effects story assignment or an audio commercial from your radio work. Use found or created video and stills that tell your story. Push it a step further and show how sound may not always convey the images you think it represents (extra stars).

The challenge is to use some audio already created to make a video. I decided to up the anti/or make it easier by using images I’d already made from The Prisoner too.

I’ve been weirdly captivated by both the stretched sounds and strange images I’ve found in The Prisoner. To an fevered imagination they might hint at the dark side of the shiny sixties exterior. Unless I am miss-remembering the TV of my youth The Prisoner explored some deeper territory than, say, The Man from Uncle. Perhaps this video hints at that.

I’d already got the audio and had generated a lot of images layering and mixing stills from some episodes. I decided on using Hammer into Anvil – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia as the psychological battle seemed fitting.

Creating the ‘movie’ was simply a matter of previewing the images and choosing some (from thousands). Dragging them into iMovie along with the MP3 and doing some editing.

I am not wholly convinced about the improvements in recent versions of iMovie. I like the move at around version 7 or 8 away from the original style but think my favourite was 9.

Anyway to edit I really only did a little rearranging, sped up the slowed down sound at some points changed the images order and Ken Burns panning and inserted some transitions. I’d say the end effect is reasonably disturbing is a slow sort of way. The effect I was hoping to make.

Village Webmaker

A friend pointed me to this assignment, which has never been done before, 2 credits to spend in the shop.

For this design assignment you are tasked to create an attractive advertisement/flyer for some type of event. Be creative. Any event will do, but the point is to entice people to want to attend your event over any other.

from: ds106 Assignments: Festival or Fundraiser?

Village-Webmaker-poster

I am usually wary of design assignments, the few I’ve done are usually full of misgivings. More of that in the weekly report.

I started with the idea of doing a poster for the Village Webclub and along the way renamed it to village Webmaker, in reference to mozilla Webmaker.

I ~~ripped off~~ borrowed Andrew’s lovely badge which gave me my background colour.

I also started thinking about all the efforts to get girls to code and a bit of googling found me some public domain images on wikimedia. I guess that leads to too many things going on for good design but I like all the references and sacrificed design to ideas.

I’ve noticed a few villagers dipping into the club which is interesting and was encouraged (a lot) by Jim’s response. It might not fly this round of ds106 but I think the possibilities of some ds106 web storytelling are interesting.

Mariana had the idea for text based adventure which we could try. I can see a lot of possibilities, most beyond my skills to implement. Here are a couple:

A branching story, someone starts a scene, others that add choices and the results of those choices.
An image map of the village map. Someone puts up the map, folk make a page about a bit of the Village, and the mapmaker adds links to the map. Rochelle reminded me of imagemaps recently. That would be easy.

I’ve also added a page to my club site showing how to add an image to a club page with the terminal.

I’ve also got another assignment to run off quickly.

Resigned: Scene Poster

Capture/Screenshot a scene from an episode of a TV show or a movie and try to make a poster for that episode or movie. Try to make it cool! Be creative! Making it suspense can be a good one!

from: ds106 Assignments: Scene Poster

Methods:

Export frames from episode with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i 'Hammer into Anvil.m4v' -r 1 -f image2 HammerintoAnvil/HammerintoAnvil-%4d.jpg

Nearly 3000 images

Combining images 10 at a time using subtract:

ls *.jpg | xargs -n 10 sh -c 'convert "$0" "$@" -evaluate-sequence subtract sub/"$0" '

Results in 291 images.

Opened one in FireWorks, takes frames of prisoners photo being typed over, from these frames:

Added a layer using the resigned card. Deleted the background from that layer leaving the text.

Text Later, interpolated, with a stroke filter.

Added the second last frame again to emphasise the face a little.

Added text picking the colour from elsewhere on the image.

Export to jpg.

I am quite interesting in the effect of combining and layering images automatically. Some hint at psychological layers that are darker than the colours used in the series.

Takes quite a lot of HD space up, but I think there are few more stories to be extracted. Especially later in this episode where number 2 and 6 are trying to get inside each other’s heads.

Gifs begin where words leave off

A quick gif with audio. A warm up watching Hammer into Anvil. An interesting episode, no escape attempts but a moral crusade by Number 6 and a battle of minds with Number 2.

More fist fights and physical action than most of the episodes so far, kosho looks like fun.

kosho