Waiting for the Teddy Bear to save me

Holidays. Eddi was bored. All her mates where off with their parents, travelling, seeing new worlds. Then again, she does not want to miss them. The last day in school before the holidays they had an excursion. At the station Eddi dared to tell that her father was the one who has built the huge display cases in the building. Big laughter. Mockery. Not her. Not the one whose Mum cleans the class rooms. Some are nice. Margeret. She invited her to her home. They talked, deeply, about friendship. Then Astrid claimed to be Margeret's only friend. Anyway. Eddi put the ladder against the hatch that has lead to the attic, her favorite place when she has had peace and leisure to do what ever she wanted. The smell, dry, dusty. something green got her attention. DAS KASLTE HERZ. How exciting! 

But, oh man, how much letters, and so small. Eddi was used to shorter stories. She loved The Famous Five in particular, light hearted stories about children  privileged in society and well looked after. But this? Then she started reading and quickly forgot about any difficulties in reading it. She immediately was a little charburner looking for his spot in life,  but not just reading about him...

from www.zvab.com/

from picclick.de

When browsing the ds106 page, which I do sometimes, I was surprised, that this year's UMW ds106 course is about folklore, myth, legend. For one of the first week assignments Paul Bond asks his students to reflect on this theme and I too was very attracted by the idea of doing this. Thus the post.

Many of my favorite stories have their roots in folklore, myth and fairy tales. Here I am greatly attracted by the European Romanticism, where many writers got back to the magical and unseen, but rather than meaning the past, have related to topics of their present time and moral. Although I like the Story of the "Life of a Good-for-Nothing" by J. Eichendorf most, which is not really taken as a fairy tale, I want to write about "Heart of Stone" by Wilhelm Hauff which is definitely meant to be a fairy tale. 

I am not sure what are the academic criteria that the one is a fairy tale and the other is not, but the Good-for-Nothing feels more like a person travelling through reality, whereas Heart of Stone goes deep into worlds that never have been seen. 

Also the moral of the Good-for-Nothing story is extremely modern and is meant to tell people that the Good-for-nothing is the one who lives the valuable life, because he dares to live instead of burying life under reason. Then again Hauff's Heart of Stone does not really touch any widespread ideas of a valuable life, but gives advice to not miss such a one.

What I am interested in is to have a closer look on how these stories, and Heart of Stone in particular, have influenced my ideas of leading a valuable life and if I should proceed going after a very romantic view on life, or if it might be a bigger adventure to try out different values, maybe from newer stories that can help me proceeding my travels through time.

Heart of Stone tells the story of a young man, who is poor, but has the chance to speak out wishes to a nature spirit. The wishes immediately become true. He enjoys becoming rich and popular, but for him this was not enough and he gives his heart away to a man who lives deep in the forest in order to get even more riches and a terrific wife. Still, without the warmth of a heart the young man was not able to make her happy. One day she died. With the help of the nature spirit the young man realizes what really makes happy and he got the chance to turn back time to now making the right decisions, which is to accept that being poor is no reason to be unhappy.

from Bildzitat, Felicitas Kuhn

A topic very often taken by fairy tales, in great variety. Two of them are the Fisherman and his Wife, where a magic fish fulfills wishes that lead to riches and back to happiness in a simple life. A completely other light on the topic throws the fairy tale The Steadfast Soldier, where a poor soldier violently came to riches and a princess wife and with her lives happily ever after. I remember that this story puts me into a big conflict, because I am more the person who thinks being rich might in most cases being bad. Is it like that?

from www.baerenboutique.de

In addition to my conviction that a person only can be a good person if it is a poor person, I do not know any fairy tales or romantic stories, where a woman was the initiative part concerning riches. The romantic woman sits and waits that a man comes along and takes care of her.

Fortunately my passion for romance does not go that far, at least not these days.

What I want to say is, apart from education and influences by the values from your surrounding folklore and fairy tales have a great influence on how someone sets up their life, although there are a great pool of stories you can choose from and if you can not find any that fits into your ideas about life you can write new stories - but choose wisely - as if any story is a wish that can influence your life greatly.

... A restless night.  Again and again Eddi woke up, thinking,  if she wants to go into adventures caused by strong but doubtful decision or rather do as all the words, written and spoken, say.
How is it to give away your heart for a while? How is it to meet a nature spirit deep in the forest? How is it when you have power over someone? How is it??? Is it like in the stories?

You will only know if you try...

dailycreate log September 14th 2013

It is some time ago that I put down something to my daily create log. The last entry was about numbers and ds106, who had become 600 and whose name you can write backwards in many interesting ways (600 Skull Chain/ 601sd).

Even earlier I wrote about my first humble tries into the headless dailycreates, which wasn't easy for there was no head to tell me what to do (Initial Headless Yield).

Up to today, which is the 14th of September, you could have done 18 daily creates, from which I created 10. I think this is a great achievement, although I presume there have been headless creators, who were able to create more than this 18.

 

Although I missed to write into my log regularly I tried to keep an overview via my computer file.

 

However, after the vision of a Skull Chain I produced a video about my key chain. 

It's a remix of a movie scene of "The Indian in the Cupboard" and media I've produced myself, like a photo, a very short clip showing me and a recorded audio, where I explain about my keychain doesn't say much about my life.

Here you can find the movie scene from the 'Indian in the cupboard':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYHTnuvA65M

I loved this daily create, because I learned to know something about many people I mainly knew from their little pictures that are necessary to identify yourself online as a person, but that do not say much or even anything about the person behind.

