Month: September 2013 (page 2 of 3)
I am catching up with another Daily Create, let’s say this one fits the one where we were asked to create a trailer for this run of Ds106, although I am not sure it sells it that well?
I put this together an evening a few days ago when I was unable to type but wanted to do something for Ds106. I had never played with iMovie but I wanted to start learning it, I knew it had templates for trailers and thought I could use one of those. But that was not the start of this artefact.
I was watching the IT Crowd on TV a british comedy the humour of which may not translate that well to other cultures. It is like a dark version of The Bing Bang Theory – the geeks in it are losers with not much to commend them, not even cleverness. I like it and find it very funny.
I remembered in the back of my mind an episode where they made fun of Facebook. They created this site called FriendFace and became obsessed with it. I remembered the scene I used for this trailer. It was so funny. I wondered if I could find it on YouTube. I found it. Downloaded it with Firefox.
iMovie awaited. It was overwhelming opening it up, felt like I was in a proper editing studio. Here I go #makingvideoswithoutaclue again.
I do feel like a fraud calling this a creation, it was so easy to do.
Hmmmm….note to self: reflect on why creation has to be hard to be good. Clearly unless blood, sweat and tears has gone into it, said creation does not fit my try harder drivers!
I wanted to use the clip, I wanted to say something about the addictive nature of DS106 in my life and I wanted to have a bit of fun with no pressure. It took me 10 minutes to make after the preparations above.
People have been so kind about it, and liked it. I like it. It makes me laugh each time I watch it. Yet, I have to say there is nothing original in it and very little technical skill was required to make it.
I selected one of the trailer templates in iMovie. I played around with it to work out what to click where – I got utterly confused. Played the trailer template empty a few times to get a sense of the shape it offered. It looked so professional even empty! All I did was get the clip from the series – the character Jen on FriendFace – and put it in the ready-made trailer. I filled in the specifics: titles, credits,etcetera and voila it was done. The story was told through the titles. Upload to Youtube – Bob’s your uncle.
As I write this I realise another pattern. This trailer did not start life as a trailer. No. I wanted to (wait for it…) make an animated Gif. Yes, I am really trying to learn how to do them – and failing miserably so far. I tried Gimp and various other means but I could not find a way (or a tool) that would let me select specific frames whilst letting me actually see all the frames in the clip. Forgive me but my eyesight is no match for those tiny little images of all the frames in a clip that Gimp offers. I could not choose specific frames even with some serious squinting. So I gave up and thought about the trailer idea. The pattern seems to be that if I am willing to be flexible in how a make the idea come to life then I can make something easily. If I get stubborn, I end up just swearing at Gimp.
People have asked me to talk about the ‘how’ so that they can make trailers in iMovie. It really is a simple as this: Get the clip you want to use, download it, open iMovie, select a template, fill in the specifics, mess around with the scenes and put them in the template with an order that makes sense for the story you are telling. Done. I did no fancy editing at all, I am ashamed to admit. Sometimes fun is just easy.
I have just had another fabulous afternoon playing with sound for another Ds106 assignment.
Such a surprise that I would even enjoy it. This time I chose to practice 3 things I have learnt about story listening to Ira Glass and also Piers Ibbotsson who I work with:
- your story should pose a question
- use the anecdote – this happened, then that happened
- don’t try to be clever, serve the story
What has fascinated me this afternoon has been the process of selecting sounds. I love the sound of footsteps running through the forest. This was my starting point. I created my Freesound.org account and went searching. I then got the ‘story’ as an image ( I am much more of a visual thinker than an auditory one – want to know what you are? here is a fun quiz ). I have to concentrate hard to listen to the image!
He runs desperately through the forest, his shoes getting caught in the undergrowth. He keeps running, he cannot go any faster. It is pitch dark. A dog howls in the distance. He tells himself he will not make it. He will be too late. A loud scream can be heard in the distance. He speeds up. Stops. The gate opens. She is safe.
What was hilarious for me was getting to the sounds that would represent the elements of the story. What sound means ‘happy ever after’? No, I am not kidding. I wanted the story to end well – So a kiss? A sigh? How long should the kiss be? Kiss and sigh? Just the kiss? What am I hearing as I see my story in my mind’s eye? Is the pitch of this sound right?
What are the criteria I am assessing against as I choose – length, pitch, fading in and out, and why oh why did I swap the sigh for the gate opening?
And all this gets made concrete by having to make choices in Garageband as to what to do with the different sounds you are bringing into the project. Of course, I wanted more than 5 once I got the hang of it. May be some background music? Don’t try to be clever, just tell the story and get out of the way. Did it work?
As If we did not have enough assignments, I did the same one twice.
But this did not start as an audio assignment. It started in my head as an animated gif. And that was what I planned to work on today.
Last night I was reading ‘is google making us stupid?’ again. it starts,
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
It has been so long since I have seen that film that I had forgotten about it. The article talks about how the way we are using Google is a little like Hal dying – somebody is tinkering with our cognitive reasoning and with how we ‘do’ thinking.
