designassignments

Hello Zombie

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 3 Comments Tags: , , , ,

Andrew Forgrave discovered these great zombified corporate logos created by Ben Fellows and a new ds106 assignment was born – or better yet undead – Logos For The Zombie Apocalypse!

I felt that logos which employed characters would work best, Ben’s zombie NBA is my favorite. So I did a quick search for corporate logos, and Hello Kitty jumped out at me as a good candidate for losing it’s sweet soul. Zombie Kitty definitely needed to have her little ear tattered a bit from a bite, and I roughed up her nice bow as well. Drawing her little rabid zombie mouth was probably the most challenging, but it was based on this weirdsmith cat. And for final touches the logo was remixed using a Japan font (really) from Dafont.

Great design assignment Andrew, thanks for creating it!

It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad MOOC

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 3 Comments Tags: , ,

IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD MOOC

I like the idea of tackling Alan Levine’s Horror of the MOOCs with a film that has a zombie kind of pursuit for money, but in the form of a comedy. There is real hysteria about MOOCs, all you have to do is look at the way the University of Virginia spastically responded to the pressure cooker of open online education.

The Canadiens had no idea what could be unleashed, in a time of tightened budgets and unbridled belief that technology will solve everything (as long as it makes money).

MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD!

Psycho Animated Movie Poster

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

Phew! This poster is done!

It was harder to make than the previous four Hitchcock posters to date, but the real problem was that other efforts became a distraction over the past few weeks (good stuff honestly). But I was able to lock in over the past couple of days and I spent most of it studying Janet Leigh’s facial expressions trying to find a way to make something for the main image of her in this poster. I think it’s interesting to think about this in the context of Leigh’s description of her working with Hitchcock while filming Psycho. She described how Hitchcock made clear that his camera was ‘the focal point,’ and she was to move with it. She mentioned how other actors might have been constrained by his blocking, but she took it as a challenge. And she does make the most of it, working the camera with her fabulous expressions throughout the film.

The original poster makes room for John Gavin, but I felt that the house over looking the Bates Motel deserved better treatment. And be sure to look closely, I think mother is watching!

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.

Reorienting My Compass, North by Northwest?

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Old Artwork, Personal 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

It’s been over a year since I first discovered ds106 and it’s amazing to me how much creative energy I’ve discovered since then – I’ve made more work in the past year than I have in the previous ten, seriously.

Ok this isn’t exactly true, I’ve made many things over the past decade, but they’ve principally been of the industrial sort – client work mostly. There’s a lot I’m proud of, particularly media materials for my wife’s non-profit Row New York (videos like Monique and Because I Row (with Daniel Phelps) as well as photography and design).

But in the last year I’ve begun to make work that reminds me of the work I used to make. Back then I made lots of stuff, all sorts of stuff, but when I made it, I was just creating, and creating and never reflecting. Despite that fact that I was in an MFA program, I was prickly about critiques, always evasive about why I made this or that. And it wasn’t because I thought ‘my art should speak for itself,’ it was because I didn’t have any confidence or sense of how or why to describe what the heck I was doing.

So probably more important than the creative energy that I’ve rediscovered is the feeling that I can and should describe my work. I falter at this effort (it’s taken two weeks to write this post and only a few hours to make Cary Grant into a track star), but it’s one I realize I need and want to work on. I want to be more confident and comfortable describing my work, not just making it.

This summer I’m hoping to focus my energy toward a bigger project. One that’s inspired by the ds106 mashup, pop culture, ‘make art dammit‘ mantra. Above is an animated movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. I previously created one  for Rear Window, and I love making these. So I’m thinking I should commit to a series, six? A dozen? I’m not sure.

But I’m also thinking about something else. Earlier this semester I read an article in the New Yorker about Christain Marclay’s mashup masterpiece ‘The Clock.‘ Marclay assembled thousands of clips from films that referenced time into a 24 hour mashup movie, that when viewed it would reference the present moment in time. So if you happened to start watching at 11AM, the clips you’d see would reflect that time.

How crazy is that? A T-W-E-N-T-Y F-O-U-R H-O-U-R movie, about time. It apparently took Marclay 2 years of slaving over his computer to create it. And its supposed to be amazing. You can only see it in galleries or museums. And I’m dying to see it, here’s a BBC story about the piece to give you some sense of it.

