We started with an old beer commercial found by Karen Young. I decided to turn it into a DS106 themed commercial and wrote the script. Jim Groom kindly recorded his lines and emailed them to me. So did Karen with added burning dinner sound effect. The Headless Inkspots provided the music. I edited it all together, adapted the poster and bingo! We premiered the commercial as a trailer to ‘Noir on the Couch: An interview on the Femme Fatale in Film Noir with Prof. Young’ on the DS106 Good Spell tonight. This segment is part of a whole show ‘The Fabulous Femme Fatale’to be premiered soon on DS106radio and sponsored by Rockylou Radio. Date to be announced.
I created a script based on something I heard on Double Indemnity and made a video commercial. I was not happy with the voices as I did them myself and then changed them in Garageband. As we were working on a collaborative radio show for Noir106, I decided to turn it into a radio commercial and asked for help from the community.
This is the kind of thing that makes the open web so special. I asked dogtrax for help and he did the most awesome voiceover. I asked Karen Young (@karenatsharon) for help and she did the greatest femme fatale voice ever. With such great voices and script, I had to find some awesome music and who better than The Headless Inkspots to provide original noir inspired music? DS106 is pretty lucky to have them as part of our community.
In sum? I think this is the best commercial ever, and it shows how a simple idea can turn into something special as different people bring their gifts to it. Thank you all, and roll on the Fabulous Femmes Fatales Show on Rockylou Radio this March with the irrepressible Ms Talky Tina in a starring role as Daphne de Beauvoir.
We have been watching noir films and forgive this quirky mind but it got distracted with these matches all the flawed heroes in the films have. What were they? I had never seen them. No box. Just the match and it lights up. I asked on Twitter but nobody cared about noir matches ( I wonder why…) I started to think about a commercial for these matches. First I needed to do some research. (Have I lost all my friends, yet?)
So they are called friction matches, but the famous brand is Strike Anywhere Matches. And yes, there are other eccentrics out and there is a web site with the history of matches.
Then there was the matter of the script. I remembered one line from Double Indemnity that started my current obsession ‘They always explode in my pockets’. I looked at various scripts and then decided to adapt the Double Indemnity dialogue:
I bit off the end of my cigar and put the cigar into my mouth. started tapping my pockets for a match, as usual I can’t find one. I hear some smart alec in the distance: They give you matches when they sell you cigars, you know. All you have to do is ask for them. Heck, I know I say. I don’t like them. They always explode in my pockets. In truth I just don’t know how to light them.
Strike anywhere matches. Extra Thick for longer burn time ….but you need to know how to light them.
And yes, somebody has uploaded to You Tube instructions for how to light Strike Anywhere Matches. This is what I like most on the web, I can always find someone who seems more eccentric than I am! So, we download that via Clip Converter. Then pop it into MPEG Streamclip to remove the audio and trim it.
New iMovie is pretty cool. But before that, GarageBand to the rescue to change my voice and record the script. It does female to male, deep and soulful, but there was no femme fatale…
Then, audio and video into iMovie, via an image of the matches. And yes, I think I need to get a life. I had such fun though. I plan to record this for our Radio show as a radio commercial but I am going to ask for help with the voices – Dogtrax does a mean noir hero voice, I need to get my femme fatale though. Any nominations? She just needs to record the last two lines.
Learnt about matches, about how you can find any script movie online, learnt a few more tricks in iMovie. Getting the style right is interesting: black and white not enough, you need high contrast. The transitions matter, I remembered seeing the circle open/close transition in some noir films. Used that. And others details I will bore you no further with.
…and I still laugh when I watch it. Never underestimate the value of a daily smile!
I have not written one of my long reflective posts for a while. I have enjoyed just making stuff without words. Still, the time has come.
I am not sure how long ago I was entrusted with making sure there was a Daily Create prompt for us all every day. I can say it has been the best job I ever had. I would do it for free. Wait. I am doing it for free! Except that not all that counts can be counted. The joy and creativity I get back from driving the DS106 daily create bus, I cannot measure. If what I do supports the DS106 community and is of use to some people, it is a real privilege to be in the driving seat.