As I read the article and reflected on its relevance to my own cognitive strategies and how they have changed as a result of not having to hold information in my head, it occurred to me that the scene from the film could make a great animated gif.
I could show how slowly we are degrading our circuits – like what happens to Hal as he ‘dies’ – and use it as an example of the potential of our decline into mere pancake people:
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” […]we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I went searching, of course, and found this segment of the film for my next #thoughtgif.
I looked for the gif shot. I looked again. I realised that what made the clip powerful was the sound and not so much the video. Then I had an aha! moment. What if I did a second radio bumper, it is audio week after all, with Hal’s song? I followed the same process as in my previous post and what you hear above is the result of me playing with Garageband a second time. My first audio gif is how I see it.
What was interesting in this assignment is that I did several trials of the radio bumper – I was not happy with the results and so kept trying new ways. I had feedback from Alan Levine that my original radio bumper was a tad long so I wanted to cut this to make it shorter. I was reminded of something that Alan said about animated gifs
But when you go through a mindful process – identifying a subtle piece of the world to isolate, or a moment/character in a film, it gets interesting. But for a film clip, it is this great reductionist process to extract a few seconds form a larger work, focus it down to a short video clip, then import into Photoshop/GIMP, and reduce it even more to a number of frames, and reduce it even ore to emphasize the moment, or reduce the file size..And when you get to the point of being able to isolate movement to just a small portion of a frame you have arrived to an artful process.
The process of isolating smaller and smaller elements to produce an artefact that fits certain aesthetic criteria does require one to engage the tortoise mind or cognitive unconscious. i was fascinated that this could happen through the audio channel and that it was as absorbing as working on a video clip. I wondered, what aesthetic criteria I was applying as I have not got a clue what makes good or bad sound. Yet, beyond length, I kept thinking about the potential use for the artefact ( a late night programme on the affairs of the mind) and kept rejecting successive versions. Why? What did I change? Well here is where I lose track. I got lost in Garageband and ended up with a version I was happy to share. I changed many aspects of the sound, moved tracks around, used different effects. I even tried looping the audio – as animated gifs loop forever – but that seemed overkill.
I end my DS106 day with a number of insights about my process. I am not thinking about my output as art, in the way Alan and others in DS106 do. I like to do the same thing more than once to get to understand the tool and the process. I need the tension of opposites to create anything and it is hard to create this in DS106 as there is not tension between what I want to do and what I have to do. So, this morning I got ‘distracted’ with kinetic typography, wanted to go off and do more of that, and then made myself come back to what I ‘had’ to do. Of course, this is just mind games as in this case there is not even the semblance of me ‘having’ to do anything. It seems I need the sense of struggle to produce. No doubt I will continue to explore this in the next few weeks. Some questions I am asking:
- If not art, then what?
- Why not art?
- What does repetition give me?
- Could I find more skilful ways to engage creative psychological tension?
The working rule for this week’s posts:
We like to see writing with your media, a story about the story, or the story behind the story.
Tah!Dah! my first ever radio bumper.
I did not even know what that was until this morning. Go figure. I listened to a few examples from past participants and understood what we being asked of us. Not my thing, I told myself. I will have to think about how to do it in a way that makes sense to me. I wondered about the bumper or catch phrase Dr Frasier Crane used to sign off his programme on KACL Radio. It occurred to me that as the DS106 headless shrink I could bring something other than music and special effects to DS106 radio – I know nothing about either. So I did a little search in the Google and found a video clip that would work. Video. John Johnston may say that audio is not something less than video, but in this case it was. How do I take out just the audio from this video? There must be an app for that. There is.
So, I had the audio from the video and still without a clue. some kind of audio editor must be the next step. Something like Audio Gimp. Ahh! I think that Garageband does that on the Mac. Never opened it. May be now is the time. I went back to the Google to get some tutorials and there are many. Then had the idea for the tag line, synthesising an idea: ‘Talky and the Shrink tackle the big questions’ which is the Radio show I would like to make on DS106 Headless if Talky Tina will join me. After hearing her lovely voice I think we would rock the airwaves. I recorded the audio on Quicktime. Dragged it to Garageband. And now what? Well I had to learn to split a file, fade out, copy paste bits of a sound file. My favourite was discovering that I could get my voice to echo. I considered doing the whole thing myself, Frasier’s scripts are available online. But that would have been too much audio in one day.
This course is really stretching me. I looked at the plan for the week and I have to say I wanted to go back to last week and do more from there. As I said earlier, in spite of encouragement from Cogdog and John Johnston audio is not my thing. Writing is.
By jickity, DS106 is challenging my preconceptions. When you get the lovely feedback I have had about this voice of mine I do not like recorded, you had better pay attention and at least have a go.
So now, I am just waiting for Talky to call and tell me she is in! We have our radio bumper ready, all we need is for me to get a clue about how to do a radio programme…but may be she already knows how to do that.
How did I miss in the flow? Cathleen Nardi shared it this week and I only just found it reading my Paper.li daily. All I can say is thank you, Cathleen and wow or blimey as we say here in the UK! This will keep me motivated each time my ambitions do not line up with my output which is often. Enjoy.
