Reflections, but not like the kind from a mirror cause they’d be backwards and I can’t write backwards

Posted by Tim on April 29, 2012
Posted in: Assignments, DS106. Leave a Comment

Alrighty time for dat final reflection. First off I still don’t fully understand what a cyber infustructure is nor can I spell it successfully without using spell check and I’m not sure if I’ll every truly be able to say with confidence what a cyber infustructure is. Even after going through all of this work and living online pretty much all year I’m still as confused as I am when I came in.

Storytelling is the same for me now as it was when I came in however. For me a story is any way to communicate an idea or a feeling to other people using images, text or sound. A story doesn’t need to be complex to be a story and some of the best stories can be something as simple as a man hugging his dog on the street. It’s not a deep story, it’s not a complex story, some people wouldn’t even count it as a story because it’s lacking words but I think it’s a story. This blog in a way is a story as well. It tells about my journey through the class of ds106, what I learned and even what I was feeling on certain days.

What I learned the most form this class was probably about how to host a blog and using sites like flickr, youtube and twitter. I still hate twitter though, it’s not really for me. I don’t feel the need to update a status constantly or follow people and see their status updates daily, I find it mundane. Well I think that’s the word, it’s close enough and I’ll stick to it. I also learned how to use GIMP to edit some photos and I’ve had a lot of fun screwing around using it.

As far as my best work in this course, I’d have to say my Wild West audio story was probably my favorite project of the year. It meshed together very well and was extremely rewarding to listen to again and again and again. http://blog.flavorblast.me/the-sounds-of-the-wild-west/ it can be found here. I also really liked the Hey Wait where did that guy come from design assignment. That was the assignment where I photoshopped Gollum into the Republican Nomination debate. http://blog.flavorblast.me/design-assignment-wait-whered-that-guy-come-from/ Other fun assignments were the drive redone movie poster http://blog.flavorblast.me/design-assignment-if-movie-posters-told-the-truth/ and the piano cat duel mash up that I did http://blog.flavorblast.me/piano-duel-for-the-ages/

For future students of the class I would def say keep your assignments simple and don’t get caught up in the details of creating the prefect project. Also think ahead to the mash up projects because those are the hardest projects to complete in my opinion. Those and the remixes I found to be hard to complete.

Final Project going up

Posted by Tim on April 29, 2012
Posted in: Assignments, DS106, Final Project. Leave a Comment

Music is one of my biggest interests and it is something that both me and my girlfriend share and enjoy. Concerts are a big part of our life. For my final project I wanted to take my love of music and use it to tell a story. In my opinion music already tells its own story. It can tell an actual story, like the story of the Battle of New Orleans or it can be more vague and tell a story about the person who wrote the song and how they felt at the time. Combine a song with a video for a music video and *boom* you’ve got yourself a whole new story to see.

I’m a big fan of the band Fair to Midland and had recently seen them in concert. Their music video for Dance of the Manatee is one of the quirkiest music videos I’ve ever seen. It also manages to tell the story of a giant who helps these people move from their desolate home to a more plentiful area. The giant puts himself at great risk to help them and to repay the giant they start to destroy the area they have moved into. The giant is outraged and falls, cracking the land and leaving them stranded on this area that they slowly destroy. By itself that’s a nice little story about a giant and some evil people. Fair to Midland came out with another video with them just sitting in a room singing, playing instruments and occasionally smashing a piano with a sledge hammer. This can tell another story but it was a pretty lazy story in my opinion. It’s the story of someone that really hates a piano.

Anyway I decided that I should take one of Fair to Midlands songs and do my own music video for it or just a story board. It was a terrible, terrible idea that I should never have done because my prefectionistism kicked in and made it difficult to do much with. The song that I chose to try and story board was the Walls of Jericho.

It’s a very moving song for me and I had a whole little story worked up in my head for months. I’m extremely bad with taking what’s in my head and being able to transport it onto paper in a way that doesn’t make me delete everything right away. So I had a bunch of little doodles done for the project to start with as a road map for what I would later construct.