Then I dared using a picture I've created while I attended one of the many coursera MOOC's which are not very popular with the former heads of ds106 because of their rigidity of presentation. For showing regret to have been so disloyal I made me headless, which had the effect, that the vivid and angry shark got even more into the center of the picture.

Then I did not dailycreate for some time, but because I liked Alan Levine's blog post from the other day, about dailycreates, where he presents his work together with work from other ds106ers, I want to present a dailycreate I liked because of the surprise I felt when reading it, especially the comment of Jenny(n).

What Jenny(0) did

September 9, 2013

Jenny(0) started writing a story about Jenny(1):
  
      Jenny(1) started writing a story about Jenny(2):
  
         Jenny(2) started writing a story about Jenny(3):
   
            Jenny(3) stopped writing.
  
         Jenny(2) stopped writing because Jenny(3) stopped writing.
 
      Jenny(1) stopped writing because Jenny(2) stopped writing.

Jenny(0) stopped writing because Jenny(1) stopped writing.       

as well as people liked the following book cover idea, which I can understand. It has the lightness I am always happy about when it hits me; in the outside or for my own work.

 It is a present given by ... whom?

                                         Click to go Melinda Kumi's flickr image.

The same with Guilia constantly creating doodles. This is a present I've never received (which is ok). When I try following my thoughts with the help of little drawings I am left behind completely helpless for the block in my head.

... and it looks so nice!

                                                                                Click to go to Guilia's flickr image. 

however, I've got to go on and I am really proud of the result of my next dailycreate, which was to design an alien postcard with  Hubble photography.

This has a lot to do with masks I created in my new Photoshop. I am hardly aware of what I did, so sorry I can not give a detailed description.
I remember painting on a mask to 'paint away' the edges of the picture, and also interesting was to give the characters a black edge, where you have to use a rippling filter on. Then you select this black parts and on a mask for the characters you blacken the selected parts, the way they are erased in the image. Yes, it is sooooo complicated, but fascinating and it helps making the characters more integrated in the picture.

What I further realized is that participants often try to tell that, apart from the ds106 dailycreates, they have their personal daily creates like for example this picture below which is by Alan Levine, whose daily photography I highly admire and enjoy.

                                                                                   Click to go to Alan's flickr image. 

And finally there is the case of Christina, who likes having more audio dailycreates, as I do.

                                                                                Click to go to Christina's flickr image. 

Cyberreality

Do I have a cyberself?

While I have read and watched and listened about Gardner Campbell's Personal Cyberinfrastructure I realized something I have but did not know. I started thinking about if I maybe have a completely different personality in the cyberworld. Everybody knows we are different in different environments like  family and home, work and place of work or friends and recreational facilities. Why not being different in a cyberspace and how real is this part of my life?



cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Kiba Tachikawa

Gardner Campbell as an educator may not be interested in particular to answer these questions, but he certainly must have thought about them sometimes.
Gardner's main interest is to teach young college students how important it is to have a personal space in the world wide web, but he does not reason by telling them it has to do with becoming a good grade for creating this space. His idea is to position his students within a learning environment and/ or make them a responsible-minded global citizen.
I first understood what he meant when looking at an example he presented during a discussion with students. My view was always the one of an artist, who has to present his creations to become known and as someone who wants to learn about art, especially digital art and storytelling.
Gardner again presented a the page of an female student who learns about the engineering sciences. This reminded me of myself and that I definitely would have learned more about science if I had been able to be creative in the way this page shows us. It is personal, it is creative and it is a bit of ingenious. This way I adopted the idea  of having a personal cyberspace as particularly worthy for anyone and for a global development in general.

This way due to her page the young student also became a personality to me and I presume her personality within her non-cyberenvironment is rather different from what I imagine of her.

I started diving into being a cybersoul during the spring ds106 course of 2013. I was quite myself and not very successful with this, but my determination to learn all about ds106 and to post whatever I am able to create, finally gave me some consideration. Still, I have to say I tried being a cyber personality earlier, but did not get any concern until I have found the ds106 page, where a community exists, which is unusually open to newcomers.

Still, the point to be more interesting to people in the ds106 cyberspace remained, so I started creating a new avatar.

former

new   

The grey one is nice and amiable, but among all the brightness and creativity of the avatar landscape it may not be realized easily.

Still, I asked myself: which is more me?

A long time I thought the grey one it is. My answer today is: the bright one. The reason for this is by creating a new avatar I have become more of this even in my everyday life, which I like and which is essential for not drowning in everyday occurrence.

Yes, I have a cyberself, and moreover I have a cyberlife. Yet, I am sure both everyday life and cyberlife influence one another. This way I agree with Gardner: by helping students creating their own cyberspace and cyberpersonality you help them with their personal development, which was always the intention of educators, apart from giving marks for good results.

Thanks & Done

The first time I read about ds106 was on my birthday. Isn't that meaningful (:   It was also the day or at least near to the day where the regular students started the course. I looked around on the ds106 pages and found one, that instructed the regular students. I liked it and thought maybe I can do some of this, too. I did and it turned out I did even all of the assignments. I left out attending the show or the open laboratory for they happen when I was asleep and I my spoken English may not be good enough and I may have felt out of place.

The language has been a great point for me during the four month of ds106. On the one hand it was a great challenge to see if I can get along in a course given by a university, on the other hand the writing was the most troubling part, except from learning how to create a gif. However. I did fine and even improved my English language skills.

Apart from this I've learned so many about photography, design, video and audio production and I've learned about new possibilities of telling a story like web stories and mashups.