My first Audioblog for DS106. Getting ready for Audio week, I do my first assignment for week 3:
“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! Here it is, random thoughts and reflections on the question.”
I forgot to include this on my video – but wanted to add it here as I think it is such a simple and yet beautiful example of what appeals to me about kinetic typography.
At the 15 minute point I clicked on the wrong screen. Here is the link, I am talking about but not showing at that point.
And here are the few words I wrote to express what story means to me:
What is digital storytelling?
The dog running after that pheasant
Vivirla para contarla – a life lived to be told
A doll emerging from imagination and becoming our mascot
Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn
And yet I do
The feeling when somebody says ‘let me tell you a story’
Snuggling up to hear the story
Afraid to tell them in case the magic breaks
Afraid to be seen, afraid to connect
Using the fear to be present with another
So what is story?
Emotional connection
A gift of imagination
A moment caught and shared
And when digitally imprinted a moment that could exist forever
But if not co-created in the moment, is it a story?
Without a shared context, is it a story?
May be all it needs are humans willing to show up and take the risk to live life and tell about it…
#GIFFight #ds106 #headless13 #mannequin #headless #roundalmost20 #riff-a-GIF #3
This is so clever. I almost don’t want to know how it was done, so as not to destroy the magic.
…the bags of gold, that is.
I am suffering from RSI on my left hand after spending far too much time on the computer with DS106 creating. My body is saying I need to manage my excitement and spend the bags of gold I am getting wisely.
For this weekly summary post I decided to select from all the notes I made this week – see tag cloud above (you need Silverlight to view) – and write this summary post to help me reflect on the biggest bag of gold I found and how it relates to my teaching:
As I started to work through this week’s materials, I set out to read Gardner Campbell’s article. I thought I would just scan it as I have read it many times before. But then I had the idea to use Tapestry for a second time this week to get some of those nuggets of gold we were told to keep for future weeks of learning,
Keep track of a key sentence or sequence in the video that generates interest or questions for you, […] Gardner calls these “nuggets” and will be launch points for our discussions.
So I started a Tapestry story instead of highlighting text. This seems important in the light of the metacognitive strategies we develop as a result of the tools we have available to us. The ways we start to re-imagine learning. I had used Tapestry before to respond to a question by Talky Tina and had moving feedback from her about it. I always like to use a tool a few times to get a sense for what is capable of. I added the beautiful summary by Julia Forsythe as my opening screen and left a comment on Flickr for her – as I thought this was a beautiful artefact. I kept on reading. I highlighted and copied onto Tapestry key nuggets – not before going into Gimp and stealing the little bag of gold from Julia’s drawing for use in the Tapestry!
.
Seeing the quotes on Tapestry and organising them made me think about the content of the article differently. I saw a theme I had not seen before – the idea that in the construction of a cyberinfrastructure we are composing a life in the sense Mary Catherine Bateson means it – in a life of discontinuity we need to compose a life rather than plan it. The nature of the web is such that it affords purposeful composing. I looked for the book and found out that she has now written a book called ‘Composing a further life’ and though it is a book about life after retirement, I thought it applied equally well to the ‘further’ life we begin to live online as we decide to put down a few virtual identity markers.
I added this nugget to the Tapestry. My Tapestry was looking decidedly linear and non-arty. I had the idea to select images on the basis of what Gardner said on the video we were also asked to watch. I got Flickr advanced search for CC images and Savvy Gimp free images finder ready and started the video. I completed the Tapestry that way.
Images were all creative commons, although I should have got attribution written down under each – I was simply too tired to do so. In that sense creating openly is more time consuming that just making notes privately. Here is a link to view fullscreen.
I developed a new way of ‘studying’ using the tools of the open web. I guess this is what Gardner means when he says the old sometimes gets in the way of the new – if I had used my usual mental models I would simply have scanned the article and left it at that. As I had the frame of making art for DS106 and I was on the open web, other ways of studying presented themselves.
I can already see how my own teaching will be changed by DS106.
I will want to include some of these ways of learning as options for my students. These are the bags of gold….but wait, is it safe? Can we do the same thing behind the firewall of my organisation? Here comes the illusion that the digital facelift is the same thing as composing a digital life. It is not. Wish me luck trying to persuade the powers that be in my world to spend the gold. I am encouraged by some digitally subversive action from other DS106 participants:
@cogdog @mdvfunes DS in #DS106 => Digital Subversive
— Rochelle Lockridge (@Rockylou22)
This week will be work in progress for several weeks. There are so many nuggets. I will pace myself and right now I am trying VideoNot.es, having tested Vialogues along the way, I prefer it because I can just keep notes on my Google drive. Vialogues is more like a visual Voicethread and more a sharing tool than a note-taking tool. I will work with the video for a while and keep reflecting on the ways in which taking steps to build a cyberinfrastructure challenges the way we teach in non-digitally aware institutions. The faculty may be up for being open to the world, they may consider opening up to each other with ready processed material, but how could they ever be persuaded to open up to themselves and be willing to critically reflect on habits of mind to increase self-awareness? And share these vulnerabilities with their students?