So besides animated GIFs I’m thinking about something else – it’s not a 24hr movie – I could never. But it’s a mashup that would require help. I’m thinking about telling a story about education through the innumerable portraits created of teachers and students in movies. I feel like there might be something we could learn from these portraits of schooling.

I’m picturing a mashup of scenes that portray high school and the interactions between students, teachers, parents, and principals. I want to see what will happen if I create interactions between characters from the Blackboard Jungle and the Breakfast Club. Too crazy?

Anyway that’s where I’m thinking of pointing my creative efforts – Hitchcock GIFs and/or a high school mashup. I’m excited and anxious at the same time. It’s been a while since I’ve felt ready to do something like this.

Rear Window Animated Movie Poster

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Alan Levine’s post about watching cool flick’s with Jim Groom finally got me to get of the snide and finish this animated movie poster for the amazing Hitchcock classic Rear Window. I have an older post with animated GIFs from Rear Window, but all things GIF need to ratcheted up a notch every few weeks.

This poster is was created for the limited theatrical re-realease of the movie in 1999 after an extensive restoration. I am a little disappointed with myself as if I were to really make something truly awesome, it would have been modeled after the original theatrical poster, which showcases all the happenings in the many neighbors windows. *Note to self, amazing summer project might include creating a number of Hitchcock animated movie poster GIFs.

To make this poster, I used the James Stewart GIF from the previous post, as well as made a new one for Grace Kelly. The work on Grace Kelly’s GIF was a lot tougher as it required the erasing of the background on ten separate frames (not fun). Here’s what one of the frames looked like beforehand:

To create the animation, I used the animation timeline in Photoshop in which you basically turn on and off different layers per frame. This is also a bit tedious, but it allows you to create some interesting timing options. Each frame can be assigned its own amount of time, which is how the pauses work. Here’s a look at a few frames of the animation timeline:

And here’s a look at the layers:

Since Alan’s post refers to Blow-Up as well as Rear Window, looks like I still have more work to do.

Bad Guy Business Cards – David Lynch Edition

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

Frank Booth Business Card

So what’s really surprised me recently is how my phone could suddenly be such a big part of my design process. I’ve used Photoshop and Illustrator for years, to touch up photos, create logos, set typography, etc. But in the past few weeks I’ve been bouncing images back and forth between my mac and my phone just so I could use these amazing photo image adjustment tools that I don’t have on my computer. In particular I’ve been using Snapseed an iPhone app that maintains the original image’s resolution and allows for multiple passes with filters unlike apps like Instagram.

I created this Frank Book Business card based on the frame below from the film Blue Velvet.

After deleting the background, I converted the image to grayscale and applied a Halftone Pattern filter, which emulates old printing processes to emulate grays with lots of tiny black dots.

Next I imported this image into Illustrator and used one of my favorite techniques which is to convert bitmap images into vectors using the Livetrace tool. After that I did some additional vector work, type setting, and the placement of the Pabst Blue Ribbon logo. To bring me to this point in the design:

Here is where I would have normally stopped and been fairly satisfied with the work. But lately I’ve been importing this work next to my phone and doing additional filter work to produce the final result above.

I’ve been using a new favorite app called Snapseed which allows you to apply multiple filters to an image before saving it. It’s surprisingly snappy (insert bad pun joke), working much faster than other digital imaging apps I’ve played with. My favorite filters at the moment are Vintage, Drama, and Grunge. Each one has a ton of different options, but a simple interface that’s generally unconfusing.

Right now it feels like a new process, that leads to some interesting rich results. I worry that I might lean too much on some canned computer filters to create a particular ‘look,’ but for now I’m sticking with it.

Below are the before and after phone edited versions of a business card for Sailor from the Lynch film Wild at Heart. And thanks to Paul Bond for the inspiration for the bad guys business card assignment.

Sailor Business Card

Karateka – Animated Floppy GIF

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 9 Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

If there is one videogame I’m certain that I spent a few hundred hours playing, it’s definitely Karateka on the Commodore 64. Karateka a simple fighter game, which like most games of that time was really hard to complete, as there was no option to ‘save’ and pick up where you left off. The game gives quite an extensive narrative introduction, defining the role of your quest, including this text which rolled in the beginning with this music:

High atop a craggy cliff, guarded by an army of fierce warriors, stands the fortress of the evil warlord Akuma. Deep in the darkest dungeon of the castle, Akuma gloats over his lovely captive, the Princess Mariko.

