I had hoped to participate in the Western-themed #ds106 this term, and what with teaching a little less than usual I thought I’d have time. Not. Too many grant applications, research, award applications, and lots and lots of committee work. Alas.
But I did do today’s Western-themed #ds106 Daily Create: caption a Frederic Remington painting. The instructions were to “add a caption to the painting to bring the west into the modern age. Make it funny (yet stay respectful).” Well, not sure I brought it into the modern age, but I did try for the rest of those instructions.
The original is “Miners Prospecting,” public domain on Wikimedia Commons.
The one with the pan just looked so guilty…
I used GIMP to add the text to the image. I didn’t have any fonts that looked Western-y enough, so I went to dafont.com and downloaded “Duality.” I felt like it mixed oldish-looking with a kind of sense of joking fun.
Every time I do this I forget how to add fonts to my computer so GIMP can use them. Fortunately, there’s the internet. This page was helpful.
The hardest part was picking a colour for the text that made it stand out and be readable, and yet didn’t just sort of fade into the picture as if it were part of it. The yellowish colour worked best, as it fit the aesthetic of the image better than like blue or something, yet also clearly looks added on (which was the idea!).
The ds106 daily create for Jan. 4, 2016, was to do some research on Spaghetti Westerns. I relished this encouragement to do so because, well, the whole idea has never made sense to me. What does pasta have to do with Westerns? And why specifically spaghetti?
I realize that by saying all this I admit I know nothing about Spaghetti Westerns, which is certainly true. I know next to nothing about Westerns at all. The genre has just never really appealed to me, even though I grew up in what is technically the “West.” Small town Idaho had its share of cowboys and cowgirls, and rodeos were big. But that’s really not the same thing now, is it? We had sheriffs and saloons, but things were mighty tame by the time I was born out there in the wilds of small town Idaho.
I don’t know…something about the aesthetic, or about the over-the-top masculinity and violence, about the sexism…it just has all not been attractive to me.
So I am taking it on as a challenge to find something I like in Westerns, by joining #western106 this term, an open, online #ds106 that was supposed to be taking place with Alan Levine at KSU, but that didn’t have enough students (what were they thinking?). So it’s up to use open online participants to corral the wagons.
And as a start, I’m learning a bit about Spaghetti Westerns.
“The name ‘spaghetti western’ originally was a depreciative term, given by foreign critics to these films because they thought they were inferior to American westerns.”
“In the eighties the reputation of the genre grew and today the term is no longer used disparagingly, although some Italians still prefer to call the films western all’italiana (westerns Italian style). In Japan they are called Macaroni westerns, in Germany Italowestern.”
So spaghetti westerns are macaroni westerns too. The pastas multiply! And if that weren’t enough, some Westerns that focused on political topics having to do with Mexican revolutions were, according to the same site, known as “Zapata Westerns,” but sometimes as “Tortilla Westerns.”
I can’t help but wonder what Canadian-made Westerns might be called. Somehow “Maple Syrup Western” just doesn’t have an authentic ring to it.
I also learned from that same site that A Fistful of Dollars (1964) is a remake of a Kurosawa film called Yojimbo (1961), and Wikipedia tells me that Yojimbo was heavily influenced by “the 1942 film noir classic The Glass Key, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett‘s 1931 novel.” I haven’t heard of any of these except the 1964 Western, and now I’m interested to follow this particular thread (perhaps mainly because, well, I just really like film noir).
“Initially, the Spaghetti Western protagonist was a loner/outcast in the Eastwood mold — not a traditional John Wayne-style “good guy” in a white hat, but a morally flexible type, more unpredictable and cynical.”
Okay, that sounds intriguing to me. I can get on board with that to some degree, though I’ll have to deal with the sexism and unnecessary violence somehow.
Also, the genre changed later with the political films (late 60s), according to the same site:
“The lone hero was out; collectivist themes were in. Many took as their historical basis the border battles between Mexico and the United States (leading to their occasional branding as “Zapata Westerns”).”
Since I haven’t seen these, I can’t comment on whether or not they have racist or xenophobic overtones (that will have to wait until I see one or two).
A number of sites said that one thing that makes Spaghetti Westerns stand out in part because they were much more violent than other Westerns, apparently. And when I learned that Tarantino was a fan of spaghetti westerns, well, after this, I wasn’t surprised. I haven’t seen Django Unchained, but now, at least, after reading all this, I understand the reference to Django (1966).
So after all of this I am more intrigued about Spaghetti Westerns, and will find myself some time to watch a couple (after I’ve finished a lecture on Apocalypse Now that I have to give for a class next week!).