Concerning the communication I did open online courses earlier and I consider ds106 has the best possibilities to communicate with other participants, but to me communication seems still broken and unstable. I consider online communication in general casual and where masses of people try to communicate, this issue becomes even worth. DS106 don't have these masses, yet.

Comments have been part of the communication. I did not receive many of them, but value any I was given. I think Alan Levine comments most, but beyond this he often mentioned my work on twitter

Stefanie J is truly #ds106 #4life as an open participant- see videos 5 Seconds of Trolls and Silent Harmonium Love stefaniejeskestory.blogspot.com
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) April 11, 2013

or even on his blog or in a presentation during an online conference. I got a lot of confidence out of his consideration although I had the impression it was sometimes more about my sad experience than about my artwork ;)

I supposedly did more comments than I received and unfortunately often had the feeling the comment was not welcome. In the end I can not know, for it is commenting not communicating and I never became really any feedback on my comments, which is OK. It just would have been nice. Anyway it's not entirely true, Michael Branson Smith has given nice feedback.

Where I did not participate much was twitter, because my twitter account doesn't work properly. My posts are just partly shown via the appropriate tags. Sometimes I tried to reply to someone, but it all remained unnoticed like it is often with twitter, because the different threats are too many to keep an overview.

Concerning my digital story telling creations I am very pleased with both, my works and the ds106 platform, especially the assignment bank and the "weekly stuff to do" posts by Alan Levine. I've started with learning about making animated gifs and doing daily creates. I've finished more than 18 daily creates. I did not post about any but this link shows the ones I've posted about.
With all the categories the assignment bank and the daily creates are sorted into, it could have been forgotten that it is about story telling. Still it is. I've learned early via the daily creates that little pieces of media can tell a whole story, like just one picture or a hummed song; and I've learned that a creative caption or title adds enormously to  a story.
Yet I've also learned  about more extensive digital ways to tell a story like videos or audio pieces. My Best Work you can find here. The selection contains creations I feel good with, because they seem to be me. Other works might be better or more interesting, yet they feel more strange to me. Funny, isn't it?
In the end I combined in extensive projects what I've learned. For this take a closer look to my radio show, where a little girl experiences the unhappiness of war, and the final project, where I imagined a world in which two sides battle around creativity (final project - making of)
I like the story of my final project, yet I am worried it is too strange to others. I may even touch the values of people, like being a decent, hard working person, who tries to add to their society. I hope the exaggerated style will help them to see this is just an idea and a story which tries to make a point.
While I've created the story I often thought it might be better to create my own videos and drawings and animations and photos. The style would have been more consistent, there were not copyright issues and I would spare me the trouble to find in other peoples work what I want to say. Still it would have been months finishing this kind of project.

Four month ago I posted about what story telling is for me. I still agree. Moreover I was surprised how insightful my post already was. I already knew a lot about digital storytelling although the term by that time was completely new to me. Yet it is not as personal as I've stated in my post, but often has to do with being able to tell a story you were instructed to tell, which might be useful when you have to fulfil the expectation of clients, maybe in advertising agency.
Although the assignments are very open for ones own interpretation they contain instructions you mostly try to satisfy. This was a good exercise to me, because almost everything I've created in my life was self motivated.
Another aspect of this early post was that stories children are telling are often considered as lies. I think nothing has changed here, except in my inside. I now don't think I was a liar when I told a story but just a creative child full of imagination. I like this change and it will help me going on as a digital story teller. I just want to say the support, which ds106 provided my creative and imaginative part did me a lot of good.

Concerning my contribution to the ds106 community I think of two assignments I've created and with them two tutorials.

1. Multiply Yourself - I instruct to take two or more photos of yourself at the exact same place and to make you appear more than once in a picture. It seems more difficult as I thought or my tutorial is not for people who are new to the mask technique and my teaching skills my not be the best. Still I think the idea is interesting.
Find the assignment here and the tutorial here.

2. Rotoscoped Action - I instruct to take a sport or dance scene and to draw the outlines. Then it should be combined to a animated gif or video, which I've forgotten to write about. Unfortunately I can not edit the assignment text any more. Further the page does not show the video, although if you click on the placeholder you'll be assigned to it.
Find the assignment here and the tutorial here.

For some advice for future ds106 students I've created a comic strip with funny "star people".

Now I think I'll continue doing ds106 assignments. Still the last four month I was just lucky to have so much time for this course. I may be able to do sometimes a daily create or assignment, yet it will be far less time I'll spend within the ds106 community, which means this post is A Little Good Bye and many thanks to all who have contributed to this fantastic opportunity to learn about digital storytelling.

The Making Of Liberation

I've ever invented stories, but rarely have worked them out to some extension. Funny is that I've invented most of my stories in English as homework of my English courses, which mostly have been short stories. Some teachers found them weird some interesting, all found them somehow confusing.

The story for my final project may again be confusing. Not for me, naturally. I thought about making what I often had to think about the theme of my final project. All my life I've asked for support to develop  my skills in the visual arts and music., yet rarely got some. They paid enormous sums to educate me as a skilled worker, an engineer, a programmer, a project manager ... but whenever I've asked for support for doing artwork they simply looked at me pitying. Of course I could not mind thinking about this. Most of the result of my thinking you can find in my final project "The Long Way of Liberation".

To make my points clear in just a short story I've used exaggeration. Creativity and artwork are not just disapproved, but severely punished and highly despised.

I started with a government's disinformation about creativity. The totalitarian city government I've imagined needs production which enlarge their power. They blame creativity for not having enough workers for this purpose. This is a visual design assignment of making a poster from two or more photos which message is shocking. I realized it in Gimp.

