What happens when you forget to make a Valentine for #ds106

The Heat Miser is gonna get ya!!

 

This year I had no idea what I wanted to make for Valentine’s Day, DS106 style.  I made my 2011 Superhero Valentine’s with the help of some of my funny roommates, and  I happened upon on the 2012 Romance Novel Valentine’s cards randomly while shopping.

But now 2013 in Korea, I couldn’t decide what to do.  I feel I have been a lot less creative while I’ve been living here; I haven’t converted anyone to the DS106 cult yet here :/

A few days ago, I was looking on Retronaut for ideas when I found this Valentine. I think it is hilarious because it  so weird!

Since I didn’t make anything for Valentine’s Day 2013 and  broke a 2 year tradition @__@, I know that the Heat Miser must be very unhappy. No….not just unhappy. He would be ANGRY.  What would the Heat Miser do in this situation?

Cook the Blondie! Haha.

PS: I am super impressed with Megan Mc’s 2013 Nerd Valentines! As always, she is rocking nerdom!

My favorite from the set:

I want to program a little robot to say this, haha. Megan rocks at life.

 

GAME ON: Rainbow Brite hits the big time

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but for some reason had gotten totally distracted and forgotten about it until now.

Every so often I check to see how people have been linked to my photos. One day I found that some of my Rainbow Brite photos had been linked to this online game. I was intrigued and decided to check it out. Continue reading

365 Days Worth of Photos

Last Monday I finished my yearlong Dailyshoot challenge! For my final dailyshoot I took Sibling1 along and headed out west. I took photos in two different locations (abandoned house & empty field) before deciding how I want my final shoot to end. The result:

Victory!

Let me tell you, it was really hard taking a (good) photo everyday! Some days, especially when I was traveling, I would take so many good photos it was hard to decide which photo to choose as my dailyshoot. Other days, I had to scramble around just to find something to photograph.

It also was a lot easier to take photos when Dailyshoot.com was running. Once it became defunct in the beginning of October 2011, it took a lot more motivation to go out there and photograph something each day. It also was a lot harder to keep track of which dailyshoot assignment number I was on since I generally didn’t post the photos the day I took them. This lead to double posting assignments for one day and also not having my dailyshoot assignment #’s in the correct sequence.

Still, I had an absolute blast with the project!

Out of all the photos I posted for my dailyshoots, about 2/3 of them are pictures of inanimate objects, landscapes, & plants. The remaining 1/3 is mostly pictures of friends/family, animals and random strangers.

My thanks go out to all my lovely amigos who helped me with my project including: Megan Mc, Elena, Laura, Gina, Karen, Colleen, Marieke, KKY, Rose,  Kayla, Army, Aitak, James, Dan G, Quacclynn, Raven, Sabine, Mario Lopez, Tito, Steph, Ashley, Natalie, Aliyah, Jess C, Z. Efron, Clare, Isaac, Charlotte, Meghan, Jackson & Nikki, George, & last but not least, Jim Groom. (If I forgot anyone, let me know!)

Also, I am extremely indebted to DS106 as whole because it inspired me to start this project and to continue on with it for an entire year.

I used over 10 cameras to take these photos. During the course of the year I managed to kill two cameras  (my 1st camera died of old age (4 years old) :/ and its replacement later fell victim to accidental drowning >.< )

My favorite photos from the year are as follows:

Favorite Photo Shoot: The final Rainbow Brite Shoot  where I managed to get 7 friends plus Jim Groom to dress up in  crazy outfits and take silly pictures.

Favorite Model(s): All my models were truly fabulous! But definitely big kudos to Megan Mc, Elena, & Karen because they were the ones who volunteered to model in a lot of my photos.

Megan, Elena, Karen

 Favorite Photo of a person: I like how this photo is really focused on the dandelion and yet, it’s also all about the person in the background (Elena).

 

Favorite inanimate object photo: Love the image of the flame leaping into the balloon.