I am going to do an instructional video for one of my philosophy courses, on Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” I spent quite awhile this morning looking around the web for videos or animated gifs of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain, having it fall down again, and starting over. I wanted to use something like that for my course video. I found a few videos and gifs, but none of them were, so far as I could see, openly licensed.
What’s an instructor to do? Create their own animated gif, of course! Thanks to #ds106, I can.
It didn’t turn out exactly as I would have wished (do these things ever?); I would have liked to have had Sisyphus move the boulder in from the left after it falls down, but the icon of the man in the original wasn’t shaped in the right way for that to look good (he would have his hands in the air while pushing the boulder sideways!). And I just don’t have the time right now to change his arms so he is pushing the boulder sideways with them. That wouldn’t be too hard to do, really, with this black-and-white, blocky image, but I am out of time today.
Now, because it’s going into a video, I’ll either have to credit the original icon maker and The Noun Project in the credits, or put that info on the gif itself (I’d rather not), or just buy the icon from the Noun Project itself. Yeah, that’s the easiest thing…and I am getting so much value out of this one it’s way more than worth it!
I love how #ds106 is useful not just for fun (and it certainly is useful for that…we all need fun in our lives!) but also for my work. Excellent.
Two more…
I decided to add to the original by making the “sigh” obvious:
And then, because Camus says at the end of the short essay on Sisyphus that “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” (and my video will talk about this), I made one where he is very happy.
After downloading the original icon from the Noun Project (see link in caption for the gif)…
I put a white layer under the transparent black icon.
I selected the rock using the circular select tool, did command-x to “cut” it, then created a new, transparent layer and used command-v to paste. In GIMP, that gives you a floating layer that you have to anchor down to the new layer you created.
I made a few duplicates of the transparent layer with just the rock.
I selected the man using the free select tool, and then pasted him onto one of the layers with just the rock. So then I had a transparent layer with just the man and the rock together, and some with just the rock (important for when the rock rolls down!). I also had a layer with just the mountain, and then the white background.
I merged the mountain layer to the white background layer and duplicated many times.
I duplicated the man-and-rock transparent layer many times.
Then it was just a matter of moving the man-and-rock layers up and up to the right, incrementally in the stack, putting a mountain layer beneath each one. (I keep forgetting to take screen shots while I’m in the process, to help explain!).
Similarly, on the top of the stack (GIMP animates from bottom of the stack to the top) I moved the just rock layers down and to the left incrementally in the stack, with mountain layers between each one.
At that point, what you should do is test the animation using Filters -> Animation -> Playback. You’ll get a bunch of white mountain layers between the moving man-and-rock layers so it looks a bit weird, but that way you can easily move the man-and-rock transparent layers against the white background if you need to.
If you do what I did, and merge the man-and-rock layers down to the white mountain layers before testing this out, then you have to do “undo” a bunch of times to unmerge them so you can move the man-and-rock again. I did this several times over. And if you save in between, I think “undo” only goes back as far as you saved. Because there were a few layers when he’s at the very top that I wanted to change the position of the man-and-rock of, but I couldn’t b/c I couldn’t unmerge them. D’oh.
When I was happy with the playback, I merged the man-and-rock and rock layers onto the mountain on white background layers.
Then I added some pauses in the timing; I wanted there to be a pause before the rock rolls back down, and between when it rolls down and he starts over again. I also wanted there to be a pause when he starts up again, facing the mountain with his rock, like there’s a little sigh of here-we-go-again. To do that, I changed the titles of the layers to add millisecond timings: “start (500ms)”, “before rock falls (400ms)”, etc.
Then when I exported it as a .gif file, I slowed down the animation by putting in the box where it says “delay between frames where unspecified,” and changed that from 100 to 200 ms.
Though some of us focused on one and others on the other, many of the open, online #ds106 participants came together to create a joint radio show combining themes from both summer #ds106 experiences.
The result is a fairy tale, with some themes from the tv show The Prisoner, which #prisoner106 was based on.
Ron Leunissen & I volunteered to edit all the bits together, but really, Ron did the bulk of the work. I did three scenes and he did all the rest! John Johnston did the whole of scene 7, the one that is only sound effects of the Princess in the labyrinth, with no dialogue.
Here is the show, which was premiered on ds106radio on Sunday, Sept. 6, 8pm UK time, during the ds106 Good Spell show. It is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. Please credit “DS106 open players” as the creators.
Many sound effects were used from freesound.org that were licensed CC0, and those are not credited here. Some sound effects were created by the collaborators on this show themselves. The following are credits for sound effects that require attribution.
