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For the sheer joy of working with the material.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Just getting warmed up for camp by making a couple of Bob Fosse choreography animated gifs. His work seems to lend itself to the format. First, the man himself, from The Little Prince:

This was done by downloading the clip from YouTube, then opening in QuickTime Pro and exporting as an image sequence. The first time was a default of 4 frames per second, which was too choppy, so I changed it to 8. Then I tried the Gifninja site our camp director Alan Levine used, but I didn't like it. Too fuzzy. So I used Picasion instead, at fast speed.

Then (always a favorite of mine) the Sweet Charity dance hall girls (this one is subtle): 

For this one I did the same thing with Quicktime, but then tried Make a GIF instead. It lets you use 20 images instead of just 10 like Picasion, but that made a huge file (over 1 MB) so it wouldn't play well. I went back to Picasion.

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Looking at the ds106 collection of campers and counselors, I don't think I'm either one. I've got too much experience to be a camper (and I refuse to bunk with anyone), but I'm not counselor material either.

I didn't go to camp as a kid, except for one New Years when my best friend had a job as a counselor for a camp in Sequoia National Park. She talked me into applying to be camp cook's assistant, and I did it. The cook, Owen, was a taciturn guy with a long black moustache who was painfully shy and pretty much ignored me the whole time. I didn't know how to cook anyway. I had never been to camp. And I had never done more than drive through anywhere with snow. The place looked kinda like this:
 

(Photo: National Park Service)

One day I went for a walk after the breakfast rush. I was a big city traveler - I can still find my way around any city even if I've never been there. But in the woods, in the snow, I got lost. The night before, there had been a bear - I heard about it after I took a little kid to the bathroom in the middle of the night so my friend could get some sleep. There were no landmarks I recognized, just snow and trees. I wandered for awhile till I got to the edge of the national park, then somehow I found my way back in time to chop veggies for dinner. 

The rest of the week, I pretty much stayed in the kitchen. So if you're looking for me, that's where I'll be. 

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My idea of camping is a hotel without room service. Camps have dirt, and insects, and wild animals who make strange noises at night.

Here is my cabin:

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We made this for ds106, but I wasn't sure what assignment to put it under. I think it fits with Recording a Memory, even though it's goofier than that and took more than two stars of work! Filmed with an old Aiptek 1080 camcorder on the spur of the moment, edited in iMovie, audio corrected in Audacity, music is Funkusion presents Back to Funk / Session II (Internet Archive).

Followup -- added an assignment called Sardonic Tours

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An idea for a ds106 assignment, like when you have the TV and the stereo on at the same time, and somehow, it kinda fits.

Kagemusha / Zorba

kagemushazorba.mov Watch on Posterous

Frankenstein / Circle of Life

FrankensteinCircleofLife.mov Watch on Posterous

Kagemusha (1980), music by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (Zorba)
Frankenstein (1910), music by Elton John

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It's been awhile since I've done one, so I followed my own instructions from December 2010 to make this one. It's my favorite scene from The Final Countdown (1980), where the aircraft carrier is about to get sucked into the time vortex and goes back to 1941 as Pearl Harbor is being bombed.

Thanks to Scott Lockman, who suggested on ds106 radio that this would make a good gif. 

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This is just for sharing, since tonight on ds106 radio, Scott Lockman said he's never heard of the series. It was one of my favorites - in syndication, of course.

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For the One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds assignment, I went for leading ladies with cats in classic films.

From:

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961): Audrey Hepburn
Gigi (1958): Leslie Caron
Bell, Book and Candle (1958): Kim Novak
Bringing Up Baby (1938): Katherine Hepburn
The Pink Panther (1963): Claudia Cardinale

I used similar techniques to Alan Levine's 5 cops in 5 seconds, taking clips from YouTube and using iMovie to make this.

The stupid thing is, Posterous won't accept my video files anymore, regardless of codec. Or rather, it accepts them, but won't convert them. I may be moving to Wordpress. Anyway, I had to upload to YouTube to get the embed. 

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Just an idea for an assignment that came to me while watching Fosse (2002). The number Big Spender from Sweet Charity reminded me of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) in their predatory sexuality.

So the assignment is to take a still art image and juxtapose it with a movie clip or animated GIF.

bigspenderclip2.mov Watch on Posterous

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gwtw.mov Watch on Posterous

A clip of cinematic mastery in response to Jim Groom's post The GraMar of Film  - the famous crane shot from Gone with the Wind (1939). Scarlett is trying to find a doctor to help her friend, who's in labor at home, but the scene goes from being a search for a doctor to a representation of the fallen South in the days following the loss of Atlanta.

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This one is part Alternate Book Cover (except that it's a movie poster) but mostly If Movie Posters Told the Truth.

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I got the still from the film, then found the kanji for "samurai" and made sure the phone number was in Tokyo/Osaka format. Created in GIMP, using the color from one man's kimono as the background color. 

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I used GIMP (still working at learning it -- this was great because of the many layers of images: the Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, the Time Machine, and his own film Things to Come).

With Wells himself, ready to give us the talk through the mic, taken from a photo of him broadcasting on the BBC in 1929.

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A friend of mine created this and gave me permission to post it anonymously. That's what happens when you get to talking to people about this class. :-)

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Bernard_Herrmann_-_Vertigo_(theme).mp3 Listen on Posterous

I spent too much time with Gimp, because I could only rotate the middle layer one layer at a time, since I don't really know how to use the program, then whiten out the black circles that resulted.

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