 

Favorite altered photo:  I like the extreme color contrast here.

Favorite Animal Photo: Bentley jumping into the lake. Great frozen motion shot.

 

Favorite photo of me: I ended up using a few photos of me for my dailyshoots and this by far is my favorite because it captured such a unique experience.

I was going to start year 2 of 365 photo a day project, but decided that with all the effort I am putting into “366 Creativity Journal project” I don’t really have time to do both properly. So year 2 of photos is going to have to wait a little while, but I definitely plan on coming back to it one day.

Rainbow Brite: A New Legend Begins

Once Upon a time there lived an ordinary girl named Megan. Oh, she was unique enough in her own ways, she possessed high levels of strength and was a giant Star Wars nerd among other things, but she would never possess any supernatural abilities.

Or so she thought, until one day an unusual being appeared to her as she was walking to her digital storytelling class:

Orin, the wise one.

 

 

The strange creature was a Sprite named Orin. He came from the magical planet Spectra, a planet of pure diamond that all the light in the universe has to pass through before it can reach Earth.

Unfortunately, as Orin explained to Megan over a cup of coffee at Hyperion Cafe, Spectra had been taken over by “The Dark Princess.”

 

 

 

 

pure evil

 

 

The Dark Princess was determined to keep all the light and color in the universe to herself.  If she was to succeed, all the life in the universe would die!

A girl named Rainbow Brite, a girl in charge of creating all the colors for Earth, attempted to stop The Dark Princess. But The Dark Princess proved to be too strong of a match for Rainbow Brite. She stripped Rainbow Brite of all her powers, turning her back into the human child named Wisp, and locked her away in a high-security Dungeon.

Hearing this news, Rainbow Brite’s friends, the Color Kids, attempted to free Wisp.

 

 

However, the Color Kids’ haste and overall lack of strategy lead to their undoing. They too were captured,  vested of their powers, and imprisoned.

With Rainbow Brite and the Color Kids out of the way, The Dark Princess relished the impending demise of life as we know it.

But what the Dark Princess didn’t know is that Orin had managed to steal the crystal containing the powers of Rainbow Brite and the Color Kids. Unable to free the kids from the dungeon without great risk to himself, Orin instead chose to flee to Earth to select a  new and stronger Rainbow Brite, along with her friends, the Color Kids.

The reason he had chosen Megan, Orin said, was not because she was the first blonde girl he had stumbled across, but rather he had heard of her superb athleticism  as a rugby player. With these skills, she would be able to kick the ass of the wannabe Princess and restore everything back to way it used to be; A color filled world, although Earth would still be plagued by little things like wars, pestilence, and poverty.

“So,” Orin asked once he finished his tragic tale, his little paws clutching Megan’s hands in supplication, “will you become the next Rainbow Brite and save the world from imminent doom?”

Before Megan could respond, the crowd of people at Hyperion who had been observing this whole scene with blatant interest (seriously, how often do people get the chance to observe a Sprite in real life?), shouted “DO IT, MEGAN!” “Save the Universe!” “RAINBOW BRITE, RAINBOW BRITE!”

Surrounded by this cacophony, Megan blushingly agreed. It was then that she was transformed from an ordinary College student into *** SHAZAMMM! ***

Rainbow Brite!

Now that this matter was settled, the next thing to be done was to select the Color Kids who would accompany Rainbow on her ass kicking mission.

Hundreds of people threw themselves at Rainbow, exclaiming that they would be the best for the job, but Orin and Rainbow already had the perfect crack team in mind.

Thus, the new Color Kids were chosen:

Steph transformed into Lemon Drop, with power over the color Yellow. Lemon Drop possesses a cheery disposition, able to brighten people's days even in the darkest gloom. When she smiles, you get this warm feeling inside you that makes you want to be friends and do what you can to keep her smiling.