Next I take the challenge of finding some artwork and according to this creating a gif from a video which has a deep relation to the artwork. For my story this means a picture on an event announcement and a gaze into a forbidden creative world.

They spy after the heroine of the story and I illustrated this by an animated gif which shows attentively and disapprovingly looking eyes and the ear of the spy. The assignment idea suggested to let the viewer know from the eyes what the character is up to.
I looked up a video, made single pictures of the passages I needed and combined them to the gif.

I further did some audio, where the heroine is detected and pursued by a police officer. For this I had to record my own voice, but was not really impressed by this. I rather added some sound effects, too. The original assignment motivated to simulate an emergency call, which I've slightly altered.

For the next part I've created an assignment idea myself, which is to rotoscope some action, this case a dance. I took a video of and dance took some parts of it. I further made single images which I used to outline the action several pieces of paper. I liked the animation style more then some real dancers.
For my story this means to illustrate a group of dancers who have been arrested.

The plan in the story is to rescue the group from a highly secured prison. I've used the assignment idea to take the sound of a movie and to change the meaning of the story. I did. In the original the arrested people were the bad guys, in my audio piece the prisoners are meant to be rescued, which I tried to make clear by the introductory passage, which describes the way into the prison and by that also the way out.

The last part of my final project are six animated gifs arranged in a table, which show part oft he plot and character issues of the heroine. In the story this is a report the heroine has just finished after her long way of liberating herself from other people's expectations.

I didn't like taking the story as I originally sketched it. It wasn't very fluent and with the fact that the viewer has to take some action which might take him away from the flow of the story I rather just added some  direct speech. I even think this way the text is more the illustration of the media than the other way around.

I also thought a bout the title of my original sketch and decided it should be more motivating to go a creative way. "Never free to go" is too depressive for this purpose and I rather titled the story "The Long Way of Liberation".

Nature's concept of Mashup & Remix

"Everything is a Mashup" (by Kirby Ferguson) was one of the statements I've thought a lot about while exploring the concepts of remix and mashup. In this series it is not just about songs and visual media but also about different areas like the Apple computer. Apple took for example the idea to arrange icons on the screen as if it were the top of the desk. They add the drag and drop idea and have been successful with that. Still Apple could not have done it without ideas which already existed earlier.
I like nature and think it is the basis of all what people concern. I don't think there have been aliens, who brought us media, but we developed them from natural concepts. In the case of media this is the concept of communication and sharing experience to add to the collective knowledge.
Back to mashup and remix I remember that the basics of living organisms are tiny proteins which are combined to the genetic make-up. Further this genetic make-up tells what the cells will be like and the cells add together will be organs and a set of organs are a human being, animal or plant. That's it. Everything is a mashup, even us.

I started my remix creations with  Alan Levine's funny assignment idea to send him on vacation after an exhausting ds106 semester. It seemed easy and except from that I didn't get along with Popcorn the remix software, it was. It was also fun, but I often thought rather to be careful what I mix into the video of someone I know somehow. For example I've found several songs for which I was worried they could be offensive, or I did not want to add something completely stupid. This was rather different with the following assignments, where I had no relation at all to the author of the media I've remixed. I sometimes thought about what they would say to my changes on their creations, but not more. You can find the video here.

Some thoughts of what a person might say to my remix I had with Cory Doctorow, who I display in my way as a colorful creature according to the assignment to remix a photo of him. I did not think much about of altering  Jonathan Worth's photo, but rather if Cory Doctorow likes being seen like I do see him or at least displayed him.

A third remix was about using the remix generator of ds106.
I got this, taking some artwork and reinforcing its meaning and adding some of the Seuss styles. For this I took a work which was done by an earlier student and remixed it to the Seuss' Twilight Gothic.

My first mashup assignment was to combine some given media. First I thought there's nothing I can do with the media, but then I had some ideas and in the end it was really fun to do the assignment, which has become animated gifs and  an audio mashup.

I further chose creating a mashup of the trailers of a triology (assignment details), which has become a rather dramatic piece of media. The same drama appears in a mashup of two songs (assignment details). This lead me to the assumption, that the mashup concept is good to create dramatic content. You can also find this point in my essay about mashup and remix.

I did even more, which is a daily create where I created a poem. I later mixed this up with a screenshot of an animation I did years ago.

Green Lioness

Wings

Wheeling high above in the sky,
Independently,

Nearly Lost,

Gliding towards a wildlife sanctuary,
Sunnily.

And now I have to take some food and mix it to a meal from which I will take the good things. The rest will go back to nature where it will be decomposed by little living beings and where then a mashup flower might appear from the new available minerals.

I should not forget to tell you about my character and story for my final project.

Mashing up the Remix

I really needed the two weeks to find out about mashup and remix. I actually started the ds106 assignments before I've understood the concepts of mashup and remix. What I can tell you from heart you can hear in the following audio. I rather had talked about this to a friend, but they are all very occupied with themselves and they did not like the idea to listen to another fancy talk of mine, but there must have been someone like butterflies and fairies, who I tried very hard to ignore. Unfortunately my microphone was not able to leave out what her sensors told her. And yes, I took some notes, which makes all a bit as if I'm reading out alound. It is because my language is not as fluent as it should be.