This reflection was prompted by the lovely tweet from Jim Groom posted at the start of this post. I did have a big smile on my face when I read it. I have not said very much about the process or about how I see what I am doing because I am afraid that if I talk about it the magic will go; kind of like when we have a gift we do not understand but treasure. We may fear losing it by bringing conscious attention to it.
In this post I want to face the fear and just talk about what the experience has been like. The joy of seeing what people produce as a result of a prompt, the stream of drafts I find when I go to edit the site as people keep submitting ideas, seeing the web in a whole new way as a ground to harvest potential ideas for daily create prompts, trying things out myself to ensure what I am suggesting is doable and the one downside: I no longer get the joy of the surprise of the daily prompt. It is a little like I get to see into the future so when it comes up, I have seen it and I might be working on the next month’s set of prompts.
But it is a small price to pay for such a precious creativity source. The rest of this post explores the process as I see it and why I find it so precious.
Who?
I notice that one of my guiding principles has to do with inclusion. I always check a submission for content but also for who submitted it. I want to make sure if somebody is new or rarely submits an idea, that idea gets used somehow.
I am also always on the look out for people’s ideas in the DS106 community (and sometimes outside) that might make a good prompt. I ask for permission to use and then try to let them know when it will be published so that they can see what art is made from the prompt.
There are different audiences to consider too, the University of Mary Washington students are always a joy to interact with. The open participants come and go, some (like me) never go! Then there are those who are doing the open course with their students in different universities around the world. There are customised versions of DS106: #youshow15 is focussing on digital presence through digital story telling tools, 3MDS106 is applying the open course to develop enterprise social networking skills in a large corporate and I am sure there are others I have not kept up with. So the prompts have to be general enough that anyone can use them and also be inclusive so that people feel they are part of the community – I must confess to bias my choices to the ‘young ones’ as I describe them in my head. UMW students make my Twitter stream come alive with fun and ideas when there is a run of DS106 there, I do try to think of prompts they will find fun to do. So, I am heartened to hear what Jim says in his tweet above.
What?
Then there is the ‘what makes a good prompt?’ question. Alan Levine spoke with me at length about this when he decided to let me drive the bus: Simplicity, not an assignment, balance of type of prompt, not just what I like, possible to adapt ideas for use more than once, remembering when last one is….but if there is a blank day, Sandy will always remind you!
All of above is sound advise and I was glad to have it as well as the behind the scenes information of how the site works. But there is more. Here is where the ineffable comes in. I saw it in Alan when he spoke, I see it when I talk to creative people and I have done my best to teach it most of my career. Playfulness, risk taking, experimentation, connecting the not obviously connected, willingness to fall on my face if something does not work out… It is quite a public choice and it is daily. Thankfully Talky Tina taught me how to futz.
Beyond the cognitive creative strategies, there is also the love of the process. The flow that engaging in the process requires and the joy that brings. I have had days when my mental state has been less than ideal, I have sat down to work on the daily create and after an hour felt like I had been on a day’s meditation retreat. I keep saying, DS106 is cheap therapy.
Then there is the practical what, making sure I have ideas stored up to create prompts as needed. I have a secret Twitter list and a community in Google Plus with just one member: me. I store up possible ideas as I come across them when I am doing other web type activities. Sometimes I don’t even know how it will become a prompt – just that it can become one.
Why?
A public service? Yes, it is that. A fun way to learn digital storytelling tools and find ideas? Yes, it is that. A way to make friends? Yes, it is that too. But my why is different from all that.
My why has to do with finding myself lost in the midst of the mystery that is the human imagination. My favourite writer on creativity and the soul, Thomas Moore puts it better than I can,
“The key to seeing the world’s soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.”
The daily create prompt creates a tapestry of stories that brings the imagination alive. And that brings me alive. I am honoured to be part of the tapestry.
My first creative edit for #noir106. It is tough to work in black and white! Original poster by Jessica Parker, new DS106 logo by Martha Burtis, I think. And adorable puppy is Eric. Tried mixing Metropolis and Typewriter fonts to see how they blended. Enough.
long ago, long before any of us were alive or thinking or walking or breathing, when our souls were swirls, and long before the stars and the sun had any idea of what to do with themselves, there w…
This is my first #artonthecouch critique for 2015. I took a break for the holidays and have a renewed enthusiasm for this project. I have, however, made some changes for this year. I am not going to put myself under pressure to do one critique per week, last year it started to turn into a chore and I did not like that. Guilt is not part of the DS106 ethos – and I felt guilty if I missed a week.