Gigi became in charge of the color Pink and was renamed Cereja Blossom. Cereja is the wild child of the team. She is headstrong, but immensely playful. She distracts the competition with her fast talking and sweet exterior, and then packs them a punch of rainbow awesome. All the while they wonder why she wears a onesie with a belly dancing skirt.

Elena was dubbed Naranja Mango. She was to protect the color orange. Naranja is fiery and passionate. She is the instigator, the one with all the plans. Cereja may be a big partier, but Naranja makes the party. She is Rainbow's lead strategist for the mission.

Colleen became Aquamarine de la Greene, controlling the fate of the color green. She is the most considerate of the team, the one who holds all the Bright Colors in check. Aquamarine is laid-back and down to earth, all of which is reflected in her eco-concious style.

Jess, chosen as protector of the color Blue, was called Cobalt Pacific. Cobalt is the most sophisticated Color Kid, but at times she is just as silly as Cereja. She is the best actress on the crew and the best gymnast, able to perform stealthy maneuvers without drawing attention to herself.

Lastly, Karen transformed into the ferocious Red Dawn. She bites, but underneath this bite is a fierce loyalty and rapier wit. Red Dawn is Rainbow Brite's chief wingwoman, protector, and organizer of supplies.

Rainbow Brite and her friends were about to start planning their mission to stop the Dark Princess when they were interrupted by the legendary Jim Groom.

Now Jim Groom was not only the teacher of Digital Storytelling DS106,  the class Megan skipped in order to talk with Orin, but he was also the number #1 fan of the original Rainbow Brite. With her out of commission, Jim Groom wanted to do everything in his power to enact revenge on The Dark Princess.

While the group debated whether or not Jim Groom should join forces with the current Rainbow Brite as a Color Kid, Groom won everyone over for three reasons:

Reason #1- They needed a headquarters on Earth. Groom offered Dupont Hall to become the temporary Color Castle.

Reason #2- So far, the Color Kids were females only.  That was hardly gender equality right there!

Reason #3- Megan skipped THE-MOST-IMPORTANT-DS106-CLASS-EVERRRRR. She needed to do something big to make up for this absence or else she would #faiiil

Thus, Jim Groom became the final Color Kid, his gender proportionally represented in the group much like the proportion of males to females on the UMW campus:

Jim Groom transformed into The Peculiar Purple Pie Man. As the oldest member of the crew, P-man's experiences and friendship with people all over the universe is a tactical advantage. He is made of win and awesome and represents the most bamf color in the rainbow. P-Man has great faith in the talents of his teammates and is always encouraging them to give 300% to the mission.

Finally, with Rainbow Brite and her team assembled in their entirety, it was time for them to save the universe from destruction by The Dark Princess!

 

Coming to theatres in your area soon!

This post would not have been possible without the help of Ms. Colleen Trachy (former DS106ser) who aided me in character description for the color kids! Also, holla at Wikipedia for all the useful info about  the original Rainbow Brite TV show and the various internet sources I used  for the photos of the original Rainbow Brite characters.

 

Future project: Sleepyhead and Wizard of OZ Mashup

Although I have many projects I need to attend to, one that I’ve been thinking about for a while is doing another mashup.

But to explain why I want to do this mashup, I need to discuss my first stage performance ever.

When I was in first grade I got selected to play a munchkin in the stage production of the “Wizard of Oz” that my elementary school was putting on.

I looked like one of these munchkin women, except a lot cuter.

My one and only song for the show was “Ding-dong the Witch is dead.” For weeks before, during, and after the show, I would apparently sing it nonstop, much to the annoyance of my family.

Even now, I can be found randomly humming or singing this part of the song:

” Ding-dong the witch is dead
Which old witch? The wicked witch!
Ding-dong the wicked witch is dead
Wake up you sleepyhead
Rub your eyes, get out of bed
Wake up the wicked witch is dead
She’s gone where the goblins go,
Below – Below – Below
Yo-ho, let’s open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong’s the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead!”