To say more about the topic, my first impression was it is all about copyrights. The Remix Manifest for example is a mashup/ remix and the same way about copyrights. The ds106 show provided for the regular students also mainly talked about copyrights. I was a bit bored about this which is my normal reaction when learning about law which anyway just tries to restrict you mostly in advantage of people who are advantaged enough (leaving out protection from violence, naturally). Even the mashups and remixes are are often about copyrights. I personally did not like much of the examples I looked at (Scary Mary). Especially the mashups seem very broken and inconsistent, which spoils my desire for some harmony while consuming media. This way I am not really satisfied with my own mashup creations. The one thing I can admit is, that you can communicate themes like injustice, madness or extreme mental tension better with the mashup and remix concept. It is a bit like twelve-tone music, which has its own harmony within, you can only understand when educated in it. Still twelve-tone often is used to create a tensed ambiance or to musically explain that bad things happen.

Which I really like is that you can make something your own or build your own world by doin mashups and remixing. We have to take what the world provides to us and it feels always good not just let issues effecting us, but rather taking part in creating our environment. This way I liked the idea of mashing up (remixing) the male Twilight hero Edward with a completely other type of woman than Bella the Twilight heroine is.

Video Spring

Two weeks ago must be years ago, at least it feels like this after intensivley producing video for 2 weeks. Although I've already taken a course about producing video, it was all so new with the ds106 assignments I've chosen. I already knew about making clips and editing them to something, but I didn't know anything about searching movies and other materials and make something new, and I did not know about being creative with this. The mentioned course just taught about producing interviews and reports with a certain content and to use certain technology, which I anyway have not available for my private production.
Browsing through the ds106 video assignment bank, I loved reading about producing funny or personal videos like, "Exercise the awesome power of MS Paint to create a music video!" or "Make a video that represents who you are."
In addition to this I now know even more about video producing technology, like how to record your screen or how to download youtube videos, and after this third video week I'm far more experienced in video editing. I feel as if I can nearly take any editing challange now. Still, I presume if I don't proceed in editing video I may forget much of what I've done this 2 weeks. I realized that this could be when I used sometimes audacity to eidt my video sound and did not know any more how to do this as qualified as during the audio assignments of this course.

The following is a list of the posts of the assignments I chose from the assignment bank for the video weeks 10, 11 and 12:

Harmonium Love: A modern movie turned int o a silent movie http://stefaniejeskestory.blogspot.com/2013/04/harmonium-love.html

Troll Beauty: 5 seconds from 5 clips about trolls
http://stefaniejeskestory.blogspot.com/2013/04/troll-beauty.html

Delusion: Ambiance for a poem.
http://stefaniejeskestory.blogspot.com/2013/04/delusion-video-peom.html

The Lion and Me: Foley added to a silent film
http://stefaniejeskestory.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-lion-and-me.html

Interactive Spiderwick: An essaylike comment on a vidoe game.
http://stefaniejeskestory.blogspot.com/2013/04/interactive-spiderwick.html

Actually I am amazed by this list but also confused about if really it was me who produced them. I feel like a stranger in my own realm.
I also now watch movies in a different way, which has become stranger, too. I guess it is the nature and amount of information which now reaches my awareness. This surely can be scary.

Video Run-Up

I've started out learning about video production 4 years ago, when I did a two month course on it. The course was specialized on making video for the internet and included working with a video camera, lighting, learn to speak clearly, green screen, presenting videos in the internet and marketing and law, in case we want to build our own startup. I did not mention the video editing, but I learned also about video editing. We used Final Cut and I wish I could work with it for the next two weeks, but I can not.

Since the above course I've used Video Pad to edit any video, which was OK, because my video projects have just been small projects, mostly combine images to an animation. Yet, I recently changed my operation system to Windows 8 and Video Pad is just available for free when you use earlier windows versions. I tried Windows Movie Maker, but it is a catastrophe, mainly because it crashes all the time. This way I had to decide weather to purchase Video Pad or a different editing software and I decided on Premiere Elements, which has better audio options. Its not Final Cut, but it will do and it hasn't crashed once yet.

However, this week was anyway not about editing except from a little piece, you easily could manage with Mpeg Streamclip, at least nearly because this software does not adjust different formats you may have to combine automatically. I actually fixed this in Premiere Elements.
The just mentioned clip was the sum of some analysis of parts of the first Matrix movie. You can find two posts on this at my blog.
First a post about a scene which has been watched in a special way: first without audio, being attentive to the visual part, especially the camera angles, second just listen to the audio and how this matches the visual part, and third watching the clip the normal way, becoming aware how both parts work together or if something was overlooked.
The second post went further with the analysis of "The Matrix". I've found out interesting facts about the making of the film and illustrated this with two more movie scenes. Then I combined the most important discoveries in an extra clip.

I did not like much the assignment where Youtube genres were the topic. Actually I don't fancy Youtube much but rather vimeo. I just use it to be more conform to the ds106 possibilities. I like to keep for my vimeo account at least a touch of professionalism. On my new Youtube account are vidoes I enjoy because I can see a great deal of personal achievement I have made since I've done some ds106 video assignments, but I feel very uncomfortable with the fact that anyone can watch them, in particular the ones where I myself am displayed. It is more getting used to self representation, but it is far away from being ready for an audience of strangers.
However, I tried to make this interesting to me by observing that Youtube clips, different from the movie industry, are often about reality, not fiction. I in particular were interested in the various videos about animals doing remarkable things and the possibility that the clip is all fake.

The most challenging task this week was to do some planning and post production for two video assignments anyone could choose freely. I am used to just start with what is in my mind and I have to admit this could end up in some chaos and unnecessary delay. This week I tried to sort my thoughts and ideas in advance to produce some good video the next week. Find here which pre-production I did to create a silent film clip and a clip about a video game.

