Slide Guy Collection – Stanley Cup, Surfer, Bronco, Duck Tour

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling No Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

I caught the DS106 Slide Guy! assignment bug early on but only Tweeted them out. Jim Groom gave me some flack for by not feeding the assignment stream with a proper post. So here’s my collection in the order in which I made each Slide Guy.

In honor of game six of the Stanley Cup finals, which NJ lost. So Slide Guy Stanley Cup makes for a nice second prize.

No idea why I made Slide Guy Surfer or…

Slide Guy Bucking Bronco.

But Slide Guy goes Duck Touring was in honor of his trip to Beantown for the NMC Summer Conference.

Slide Guy you are a young meme in the making. I love you!

Giant Ants at Work Animated GIFs

By mbransons in Teaching and Learning No Comments Tags: , , , ,

This time I didn’t do any damage to the mobile phone microscope as I did for the animated burning candle. I shot these on my walk from the car to campus, which I did basically with my head down looking for ants. So of course you start to notice things you don’t normally including these really beautiful yellow wild flowers.

I finally found my ants on campus near the steps to the entrance of the main building. They were working on their hill placing one grain of sand at a time, which in this GIF makes it look like they’re moving boulders.

Here’s the video as well with an extended look at the ant construction, but look for the critter on the white flower. I didn’t even notice it while shooting (it was bright and a hot 95° in Queens), the things you can discover with a portable microscope.

My Pants, Flowers, and Bit of Burn Out

By mbransons in Teaching and Learning 5 Comments Tags: , , , ,

This is a repost for my summer course with teacher education students. I’ve been playing along asking them (and myself) to be makers, recognizing there will never be exactly what they want in the classroom. So far my favorites ‘maker projects’ by my students are a jello mold of a cell and a very cool altoids box mod into a heater.

Here’s my maker effort at reproducing a mobile phone microscope:

So the parts to build the 350x microscope haven’t shown up yet, but the extremely inexpensive ($3) magnifying loop showed up. I like many a maker following the best instructions, ran into trouble. But that’s what makes the ‘thingy’ yours, not perfect but wholly mine.

I did achieve my first microscopic animated GIF of a candle flame. But I almost melted the microscope in the process.

Electronic Games Animated Magazine Cover

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

As soon as Jim created this assignment and seeded it with his terrific Famous Monsters of Filmland animated magazine cover, I knew I had to do it.

This is cover of the first issue of the fan magazine Electronic Games published in the Winter of 1981. Nightrob has a great set of EG cover art in his Flickr stream if you’d like to see some quintessential 80′s game art.  The moving 8-bit creatures are from the famous game Space Invaders, sadly I was never particularly good at that game but I love the look of the graphics.   Take a listen to some sounds from the original play – I love the old-school oscillators and beeps.

In the era of stand-up arcades, I played occasionally at a roller skating rink called Great American Skate (and yes I did skate too, badly). My favorite stand-up by far was Tempest which had a dial instead of a joystick to rotate a shooter about a variety of almost crystalline spaces. Various geometric objects would attempt to climb toward the exterior of the crystal and you were to shoot them back.

But I spent much more time playing games on the memorable consoles built by Atari, Colecovision, and Intellivision. I played a lot of 8-bit Donkey Kong, Pit Fall, and Pac-Man. But I didn’t really go over the gaming deep end until I bought my Commodore 64, a system that almost single-handedly destroyed the still young video game industry. The C64 used rewritable floppy disks, instead of ROM based cartridges which made it very easy to copy and trade games. I made an homage animated GIF for my favorite game on that platform – Karateka.

Probably for the better, I peaked as a gamer at around 13-14 years-old. I’m a total novice with games today and mastering a controller that requires every single one of my digits to perform independently isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Joystick #4life.

Fat Cats Make Better Art History Assignments

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Teaching and Learning, Uncategorized 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

Originally posted in my summer teaching with technology course, but it’s a new fat cat so I had to get it in the ds106 stream!

Today we are going to play with digital storytelling as a tool for teaching and learning.   In one of Alan Levine’s talks about digital storytelling, he included a slide quoting Ruben Puentedura on the value of learning through stories :

One of the best ways to understand something is to create a story around it.

If you think about it, a traditional lecture is a storytelling technique that faculty are very, very comfortable with in the classroom. Sometimes they get crazy and even include presentation slides! and videos! But most faculty don’t ask students to create stories other than traditional papers, and the occasional presentation. And even less frequently do they expect you to focus on being a compelling storyteller. If that were the case, then faculty and students would need to spend much more time thinking about creative storytelling techniques in the context of presenting concepts and content. What would that mean? Less content coverage for the sake of developing richer engagement with an audience?

We’re going to look at the digital storytelling community ds106 for innovative storytelling ideas by looking through their collaboratively built assignment bank and the abundant examples of work made by community members.

The above image was made for one of the many ds106 assignments in the visual assignments category – Fat Cats Make Better Art. Here’s the description of what to do:

Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

I chose to modify the painting ‪Madonna in Glory with Seraphim by Botticelli with a picture of my cat Peter. So you might call this Madonna in Glory with Peter the Cat. I used Photoshop to do my layering and editing of the two images.

But what’s the point of the assignment, other than hopefully to get a laugh out of an art history lolcat. There’s definitely a lot of digital image manipulation skills learned in the process of creating the image, that’s fairly obvious. And if it’s your first time playing with photo editing/manipulation tools then that’s a big deal.