From my *star *performance in the play, my love of the “The Wizard of Oz” was born.  I used to watch the movie version all the time. I have read every book in the Wizard of Oz series by L. Frank Baum; my favorite is definitely: “Ozma of Oz.” I enjoy finding cool Wizard of Oz Memorabilia. For a time I even had sparkly ruby slippers just like Dorothy.

mine were just as cool

Sadly, my feet outgrew them and I had to give then away (I am still kinda sad about this!) For me, the Wizard of Oz isn’t exactly an obsession because I don’t think about it all the time, but its definitely something I like a lot.

So when I heard Passion Pit’s song “Sleepyhead” earlier this year, I immediately thought of “The Wizard of Oz.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0RvPYRRRbEE

Not only is the “sleepyhead” part of the songs is a strong factor for this association, but also the beat itself reminds me of Dorothy and her crew skipping down the yellowbrick road and Dorothy’s house spinning in the tornado.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the yellowbrick road!

As I’m not a fan of the official music video for “Sleepyhead,” and because this song just screams for a “Wizard of Oz” mashup, one of my next projects is make my own video version for  it.

I am not quite sure when exactly this is going to get done as I am going to be running all over the place the next few months, however, I hope to get it done as soon as possible. Of course, it helps that I now have a shiny new Mac to create this video. 😀

Jim Groom and ds106 converted me to the apple family.

 

Groomed4life

So we (David Noel, Kelsey Conway, and me) decided to make movie posters. They are all about Jim Groom, of course.

Behold: Groomed4life!

Poster 1:

 

Poster 2:

Poster 3:

Poster 4: (image credit to Erin O’Neal)

the infamous jim groom

Creation process:

We all sat together and discussed what we wanted the posters to be.

1) Kelsey came up with the idea of pitting Jim Groom with Tim Doom and I added the Rock-n-sock-robots to the mix. Then I photoshopped Jim Groom’s and Colleen’s face on the two boys watching the robots in the original photo.

I was the only one with photoshop so I put all of these together, while the others gave advice and ideas. I think it was Kelsey who came up with the epic movie title:  Groomed4life

2) David came up with the idea for using crazy quotes from Jim Groom that Jim Groom had actually said in class. We decided to add these quotes around the radio We then used the awesome edupunk photo in the background to represent the quote about the old creeper.

3) We decided we had to use someone’s photo from Flickr for our last shoot. We all really liked Erin’s flaming photo and so we used that one. Thanks Erin! We ended up photoshopping a picture of Jim Groom over the person’s face so it looked like Jim Groom had finally taken over the world.

4) Erin offered to take a Jim Groom photo and make it look all fiery and cool. Then I added the Groomed4life logo. Thanks again Erin for taking time to do this.

Great work team! (:

Combining 3 assignments into 1!

Since I have such a crazy final exam schedule, I’ve decided to combine 3 assignments in one!

Thus, I give you part of my post card final project, with the cover of the post card inspired by my love for ds106 (fandom, holla) and the back of the postcard containing my letter to future #ds106sers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creation process:

I knew as soon as we got the fandom assignment I wanted to make some kind of homage to ds106. Then I decided to make a postcard for it because my postcard final project has been sadly neglected for quite a while.

Originally I was doing a lot of work in photoshop to make the collage of all my photos, but I was having some issues making it turn out exactly like I wanted it.

I made the collage in photoshop, then added the border and #ds106 is for life in picnick. Then it was back to photoshop where I added the barbed wire look, the red Xs and the red heart (all of those additions were created using photoshop brushes I downloaded a long time ago).

The back of the postcard I had to make short and to the point. I could have said a lot more, but you work with what you can do. The back was created using photoshop.

Now to slay my two finals before our #ds106 final tomorrow (or is it today since its almost 1am??)