During this week 10 there have been some interesting dailycreates, from which I've chosen two. This way I've produced my first little shadow play, which I always wanted to do, but did not dare. DS106 is a place I feel I can try out things as all participants do and I just made some shadow puppets without reading a book about this at first, which I previous felt I should do. It was rather interesting to figure out how to record shadows on the wall or if anyway rather record the back of a screen, but I realized that the shadows get larger when further away from the screen, which did not fit to the impression I intended to achieve.

Watch yourself the result which displays a dance.

I also made a drawing of a nice present I once received, which was a chamber orchestra in a yard, when I had my first art exhibition, which by the way was one of three or so, because I don't like exhibiting my artwork.

 

 

This week has been challenging in its own way. For me it is always easier to create something visually or audio. Writing is different. Not really the language which one might expect with English as a second language, but more to put ideas together and try to make it interesting just with words.

Yet, I felt as if I have grown a great deal to be more serious in my approach of communicating ideas. It might be important to speak out and display issues of interest and to inform friends and people in general about what I've found out. I have never had this feeling with my visual work.

Pre-Produktion

For this week pre-production assignment I've chosen the video assignments

Play by Play, where you comment a real life event (also playing a video game) and

Return to the Silent Era, which means to display parts of a modern movie as if it is an old silent movie.

For both the assignments it is almost all pre-production.
For the "Play by Play" assignment I needed to know how to record the course of the game. I browsed the internet and found a tool called "bandicam" and I did a first recording of the game course of the Spiderwick action game.
Further more I thought about, which comment I want to give and decided it will be a comparison between book, movie and game. I gathered some materials, like pictures of book illustrations.
As asked I watched some of the examples of "Play by Play" completed by previous students. The examples concerning commenting a video game, I did not like much, because I am not familiar with this kind of shooting games. This is the reason I browsed Youtube for examples and I've found a trailer which announces the Spiderwick game. Here I realized immediately, that in the trailer they just compare movie and game, but in the game there are elements which just exist in the book. They did not mention this, for commercial reasons I think.
Actually I bought the Spiderwick game to be able to compare book, movie and game and I like the idea to now have  the opportunity to sum up what I've found out, at least partly.
In the following picture I display my this week pre-production work of the 'Play by Play' assignment in the shape of a screenshot of files. I could have done even more postproduction like thinking about the comment and recording it, but time did not allow me to do so.

 

 

The silent movie assignment also needed some information of how to change a clip into a silent movie. I've found some decent explanations and jotted down the points I'm going to use for my version. The same way I had to decide on a movie and I chose "Punch-Drunk, Love" for I have already been interested in making a video around this movie. I thought about which parts of the movie I may use for my idea and I've already separated the most important scene for my work from the movie. I know exactly which other scenes I will use and how to combine them.
The same like with the first assignment I did a screenshot of my folders which illustrates nicely what I've managed this week for the silent era assignment. Here I could not have done more pre-production but next I have to go into editing.

This week I've learned to achieve some awareness of pre-production steps. Although I have always done pre-production I've never thought consciously of this step but rather got unplanned into video production. I will see next week if this will be an advantage during the video editing. I dare say, yes it is.

"Remarkable Animals" or "Animation"?

The  ambiguity of categorisation.

While I've worked through the ds106 open documents list of categories on Youtube videos, I remembered that there are also categories designed by Youtube.
I've displayed both lists at the end of this document.
The differences are a more general approach in naming the categories by Youtube, whereas in the open document the naming is a kind of insider language, spoken by groups of people, so that I, as a non native speaker, not living in the USA, often could not find out what the content of the videos will be from the naming. Still after watching some videos I was able to sort out what any category means.
I thought it interesting to compare the two lists and at first sight the open document list is longer and I dare say you could unite some items like "everyday life as art" and "everyday life as a musical" which is art, too. Apart from that, ds106 students may have special interests, like stories which may have influenced the list so that some categories stated by Youtube are not included like "travel and event" or "education", whereas they have genres like "redubbed" or "mashups". Still, many points you can find in both lists like "politics", "science" and "animals", but the story tellers often mix this with "entertainment" ( "news politics" <-> funny/ entertaining politics).

However, anyone knows videos or movies often don't have just one genre they fit into, but more. I've already found this out for a movie scene I analysed previously ("Identity Matrices", at the end of the post).

For this post my insight concerning categories and genres expanded in the direction, that we in general  know for movies that they are fiction and that the categories all refer to this understanding of movies. Yet we can not have this agreement regarding Youtube videos, where you can find reality clips as well as clips of invented realms and ... both are often mixed and you do not even realize.

In the following I display two clips of elephants painting. I already can tell you that I prefer the first video as real but not the second.

 

 

v e r s u s

I also like the paintings produced by the elephant in the first video a great deal more and consider them art, whereas in the second they try to tell us art is when you display naïve images like elephants and flowers and that it is more impressing when an elephant can draw these images. I on the contrary am impressed by the real possibilities of an elephant concerning doing paintings. Maybe we also have to admit here that the idea of this beautiful art is made up by humans and I really would be curious what an elephant could tell us about what he considers art, if not anyway art is an idea of humans but not animals; and further coming back to genres: what list of genres an elephant would create?


