Something beautiful

Yesterday’s Daily Shoot was: Find something beautiful and make a photo. Don’t over think it.

What I find interesting is the response to this dailyshoot was. Okay, so there is a lot of flower/ plant photos. And there’s a fair few photos of people and animals.

How cute is this?

But people have also posted photos of sprinkles, shadows on a tissue box, paperback books,and a bank deposit receipt.

 

Wish this was mine, haha! 😀

I have to say, I like these photos more than other totally gorgeous photos.

Why? Because they actually stick out in my mind. These images resonate more because they aren’t something that on first glance I would really consider beautiful. But once you shift your perspective, then you can see the beauty in simple things like sprinkles or  shadows on a tissue box.

As for my daily shoot, it was an idea born from several hours on tumblr combined with a loooooong car drive home and a dead camera battery. I borrowed my Mom’s really nice Nikon (so want to steal it!)  and took this photo fairly quickly.

love.

Why do I find this beautiful?

Well, even though many of my good friends are thousands of miles away, across seas and on different continents, they still make an effort to keep in touch with me.  They send me cute letters, postcards, emails and even packages filled with things they saw and bought for me just because they knew I would like it. This photo goes out to all my beautiful friends who remind me constantly how lucky I am to have them in my life. <3

Can't wait for instantaneous travel!! Flying gets OLD after a while!

 

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.

 

“Tour of Wanderlust” : Photo Sesh 1

I was talking Colleen about all the adventures I was planning for this summer and she has decided to dub it “Tour of Wanderlust 2011.”

The “Wanderlust” part of the name is a joke from when we were trying to decide on the name for our literary magazine last fall. Someone suggested “Wanderlust” which we quickly rejected as a magazine name, but Wanderlust remained as an inside joke.

In regards to keeping up with the daily shoot while traveling, it was actually kind of difficult.  I had lot less internet access than expected. Also, didn’t have that much free time as we were constantly hopping from place to place!

I’m definitely exhausted from all that traveling around and looking forward for a short break before I join my ozzie friend Rose in NYC.

However, despite the chaos of my travels, I managed to snap some pretty good daily shoot photos. Out of the photos I’ve managed to post so far (still have about 9 to go), the only photo I don’t like is the toothbrush one. That photo was really scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of  “I just really needed to snap  a photo, asap!”

I might be posting more photos up from my trip, but depends on how much time I have.  After I catch up to all the rest of my daily shoot, I still have to post the final Rainbow Brite Shoot up from a month ago (wait, has it really been that long?)

Also hoping to catch up with my postcard project and hoping to blog some more about my trip.

So much to do, so little time!

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??)

A week’s worth of Daily Shoot photos

I really like this past weeks daily shoots! I actually remembered to take them the day they were assigned (always a plus!) and they are all so different which is cool.

 

I think the biggest reason why I like them all is because they perfectly seem to represent each day I took them. Normally that doesn’t happen.

These aren’t picture in the actual order I took them  but if we go through the list:

Friday– Computer (had computer issues and thought my computer was tostitos toast!)

Saturday- Fake Mustache one (my friend fell asleep before we were about to go out so I pretended to draw on her to wake her up)

Sunday- Bubble Boy (friends came over for dinner/ studying and then we took a study break to blow some bubbles.)

Monday– action photo (sister came down for a presentation I gave at Kemp Symposium and then she put on a mask I got in this really fab book about vampires)

Tuesday- Bunny photo (went to Passover Seder at my Roomie’s house and then her mom gave us all Easter basket too– They have jewish/catholic household, best  celebrations of the 2 religions 🙂

Wednesday— Sad Karen (SO MUCH HOMEWORK TO DO IT IS RIDICULOUS. Hence the all caps and the sad face D: )

Thursday– Blue Shoots (last day of classes ever since I’m a senior and I’m really going to miss all my good friends at UMW– it was nice to spend time with them AND work on a real project 😉

 

Let’s see what magic I can come up with in terms of taking photos during finals week! Wish me luck girls and boys….

ET Mashups

So lately I’ve been obsessed with Katy Perry’s song ET. I think the lyrics are horrible and very much emphasizes male dominance over women:

“Take me, ta-ta-take me
Wanna be a victim
Ready for abduction”  aka RAPE ME, ALIEN MAN, RAPE ME….

but it’s so damn catchy.  (Kind of like the Friday song, but better?…)

Anyways, I decided to make fun of the song by doing a couple mashups. My original idea was to mashup Charlie Sheen Clips with the ET song.  But in the interest of time (and so Jim Groom won’t kill me because I’m so late in doing this D:) I also decided to mashup this song with a couple other videos I found randomly. I will try to come back to my original idea, but here’s something for now.

So I found this video on Archive.org website and thought it was really cool and trippy! It seemed to blend in with the song pretty well and I didn’t have to do much editing to put them together:

(Having trouble embedding these videos now, so will figure it out later)

ET Trippy Government Video

Then for this Boobah/ ET mashup, the original video is really creepy by itself. Yet, once the ET song, it is EVEN MORE CREEPY.  Sorry about the video quality, it was the best one I could find on youtube.

ET Boohbah

 

NOTE: I really hate Boohbahs. My sister bought me a blue one as an bday one year as a gag gift and ever since I’ve been haunted by their eyes…. Shudder.

 

UPDATED:

 

I finished the Charlie Sheen video! It’s a lot shorter than I expected, but I think it turned out pretty amazing! 🙂

ET Charlie

Dear DS106

Dear DS106,

Sorry for not showing you any love lately. All my other classes have been bogging me down lately and it’s all I can do to stay afloat! But, since I turned in on Tuesday a paper that is worth 35% of my grade, I will have slightly more of a breather before finals! This means I can comment more on other people’s blogs and try to get some other assignments posted that I’ve been wanting to do but haven’t got around to it yet. :]

On a side note about my final project, I’m kind of sad about this week.  I accidentally forgot to take photos for two days because I was so busy working on my paper. D:  So that has kind of ruined my taking a photo every day for 365 days project. >.<

BUT, I did take extra photos on the day after the forgotten photo day, so I guess that makes up for it?

Anyways I uploaded a week’s worth of photos today to flickr so check it out:

This is my favorite of the week.

 

 

 

Also, I did this for fun. It makes me laugh. 😀

Oh and exciting news! The Winter Issue of Aubade just came out and I had two of my photos published in it! So pick up a copy on campus somewhere.

And, I had a couple of my photos accepted to Spurt Literary Magazine (another UMW Lit Mag). I’m pretty excited about it (:

Love,

Sarah

Awesome Mashups

So here are just a few of the mashups I’ve come across lately that I really like 🙂

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0i9acHS_zQ&feature=related

 

I love how the creators mixed Angry Birds and the three little pigs with the events happening in the  Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.  Very funny!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqCyTM1bF6Q&feature=related

Not sure if this next video counts as a mashup at all, but I like how this put this song with people doing cool bike tricks.