You are one trained in the way of karate: a Karateka. Alone and unarmed, you must defeat Akuma and rescue the beautiful Mariko.

Put fear and self-concern behind you. Focus your will on your objective, accepting death as a possibility. This is the way of the Karateka.

This kind of narrative foundation was fairly unusual at the time of Dig Dug and Donkey Kong, and even more compelling to me was the minimalist aesthetic that went into Karateka.

The bottom half of the animated GIF shows Princess Mariko being locked up by Akuma. The color palette is restricted to black, white, gray, and the tan of Akuma’s costume. Also, the game was effectively ‘letter-boxed’ into a more cinematic wide-screen format.

So this is not exactly an remixed game cover, but it is in the spirit of that particular assignment. I wanted to give homage to the media of the day, the floppy disk, which allowed me to participate in my first bit of software piracy.

It was common to have dozens of boot-leg games copied to 5 1/4″ floppy disks. Back in the 80s you could rent videogames on floppy disk from video stores, and the only piece of copy protection was a little piece of aluminum foil sticker. It was a bit of craftsman’s work to remove and replace it without leaving behind a hint of your deviant copying behavior.

To create this particular animated GIF, I used this lovely scanned copy of the original C64 Karateka floppy. And to make the animation of the characters, I used an emulator of the C64 for Mac OS X called Power64 and then loaded up a Karateka ROM. The whole culture around rebuilding games from scratch and creating emulators is quite remarkable actually – there’s some real amazing geek efforts to preserve game history.

Once I loaded the game, I used Quicktime to do a screen capture of the intro and some game play. These movies were then opened in Photoshop to do work on the frame-by-frame animation in multiple layers. More to describe about that another time.

A purely unapologetic piece of DS106 branding

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

Build for DS106

Cogdog’s DS106 propaganda post was taken to task by Stephen Downes for “over-branding” ds106. Is the DS106 to much hype? Not real enough? Adrift in a cult of personality?

F****THAT #4LIFE. As Martha mentioned in her comment on Cogdog’s post, there’s nothing but love out there in ds106. No hating on someone for not being cool enough, not hanging out and making enough art dammit! Every time you come back it’s, “oh my god, we missed you, so glad to see you again.” Like old friends, no apologies necessary.

And isn’t that what so much of the MOOC attitude is supposed to be about anyway? Build your network of learners, your community with people you care about, share interests with? On your own time and terms because when you truly commit and communicate, that’s when the real learning happens?

And if the ds106 learning celebration looks a little too raucous for your taste, that’s cool it just might not be for you.

P.S. – For the ds106ers out there this poster was based on this original piece of WWII propaganda. I used the clone stamp a bunch to remove the original text. And then worked with some new fonts from dafont and fontspace. What’s funny is that one of them seemed to be built for propaganda – American Purpose & Damion.

I Can Read Breaking Away

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

I Can Read Breaking Away

For the I Can Read Movies DS106 Design assignment, I created a cover for one of my all time favorite films, Breaking Away. If you haven’t seen the film it’s the story of four friends after high school that grew up in a college town, not feeling they were ever to go themselves. Their families all have some connection to the old Indiana limestone industry, usually as stone cutters, but the business has gone. So the local kids are derogatorily called “cutters” by the college kids and tension ensues. One of the cutters, Dave, finds escape through cycling and dreams of riding for the Italian team Cinzano. For most of the film he basically feigns an Italian accent and listens to opera – which makes for a great soundtrack actually.

This cover captures the moment when Dave drafts off a truck going down the highway. Hopefully the embed below works, as it’s my first time trying to embed from movieclips.com (lot’s of crappy unnecessary code in there).

The tractor trailer truck was a full size truck, but I wasn’t able to make it fit in the cover design. I like it a lot though and hope to find a way to use it at another time.

And this is the cyclist (possibly Lance?) and the book cover texture I can’t seem to find again. I didn’t want to use the cover templates others had done, and tried to make it from scratch to push myself to do something different in Photoshop. I could figure out how to do surface scratches, especially in dark areas revealing bits of white. I’ll have to work on that as I’m not 100% happy about it.

 

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