ds106

A collection of 74 posts

DesignAssignments

Going Home

I grew up in a small town called Fairborn that was situated close to Dayton, Ohio. We moved when I was 11 and haven't been back in a very long time. From what I understand the town is suffering with job loss and many folks having moved out of the

DesignAssignments

Where did that guy come from?!

Spending some time this evening in Photoshop with another fun ds106 assignment. Pretty basic, photoshop a guy into odd scenes. I'm focusing on film scenes. Enter our volunteer stage left: Photo courtesy of Rob Let the games begin.... I've got quite a few more planned, but I want to open

DesignAssignments

Math is hard

You know what's cooler than a million dollars? Me neither.

DesignAssignments

Sorting Hat

The Messing with MacGuffin asks you to choose a pivotal point in a movie and alter the plot with a single line. It turns out to be a hell of a lot of fun!

design

Design Matters

So often I have lengthy discussions on Twitter and keep telling myself "I need to be blogging this! 140 characters isn't enough for my rage!" but to grab the bits and pieces of what was said on Twitter and codify it here on my blog can be difficult at times.

ds106

ds106 Web Story

As chance would have it I was browsing my RSS feeds yesterday and came across a link to a web app called "Bolt" on Zac Chase's blog and it's the perfect tool for creating these web stories. It works similar to Firebug but makes it even easier to swap out

copyright

The C Word

I always know I need to blog about something when I've reached more than 5 tweets on a subject and still feel passionate about something. 140 characters makes any sort of civil discourse difficult, but the beauty to me is that it pushes me to flesh out my thoughts here.

ds106

Tutorial: Creating an Album Cover

With the Summer of Oblivion course technically only being Monday - Thursday there were many of us left wondering what would happen on ds106TV on Fridays. While it appears Dr. Oblivion has gone missing I figured I would jump on and broadcast a quick tutorial on how to create one

ds106

Have you seen me?

I think I should print this as a sticker and canvas Myrtle Beach with them.

ds106

Be Our Guest

This scene/song has tons of repetition, probably easier for animators to work with the scenes. I swear I'm going to stop for the day. I can quit anytime, I don't need help. Really.

ds106

Falkor

Ok, this one started off at 11MB, I pared it down to 3, and then did layer masking to cut it in half again. 1.6MB isn't exactly small, but it's worth it for Falkor nodding in approval.

ds106

November, 2019

Finally started playing around with masking in Gimp (did anyone do a tutorial on this? I searched and didn't find one). Really this scene from the opening of Blade Runner didn't need much masking but I'm a perfectionist to a fault and wanted it damn near perfect. Also, 492kb! Stoked

ds106

Let the Summer of Oblivion Begin

Readers of my blog are no strangers to the great joy I get from the madness that is ds106. It's time to fire it up again (did it ever stop?!). The Summer of Oblivion begins June 20th and as an opening salvo I've created my animated gif. David Bowie, Tights,

ds106

Mutatis mutandis

Today I accepted a position as an Instructional Technology Specialist at the University of Mary Washington's Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. It's almost impossible for me to convey the emotion behind that first sentence, because in many ways this is literally a dream, years in the making, coming true

DesignAssignments

The Big Hip Hop Tutorial

One of my recommendations in the ds106 Toolbox for folks who can't afford Photoshop (and don't really need to) is a website called Aviary. Although I refer to it in terms of a photo editor, their suite of tools really does a whole lot more including vector editing and even

ds106

The ds106 Toolbox

Looking back on the large amount of work created during the ds106 course and thinking about the reflective advice given by myself and others, it occurred to me that along the way a lot of us have blogged our process as well as the final results. Information like that is

ds106

To Future ds106ers

I've thought long and hard about what I could say to convey why this class is important. Why it is simultaneously the greatest and most meaningful course you can complete, and at the same time the most grueling. There's a lot of great advice out there already for you to

ds106

Possibilities for DS106TV

After just a few weeks of the TV experiment going live there has been a whole lot of experimentation and it's generally becoming a fun playground to explore what's possible with a medium like this. The karaoke night action was fun (and possibly painful for the audience). The joint movie

community

When a Course becomes a Community

I remember clearly the first online community I was a part of. In late 2003, just a few weeks after it had been built, I joined Monkeyfilter. Monkeyfilter was a spinoff of Metafilter which was closed to new membership at the time. I had been following Metafilter for a few

broadcasting

Karaoke Friday on ds106TV

As is quickly becoming tradition (at least for Jim Groom and I), I decided to broadcast some karaoke tunes to ds106 on Friday. The idea of livestreaming and setting up a TV station for ds106 has been back on my mind a lot recently in light of the video assignments.

ds106

When In Rome: A Street View Story

I had been playing around with the idea of using a combination of Google Street View and sound effects from the Freesound.org project for awhile now. Today's news that Google now has Street View inside of famous landmarks is all the prodding I needed to start playing. My recommendation

ds106

Video Essay

My wife always laughs at me when My Girl comes on TV. Yes, I am a man, and yes I cry at this sappy movie. I can't help it. To me there is something powerful about the way they frame a story of a girl that can't understand death until

ds106

Broadcasting on ds106 Radio

[caption id="attachment_156" align="alignright" width="580"] Image Credit Brandon Warren[/caption] The combination of a few late nights with the wife and kid out of town and our newly installed high-speed internet connection have meant the ability for me to do more interaction with ds106 by way of

ds106

Therapy with Firebug

Martha Burtis posts an excellent assignment involving the use of a Firefox extension called Firebug to edit the contents of a website to create an interesting story. This is just genius, so much easier than photoshopping a site. I wanted to do something meaningful with it, mostly because the temptation

DesignAssignments

My Valentine

Here's my simple but personal valentine to the one I love.