The other interesting thing is that people are choosing to not submit any art for me to critique. Just an observation not a judgement. I have to keep choosing the art myself. So I will choose art that speaks to me and that, paraphrasing Jeannette Winterson, I want to spend time with.
Without further ado, let’s spend some time with some awesome web art!
‘Three Seasons’ is a story told in a web page; not a photo or something I can reproduce here. You have to go an read it before what follows can make sense. And trust me, it will be worth every minute you spend with it.
What first struck me when engaging with this piece was the multi-modal nature of it. This may seem a detached and technical observation, but I think that this web page shows some of the possibilities in the future of composition. It uses audio, written words, video, animated gifs in the service of the story and it does so beautifully.
I clicked to read from Twitter one day last year when I was rushing to finish my chores for the year. It made me stop and attend. It made me stop and connect with my emotions even when I did not have time for that. That is powerful.
I am a writer so my attention on second reading was drawn to the written word. I noticed that Kailey (@kaileyck) did not capitalise any of her paragraphs. She does not use paragraphs in the traditional sense either. It is as if she is using space to mark the places where she would like her reader to take a breadth. The effect on me of the lack of traditional markers was to draw me in and make me want to attend to the story that much more…I did not know where to pause so I just focussed. As you read you think you are settling into a story told in the written word and then
and then Kailey starts to work with other media and draws the reader in further. The use of the animated gif was particularly powerful. As those of you who read The DS106 Shrink regularly know, I am obsessed with the animated gif. I have a sense that it is evolving into a medium to ‘carry’ the content of our communication that is carried by body language and gestures when we speak face to face. Humans have such ingenuity when it comes to overcoming limitations. The ‘text mediated self’ that is our digital presence is limited and favours those of us who have ease with the written word. Some people, like Kailey, are creating a new language. We all need to ask ‘do you speak gif?’ and Kailey shows us how. The animated gifs in her piece bring the written word to life. They are done beautifully: smooth precise moments picked meticulously to add to the words.
And just as you start to think that this is it, she adds sound. First in the form of a dramatic video clip, which makes us transition from the visual element to audio and then to audio only. This to me is what lifts this story from the just good to the simply exceptional. I click on the audio file and keep on reading. Just the same attention to detail as in the rest of the story. The sound blends with the words as if Kailey was there telling me the story and playing the sound on a piano. It keeps playing as you read. Foley sounds create images in your mind as you read the words
and your emotions engage with the words in ways that plain text could never do. I read to the end and have tears in my eyes as I finish reading, hearing, seeing Kailey tell me a story.
I think you can say, British understatement coming, that I quite liked the story.
My critique has focussed on form not content because this is what struck me the most and what connected with my own interest in mediated communication. Yet none of this would work without a beautifully crafted story. Do yourself a favour. Switch on clutter cloak and spend a day in Kailey’s company. It will restore your soul.
So, I am starting to explore Cine Noir for this run of DS106. At the risk of being burnt at the stake, I am not interested in watching the films! Yet, I love the style of them and the way in which ‘the sets and atmosphere reflect the characters inner turmoil’ or so I read in my overview google dive last night. I also love the typography and how it uses the form to express the emotional tone of the story. It is surprisingly difficult to find out detail about the original types. I have found two fonts that I want to play with: Metropolis and Stroke. It looks like Typewriter can also be used. So how do you get the ‘noir feel’ to an animated gif? Best way to see that was to make one from one of the most famous film Noir I know! Use of light, high contrast and that closed in vignette around the image. I noticed also that everything seems sharp and clean – clothes, posters, people and typography. I like that. How the figure gets closer and closer….scary!
I know nothing about Cine Noir. I now something about Tech Noir as most of my favourite films are about dystopian futures.
There is a lot to learn and, heads up, creative edits of Cine Noir posters will be a pig of a job to do!
The how of this gif will have to wait for now. The joy of being an open participant, no deadlines!