P4300078

P4300079

P4300080

P4300081

P4300082

P4300082

P4300084

P4300085

P4300086

P4300089

So those were a few of the story board rough drafts that I drew that I would later use to fill in for a very artsy storyboard that tells a story. The story would have involved a man who feels very frustrated at the world and feels that everything is going to end and sees misery in the world instead of joy. If the storyboard worked better it would have shown a transition as the man walked by, such as the car turning into a tank with every step he takes past the car and the young children turn from happy playing kids into skeletons. It would have given the story the view that the young man held. In contrast to that there would also be a girl who walked around and made the world look better. They would meet briefly, she’d throw a smile his way and suddenly he’d realize that the world wasn’t such a bad place after all. Pretty standard story but whatever. That’s the feeling I got when I listened to the music and that’s the story I would have wanted to tell.

I was able to take care of a few of the scenes but they ended up taking a lot of time to get just how I wanted and even then I was like meh.

final project pic 1

This image would have been the first scene that he saw upon waking up in the morning.

final project pic 2

This image would have been a scene from him walking outside. During all his story views the world would have had a reddish tinge to it. As he walked away from the house it would have collapsed into rubble.

Anyway that was it, can’t say I was happy with the outcome but I should have picked something more obtainable given the amount of time left this semester and everything else I had to do.

Checklist check in

Posted by Tim on April 29, 2012
Posted in: Assignments, DS106. Leave a Comment

Alright, so I’ve begun doing all this compiling crap and getting this blog ready for the end of the semester. So far I’ve used tungle to try and set up a meeting with Alan, but I haven’t heard back yet so I’ll be sending a follow up email tonight to make sure I can get in and get everything graded. I already have many categories to organize my blog, I’ll be adding a greatest hits category to show off my best work. I’ll be putting a copy of my blog on the umwblog space. I’d like to keep my blog though, use it to show off that I can blog for future jobs and overhaul it and make it a blog dedicated more to my interests. As much as I enjoyed the creative process I really hated this class at points. I’m kind of a perfectionist and ended up wasting soooo much time looking for the perfect remix, mashup, image or whatever to match the image that was in my head. The final project post will be going up soon as well as the final reflection post.

Dumping ground

Posted by Tim on April 23, 2012
Posted in: Assignments, DS106, Mash up. 2 comments

So I wasn’t actually able to finish this mash up. I got a little over ambitious and decided that I wanted to put an awesome tribes helmet onto the scene of boba fetts death in star wars. So I crawled through the 16 sec clip capturing screen shots at every frame, slowly advancing through. I got pretty far into that and was like well I’m this far in, might as well finish the job. I should have abandoned it right from the start. Anyway, fast forward to finishing taking screen caps of all 500 frames in the scene and it’s time to slowly and painstakingly crawl through every scene and edit it. Editing is a pretty slow process and making it look nice takes like 30 mins, times 30 by the 70 frames or so I went through and we’ll just say I wasted a ton of time and probably wouldn’t be able to finish it. So long story short, I learned an important lesson about never ever doing whatever it was that I did ever again, I’m still uploading it because i spent too much time working on it not to.

On the continued note of bad ideas I had during mash up was the bufflax mash up. It was something that I started work on, got half way done with and then threw up my hands and said nope. Something about bufflax videos bother me deep down inside and make me cringe a little. I don’t know if that’s because I find the videos to be mildly racist or what. I have a little more creative dignity then to finish something like this and be proud of the final product. I’m not above posting it in the mash up dump and forcing you to watch it though. Plus the commercial is pretty awesome anyway, my attempts at humor based on writing what I hear in english from that language only serve to make the video far worse than it is. It’s a korean popeye’s commerical by the way.

Anyway so that’s the dump of some of the stuff I spent the mash up week working on. Mash ups are the hardest thing in the world in my opinion. I always find it easier to create new work then to take existing work and mash it up or remix it. You’re always looking for your mash up to be like the taste of Peanut Butter and Chocolate but most of the time you end up with the taste of Tree Bark and Expired Milk. It makes it all the more rewarding when everything comes together.