Lists of Youtube video categories

open document list of ds106

1. parodies
2. everyday life as art
3. everyday life as musical
4. musicians with causes
5. DIY tech/retro
6. animation
7. timlapse
8. popular culture re-animated
9. literature animated
10. computer art
11. inappropriate for church, but only church
12. mashups
13. making science cool
14. unintentional hilarity
15. WTF
16. redubbed
17. kids with accents
18. strange and adorable children
19. stereotyping
20. funny/entertaining politics
21. how to videos
22. surprise of a lifetime
23. animals doing human things
24. doodle along song

Youtube list, which you can find on your own Youtube page, when you have to give your videos a category

1. autos & vehicles
2. comedy
3. education
4. entertainment
5. film & animation
6. gaming
7. how to & style
8. music
9. news  & politics
10. non profits  & activism
11. people & blogs
12. pets & animals
13. science & technology
14. sports
15. travel & event

Identity Matrices

In my last post Path Differences I analysed a scene of  the movie 'The Matrix'. I now understand this is known as the 'helicopter scene'. At least typing in 'helicopter scene' provides you with a lot of information about this scene.
However, in this post I will provide you with more information about 'The Matrix', which will be three intriguing facts of the making of the movie.

 Maybe already well known but none the less still interesting is a slow motion technique called bullet-time photography. This technique is used to display a certain motion in different speeds. A bullet may move fast at first and then slow down, or someone jumps high in the air fast, slows down and finally the motion of the actor has nearly stopped. He now may accelerate again. The following clip will illustrate this very well:

 

 

In this scene the actors also show off their skills in the martial arts, which they acquire during a four month training given by martial art professionals. (imdb reference)

My last bit of the making of the movie is about the so called "green rain". When I saw the movie about ten years ago I immediately was concerned about the falling green letters which appear when the movie starts and sometimes later in the movie. According to imdb.com, where they are called glyphs, the letters "consists of reversed letters, numbers, and Japanese katakana characters".

Having read the above and knowing the movie, anybody certainly will be able to assign the genre of the movie to the action partition. Yet, imdb.com also mentions adventure and scifi and I've read some can see thriller elements in "The Matrix".

The following clip which I've created from the scenes shown above, display what I've found out in particular: the green rain, the way of cutting in the helicopter scene (see Path Differences), and the applying of the bullet-time photography in "The Matrix":

Path Differences

The difference between knowing the pass and walking the pass.
A weeklycreate about analysing movies.

It is always so annoying to me to analyse artwork, especially when being given a set of rules. I thought about skipping this, but then my "Facebook Oracle" told me to learn the rules to know the path, while you can always forget them later to go the path without knowing it.
("Facebook Oracle" means I look at the newest facebook posts and maybe take them as advice. This time there has been a post about learning the rules and forgetting them again. Picasso said so.)

This way I got my pencil and took notes about a scene from "The Matrix".

First, like advised, I turned down the sound and scanned camera work and cuts. Because this is an action scene the cuts are fast and numerous, about 70 in 3.29 minutes. The scene displays flying, hanging on ropes and falling, so that the camera angles are mostly very dynamic like looking down into the streets of a city from high above  or looking up to the helicopter or following people hanging on a rope which again is fixed on the helicopter. You can imagine the uncertain way a camera has to go here.
The cuts are often following the point of view of the protagonists: The female pilot looks down, cut, her two friends hanging on the rope one holding the hand of the other, cut, the man holding the friends hand looking down onto his friend, lets go and sees him falling, cut back to a view an imagined audience might have (man landing on the roof). This pattern repeats later when the pilot has to leave the helicopter.
Later there are cuts according to the dialogue, showing the person who talks.

Following the second step of the assignment, I switched off my monitor and just was attentive to the sound. This starts with loud music, which suggests action. The music plus the sound of the helicopter are dominant for a while. You also can hear noises which I presumed the action from, like boots on a roof and shattering glass. In addition there are a kind of synthetic "energy sounds". I mean sounds which  evoke that lots of energy is going around, hear yourself.
Later you can hear dialogue while the music becomes barely noticeable or is off at all.

I did watch the clip a third time to see if I've missed something or to see how audio and video are working together. Most of the interplay of video and sound I have already understood when listening to the clip's sound, for I already knew the pictures. Still, there was a piece of action I did not understand earlier: I asked myself, why the man does not let go of the rope when the helicopter is dragging him by this to the edge of the roof. The answer was, that his pilot friend saves herself with the rope from the diving helicopter. If he would have let go of the rope, she had fallen down into the streets.

Then I applied some of Ebert's rules and I've found out that the main character (and hero of the movie) in dialogue scenes appears always on the right. I also detect that whenever one of the men fall they have a smaller or greater drift to the right, which Ebert interprets as falling into their future or at least making a positive moving, because right means mostly positive. The woman on the other hand appears mostly in the centre of the screen. Ebert did not say anything about this, but I consider this as one of the projections to a female being and here means feminine and maybe glorification of femininity, which here includes helplessness and vulnerability. Strangely enough she survives the fall, any crash and the explosion of the helicopter.
Earlier, when she was in charge as a pilot she often appears in the left upper corner. She manages to save her friends in this position and like this I don't think this means something negative, which Ebert suggest for left. Still the picture gives the audience a feeling of being under high pressure in a situation with few chances to save the situation.

I am aware that the above is just a rough description of what is going on in the clip concerning camera, cut and position of film elements on the screen. In addition it is possible to analyse many more design issues like color and light. Both have not been dominant in this clip. The colors were mostly skin/ dark clothes against a light, white city. People living in a virtual, sterile world.

Imagine 3,29 minutes of film and a not really a short blog post about this and it is just a summary of what happens in the clip. How much can be written about the whole movie?

I am Visual now

Summary of week 5

This week was fun and I may have done more than students were expected to do, not from the amount of creations but from the amount of time I spend on any.

This is a good cue to write about 7 Gifs around the Spiderwick movie. This is motivated by the ds106 assignment bank titled Summarize a movie with Animated GIFs, which I did here.
I consider this the most beautiful thing I did the week, but I know I got a lot of credit from the makers of the movie. The pictures already existed and I just had to arrange them in my way, which gave me some new experience in the area of story telling and I enjoyed being with the beautiful images for a long time.