Ds106 really is for life

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Sarah who had to do a video essay for her digital storytelling class, ds106.

She decided to do it on her favorite movie ever: Stardust.

She spent hours and hour and hours and hours and hours and hours TIMES infinity on the project because otherwise her professors Jim Groom and his alter ego Tim Doom would disown her #4life.

However, on occasion she got bored and paused to take funny photos with her friends who were also slaving away on this project.

 

 

Finally, she finished it and uploaded it (after several attempts) to the magnificent site called Youtube.

She eagerly awaited comments on her videoessay which covered many things in fifteen minutes worth of  moive clips, including the important issue who’s hot and who’s not in the movie.

But lo and behold, Sarah soon got a comment she never expected:

What was this?!? Outraged, she checked her youtube account.

 

But this was a class assignment! She thought.  It’s a commentary to try to get people to WATCH the film!! It’s not copyright infringement!

After consulting with several people and going to Youtube’s’s copyright school and researching what the library of congress says about fair use copyright, Sarah decided to protest the video removal.

She was temporarily stopped by this warning:

but decided to continue on anyway because her case was strong; there is no way she would be turned down.

But the people behind youtube (ahem ahem google ahem ahem) were evil and all powerful. At whim, they decided who were copyright infringers and who weren’t without  even taking any evidence into account. They denied her claim within seconds of receiving it and delivered a notice to her  dorm room the very next hour.

Why Hello there.

Sarah got a legal counsel and amassed a huge crowd of her support for the case.

 

But the power of youtube was a mighty force, and caused Sarah’s case to lose. Certain that the judges had been tampered with, Sarah’s lawyers called for a mistrial. Eventually her case made it all the way up to the highest court in all the land: The Wizengamot.

Everyone was confident of Sarah’s right to post the videoessay on youtube, but the Supreme Court was deep in the pocket of youtube and they denounced her in front of the entire world:

For her crime, Sarah was banished #4LIFE to a jail in Siberia, never again to use a computer or bathe in running water. Instead, she would be in servitude to google and she would only be allowed to eat stale bread and moldy bananas.

Fearing repercussions  for creating this assignment in the first place, Jim Groom and Tim Doom hightailed it to the Australian outback where they continue broadcast #ds106 radio and #ds106 TV from their underground homes of Coober Pedy.

Meanwhile, Sarah remains incarcerated in Siberia. She is biding her time  until it is the perfect moment for her to escape and  take down the evil youtube/google corporation and all the other people who insist on prosecuting innocents for “copyright infringement.”

A Day in the life of Zach Whalen

This is a twitter stream explaining a day in the life of Dr. Zach Whalen when he has to advise two students, Carah Counts and Alaina Sur, on their independent study. Jim Groom also makes an appearance as somewhat of devil’s advocate.

Here is the web version of the story. (Special thanks to Martha Burtis who helped me figure out how to post it online!)

And here is the screenshot version of it. (I recommend reading it from bottom to top)

 

 

 

Creation Process:
This idea came about because my roomie Elena South and I are actually doing an independent study with Dr. Whalen this semester and sometimes given our topic we are studying, we discuss very odd things. This twitter feed is an alternate reality version of some of our conversations taken to the extreme. However in real life Elena and I are not creepy stalkers, I promise!

The story was written by Elena and I on typewithme.com so we could edit it together in real time. Once we had the story, it was up to me to change the twitter feed using Firebug. Let me tell you, this took forever. For some reason I kept  accidentally screwing up the code when I tried to edit it in notepad++. There’s a lot of information I needed to change on this story in order for it to work and it definitely wasn’t easy. I ended up having over 40 saved html files as backups for everytime I would change stuff and save it. But, even thought it took a long time, I am really happy with the results.

Oh and if you click/type  the link in the tweet when Jim Groom talks about Carah’s Flickr feed it will take you to a real picture of a snake with it’s fangs out.

Special thanks to Martha Burtis’s great tutorial!