Less obvious though is the study of the details of the painting that happens while trying to place your cat compellingly and convincingly. In photo editing applications it’s really easy to zoom in and focus on the details of the image while editing. Here’s an example:

I started to notice the expressions of the cerubs which were definitely not smiling despite that they are in the presence of a mother holding her heathy baby, normally a celebratory event. So why the sadness and expressions of concern? Because it’s the baby Jesus, and being little angels, they know he’s going to have to be killed. And now that my cat is in that position, have I predestined his furry future?

So the ds106 assignments are lots of fun and obviously encourage the use of digital tools, but there’s a method to meme madness – fostering understanding through storytelling.

@dkernohan Visited My Class Yesterday

By mbransons in Teaching and Learning 7 Comments Tags: , , ,

This summer I’m teaching a York College class  for teacher education students about integrating technology in the classroom. And one of the first assignments asks the students to watch Michael Wesch’s video A Vision of Students Today and then blog about their college experience so far. One student described hers as “not terrible but having a lot of incomplete pieces.” She wondered how she might be able fill that gap and included this image of an incomplete puzzle portrait. REALLY DEEP QUESTION RIGHT?

And while reading this student’s post a tweet from David Kernohan popped up:

The comic is a remix of Neil Gaiman’s graduation speech to the University of the Arts class of 2012 delivered two weeks ago. Here’s the first frame of the comic:

You should definitely read the rest of the comic (there’s advice for what to do if your cat explodes) and watch Gaiman’s speech which asks you to respond to the stresses of life by making ‘Good Art.’ And if you believe anyone can be an artist, a good one mind you, then the answer is in being creative right? So I responded to the student’s post including that link and message.

How cool is that? Someone in England helped me respond to my student’s post. It’s as if David Kernohan were in the classroom helping me teach.

And how did David come to be in my classroom? He showed up serendipitously because I’ve been slowly building connections with peers through my blog and twitter account over the past year-and-a-half. These are connections that didn’t exist before, and the opportunity to learn, to reflect, and to share with them didn’t exist before.

Finding that cool group of people to hang-out with online has taken time, and I was lucky to discover the CUNY Academic Commons and DS106. There are so many great people I have met through these spaces: Matt Gold, Jim Groom, Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer, Boone Gorges, Chris Stein, Giulia Forsythe, Alan Levine, GNA Garcia, Scott Lockman, Rowan Peter, Tim Owens, Martha Burtis, Zach Dowell, Todd Conaway, and on and on… These connections have helped me rediscover my interest in remix culture starting with my first blog on the Commons about old artwork and making so much art dammit! for ds106.

And most importantly I’ve totally bought into Gardner Campbell’s call to narrate your process. I struggle at it – I’d always rather make an animated GIF than write – but I’m a better teacher, artist, learner, and everything else for it.

Oddly this is something I’ve wanted to write about for awhile, I have a least a couple draft posts never published that attempted to talk about this stuff. So thankfully I have this one out now. And thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone that’s been so awesome in the past year as I’ve ventured into blogging and tweeting and everything else. YOU ALL RULE.

Norman the Peeper

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

I’m working on my next animated GIF Hitchcock poster, next up is Psycho, and right now I’m thinking of deviating from the original poster dramatically. The featuring of Janet Leigh in her skivvies to advertise the film doesn’t do it justice in my mind. Maybe it got the audiences in the theatre back in the 60s? But the Norman Perkins character and his deviousness playing against Leigh the absconder is what sustains.

The Birds – Animated Movie Poster

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Personal 13 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

This is my fourth effort at animating Alfred Hitchcock film posters, and this one took a lot of time. I’m not sure if I’m going to make it all the way to my desired dozen posters by the end of the summer. This GIF is based on the 1963 theatrical release poster for The Birds and is made from 44 frames. Hitchcock enlisted the famed Disney animator Ub Iwerks to do the screen work for the film which created the effect of swarms of birds attacking actors. The birds traveling over the poster is one of his mattes used in the open credits of the film.

I hadn’t come across Iwerks before and watched a great documentary about his life and the fact that he alone designed the characters for and executed the first Mickey Mouse animation Plane Crazy.

Yes he designed Mickey Mouse for Walt Disney and created all of the first cartoons. Apparently Iwerks made Plane Crazy in two weeks – approximately 700 frames of hand drawn animation a day – alone. Insane, I thought my GIFs were hard work.

Disney and Iwerks developed the Mickey Mouse character and series after being betrayed by the rest of their animation staff, hired away by Universal Studios. They were contracted by Universal to create the highly successful Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Universal figured they owned the rights to Oswald, so they stole Disney’s staff and fired him. Ub was the only one that didn’t sell-out and Mickey was born.

Sadly their relationship soured, and Iwerks went his own way creating his own animation studio, but it never lived up to the success of Disney (that’s obvious huh?) He did eventually return to Disney studios and moving forward worked principally on visual effects, including The Birds. It’s as if he’d come full-circle returning to creating mattes like he did for the ground breaking 1920s cartoons Alice Comedies, which was one of first live-action mattes with animation.

The longer I work on this Alfred Hitchcock poster series, I seem to be delving deeper into animation as an artform which I’m thoroughly enjoying. I’m excited to see where it takes me next – oh wait that’s Psycho – cue screeching violins in your head.