BLEAWEFEASHFEGHK

Posted by Tim on April 23, 2012
Posted in: Assignments, DS106, Mash up. 1 comment

The title pretty much expresses how I feel right now. I haven’t been able to give my blog the mad love it deserves in a little while. So I figured I won’t be sleeping tonight because I’m way to stressed about my presentation tomorrow because it’ll make or break my grade in a class that has consistently given me trouble all semester long. I can do no right with those assignments no matter how good damn long I spend on them. Anyway, the title also explains my feeling in general towards the mash ups. I’ve been trying to upload some of the mash up work that I did 2 weeks ago but I’ve been running into some copyright filters and they aren’t letting me through. So I’ll be working on getting that through or disputing it and seeing if I can get it up.

So while I’m here I might as well divulge what my plans are for the final project. I’ve always viewed song as one of the best ways to tell a story and music videos are something that I like immensely. One of my favorite bands has this really awesome music video that I really like. The band is Fair to Midland and the song is Dance of the Manatee.

Above is the video and it’s really artsy and kickass and unique. They released another music video for the song Musical Chairs and it was a very disappointing affair however. It basically involves them just standing around in a room playing instruments like every freaking band music video ever.

It’s a nice song but it’s so much wasted potential, so I thought why not design their next music video myself? Do a rough storyboard of what I’d like to see and bring it back to some awesome sauce.

Piano Duel for the ages!

Posted by Tim on April 4, 2012
Posted in: Assignments, Best of, DS106, Mash up. Tagged: . 3 comments

Remember that scene from 1900 when 1900 faces off against Jelly Rolls Morton in a piano duel? Of course you don’t, you probably don’t even remember that movie. To make the scene more memorable, I replaced 1900 with keyboard cat making it a piano duel for the ages. This wasn’t what I originally wanted to use for a project but the other one I was working on ended up taking roughly 50 billion years and I didn’t have the time. So I put it on the to do later pile, started from scratch and made this video instead. Hope you like it.

Doing a little housekeeping

Posted by Tim on March 27, 2012
Posted in: Just for Fun. Leave a Comment

Alrighty, my blog was starting to look a little messy over on the side bar with all the categories stretching on for a while and the latest comments being shown. I decided to update all that. The recent comments side bar option has been removed to conserve space and the categories have been switched to a drop down list to also save space. The categories have also been given heirachy in the form of parent categories. No longer are audio assignment, design assignment and all of those their own parent categories. They are now children of the Assignment category. Assignment is now a child of the DS106 parent category which has Assignments, The Daily Create and Tutorial as children.

Just alerting everyone to the change in the site structure and navigation. Hopefully it makes it easier for everyone to navigate.

It’s my blog so I will do what I want to.

Posted by Tim on March 26, 2012
Posted in: Games, Just for Fun, League of Legends. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

Alright ladies and gentlemen. If you’ve been following my blog then you know that in a previous post I was asked by a friend to do some video game play by plays or whatnot. I had posted a video testing that out for a ds106 Video Project. Probably not the best idea I’ve ever had since I doubt many people would benefit from a tutorial on Jungling in a game they don’t know at all. Anyway, I won’t be doing ds106 forever and I’d like to hang onto this blog in the future so since it’s getting closer to the end of the semester I’m going to start uploading some none ds106 material. People who are interested can watch as I slowly learn how to make high class game videos, analyze different games or tournaments, or just screw around and make a .gif where I put Nigel Thornberry’s face on a disney princess. Also for those of you that read the blog post about theyou’ll know that the video I used was pretty choppy and grainy and not to pretty to look at.

Camstudio could not deal with the high level of graphics and the processing power that is required to run such a game. After searching around for different screen capturing software I found something called Fraps. It’s a screen capturing, screen recording, benchmark making software. I ran a test and the results are shown below in a new 30 second youtube video that I made.

The video looks much better in my opinion. I have yet to test the full capabilities of the software but when I do I will upload a tutorial. Also I will be adding some different categories to the side bar.