Also inspired by the assignment bank was dividing a photograph in several frames and arranging them in a new way. The result I named Winter Kids. This task not only made me thought about visual problems but also about what advantage it is in winter when you are a child.

I did a third assignment bank create, which was required for week 5: Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge. Here is what I have made of it.

To continue here is my post about the photoblitzing, which meant to take 14 photographs of 14 different and given content in 20 minutes.
Doing the photos was a bit of stress for me, but I liked looking at the photoblitzing photopool on flickr  and had some good experience when giving comments and getting comments myself.
On flickr I set up a set, which includes photos of mine which I like in particular.  According to this set I designed another blog post named Great Moments in Time.

Really demanding was the idea to work through a slideshow which includes advice to make better photographs and to choose some of the guidance to use it for future photographs. In my post so much to learn about photography you will find a link to the slideshow and information how this task worked out for me.

Last but not least I find some peace from very demanding weeklycreates in the dailycreates. The results I summarized in  the blog post Peace.

Mostly this week I have learned that I have to learn so much more. I still feel unsure about how to make good photographs or how to edit images or make good compositions from images. However I have become a great deal more skilled this week and I may have enough time to improve to a certain level. My ideas are faster then my learning. Maybe in future it is a good idea to do more demanding visual design together with friends. What could that be?

Impressive Workload

Summary of week 3

I have started the week with making out what storytelling is to me. After this I have learned even more about storytelling, while having some practice and listen to others about their thoughts around storytelling, when I watched the ds106 Show. I wondered about how deep storytellers are going into their work when they become their hero of the story, which actually scares me a bit. I think I don't like loosing myself in stories, which is part of the story of my life. I have started having my main occupation within in the area of technology and natural science but shifted to become an artist while starting to study the liberal arts. What contrast! I wondered about the attitude of artists a lot and did not get along with them very well. Now it is often the other way around, especially when meeting engineers, who are often dull and arrogant in their rational attitude. Yet, I still do not dare becoming one of those who are vanishing a kind of in their creative activities. Which leads me to another point of this week's ds106 class.

What was really difficult for me this week is creating on demand. I am more used to take my time when creating art and design. Yet I wanted to keep up with the regular students of ds106 and decided to do what they are obliged to do. In the end I did some good artwork but feel as if I am a kind of factory worker.

There were 3 dailycreates I have chosen:

First I made a blue screen with a death message on it. After reviewing the work of other students, which was funny and scary, I was not so sure any more if I really have understood the task. Maybe death is different to me and has to do with silence and even birth, which is why I thought it funny of me using a star in my message like for birth dates, but not a  cross like for death dates.
BlueScreenDailycreate

I also made a drawing about an invention, which is an umbrella for three people. I realized that this may mean protection to me but was not so happy with the fact that the umbrella is carried by a man who reminds me of the dream papa of infants. I even pictured a whole dream family, father-mother-child. This will give me some thoughts.

 

Next I wrote about my biggest fear. I did not really know which this is, but chose to have a big audience is frightening for me, especially concerning the feeling envy.

 

Envy

My biggest fear is having a considerable audience.
The story to overcome this may be a further invention like a coat which protects me from realising people's feelings too much and the same coat would protect me from realising my own feelings too much. This coat has an extra thick layer of material which keeps away envy from the people outside and from realising my own envy from the inside. The coat is able to communicate with me and tells me when he encloses me firmer for protection and when he opens up for communication and relationship if the situation is appropriate. So the coat is my friend I would call him or her Eagle for she would realize the danger of I becoming hurt with her beautiful blue and sharply outlined eyes very early and she would dive to rescue me from what ever is able of making me vanish in a cloud of unfortunate communication considering my creations.

 

I was very fond of the part of the task who asked students to invent a story to overcome their fear. What I wondered about is, that the fear of some is so deep that they not can think out a story to overcome it. Often they know their fear is a story by calling it irrational, yet, they can not go into the story world and try to get rid of their fear.

 

One could think this may be enough for one week, but no, there were many more tasks to do.

 

Having watched a video Kurt Vonnegut and the Shape of Stories, I analysed a little story for children.

I found this interesting but was not declined to do too much work on this. I was deeply impressed when I saw other students did different. I am not sure if I should embed links to the work I mean here. They may feel observed and pushed into public.

 

However, for the following example I had to refer to some links, for it was part of the task. I took artwork of ds106 students from the past and reflected what this stories mean to me and my approach to storytelling. Appreciating Past DS106 Stories

 

There was also a weekly creation to do: Telling Stories with Photos

I chose a series of photographs I did to find out about iso and white balance. I realized when setting them in a row that it seems as if one awakes and tries to find out where she is and what is on. First a hardly noticeable shadowy appearance of something, then a spot out of the window which becomes clearer and colored.

 

I know that regular students of Alan Levine were urged to commend on other students work and really, I was happy to be able to skip this. I love looking at the artwork of fellow students, but I have had so bad experience concerning comments. Either they make me feel misunderstood or the others feel misunderstood in what they've tried to convey with their artwork when I comment. In my past sometimes they even insult me personally and tried to reduce me by saying it is not worth  of taking my creation seriously. Thus "Once bitten, twice shy."

 

My overall view of this week is that it is fun participating in ds106. Yet it also is time consuming and I feel as if do not want to become too much devoted on keeping up with what is demanded. The greater target of ds106 is teaching about storytelling, but he creations themselves may not lead to a greater production like a series of something or a more extensive piece of video or animation, which would be nice for me.