It’s been quite awhile ago, but for week 5 for #prisoner106 one of the assignments was to create a campaign video because we seemed to be missing a Number 2 and we might need to hold an election.
I’m treating this very belated video as a kind of final project, since for it I made:
… all of which were created specifically for this video. Yes, it took me a long time to finally finish the video, but I decided I wanted to follow through on my idea for it even if it’s very late!
The Process
I did screen recordings of several clips of The Prisoner (the episodes are all found on the #prisoner106 site) to use in this video (see credits for which episodes0. Since I didn’t need audio I just used screencast-o-matic, which is a free screen recorder (though with the paid version, which is very cheap, you can avoid the watermark with the company logo on it, which I did). I thought I might want audio with one of the clips, and followed instructions here for how to use Quicktime and Soundflower on my Mac to record the screen and system audio. Problem was that I got a horrendous echo. Actually, the effect was kind of cool, but not really what I was going for. Good thing I decided I didn’t need the audio recorded, but when I do I’ll need to figure out how to do it right.
2. I was a bit stymied by how to get my animated gif into the video. I thought maybe I could just import it into iMovie and it would work, but no go. There are a number of workarounds posted on the web, but they were time consuming and didn’t seem to lead to the result I wanted anyway. So I just did a screen recording of the gif against a white background. Since I had made the gif pretty small in order to reduce the file size, it doesn’t show up very large in the video. I could have scaled it up using GIMP, but in my experience, once I try scaling something up from when it was smaller the quality goes way down.
3. The images were imported directly into iMovie and I used the “Ken Burns” effect to give them a little movement. The one with the campaign poster was a little challenging because it was so long vertically, but hopefully the panning down works okay. Images I didn’t make myself (the question marks and the number 2) were CC0 from Pixabay.
4. I recorded the voiceover audio in Audacity, where it’s much easier to edit than in iMovie, and then imported it. I wasn’t sure how to add the voiceover to the video, but selecting it and dragging it over the video put it in the right place (leaving room for background music below the video). Since the voiceover and the video weren’t synced up well, I had to cut up the imported audio and make space between the parts to sync with the video. I looked online to find out how to do that in iMovie (click on the voiceover, go to “Modify,” then “split clip”).
5. Background music came next (see credits below). I wanted the first part of the video to be a kind of “retrospective” of past Number 2’s, a bit nostalgic and somewhat sad. Then I wanted the second part, where I talk about the Village Philosopher as saving the day, to be rather over the top patriotic or heroic. Kevin MacLeod’s great site, imcompetech.com, has wonderful descriptors to help you find the right thing (the “epic” category was great for finding the second piece of music!).
6. After realizing that I had used many pieces of music from MacLeod, and that I wanted to thank him for providing such great music with a CC BY license, I went to his donate page and donated. I have decided that when I can, I usually prefer to pay for some great service or app or something rather than “paying” in other ways like having lots of data collected about me and used in ways I don’t really understand. Plus, people like him are doing a great thing and I want to say thank you!
The leadership at #prisoner106 has disappeared. Number 2 hasn’t been seen for a couple of weeks. My Super True Friend I am Talky Tina filled in for a week, but now it seems to be a free for all. Participants are still making art, though, because we are #4life.
I developed an idea for one and started working on it (I made my campaign button), but then . . . I found a way out! I escaped for a week. I’m still not sure how . . . I was out for a swim, flagged down a passing boat, and managed to get away with them. Rover didn’t come after me; maybe the disarray at the top in the Village means Rover is taking a break too.
I’m not sure where we went; I just know there were glaciers! I snapped a couple of pics.
It was a lovely time away, but then they turned on me! I woke up a week later, back in the Village. Someone must still be in charge, somewhere.
When I got back I was even more determined to run for office. We need someone who won’t just follow orders, who will ask questions and demand answers. Who better than a philosopher?
The process
I used the poster design from the “Free for All” episode, adding a couple of new elements such as the button and the tag line at the bottom.
I made this using GIMP.
1. I had the head shot already from the Village information card I made during week 1. I just copied and pasted that layer onto a new image with a white background.
2. I used the Filters menu, chose Distort (I think) and then Noise Generator to add some noise to the image. I wanted it to looks a little like it had been badly photocopied and blown up. I also used the smudge tool on my hair because the edges were too stark.
3. I used the eraser tool with a “smoke” brush to do the effect of the image fading out at the bottom and on the left side (this is what the images on the posters in the episode looked like, approximately). I also did some erasing at the top of the image.
