ct101 – Page 5 – CT101 Digital Storytelling

Internet’s Boy & Domain Name Assignment

Hmm what shall be my domain name?

To be honest I came up with 3 different names that has a personal meaning behind it.

The first one is slimshakey – this name is an inspiration from my favorite rapper eminem

He goes by the name of SlimShady. However my name is Shaikh but pronounced Shake and so SlimShakey was born back in 2015 the reason I say 2015 is because that is the name I go by on my youtube channel and the persona I want to have. Kind of like this alter ego mixing both personalities, the quiet shy person I am at home and the energetic outgoing person I am outside.

The second is brownprincezuko. Based off Avatar The Last Airbender, Zuko is my favorite character besides Sokka lol. On Instagram that is my username and so I thought mixing myself and him together sounds fun.

The third is slimshakeystudios, I always wanted to create a brand or product with my name so having the word studios makes it sound more legit. I am trying to pursue in acting so having a legit acting portfolio website to showcase my highlights can be nice.

What do y’all think? Comments your thoughts!

Now on to the Internet’s Own Boy Video, this video was very interesting because things like these I am very into. This felt like I was watching a thriller type of documentary. Aaron was a genius and he should be praised, it is just due to unfortunate circumstances what led to his action at the end. The biggest takeaway I got from the video was a quote he said ,”what is the most important thing in the world that I might be working on right now.”

Based on that quote I thought of this photo, There is so much negativity in 2020, we need unity and have to work together to make this world a better place. It starts with us to create change and influence our younger generations for a brighter future.

Hate dies, Love Arrives.

The Internet’s Own Boy!

When I was watching the documentary, it caught my family’s attention. My siblings were watching it with me because the things Aaron Swartsz would say in the film was mindblowing! Half way through the film I told them it was an assignment. I guess my siblings were doing the assignment with me afterall.

When Aaron said, “Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in” it caught my attention. This is because I have a hard time doing that. I’m a very reserved individual and I have a hard time revealing things. But after looking at this statement, it really inspired me to fuse things I learn together.

Assignment #4 – DS 106 Part 2

Hello everyone!

For this blog post, I will attempt a Visual assignment from the DS 106 website. The project called “Summarize a movie with Animated GIFs” requires you to tell the story of a movie with 10 GIFs or less.

Summarize a movie with Animated GIFs

So, I thought about all the wonderful movies I can play with!

For this project, I chose The Little Mermaid.

After choosing a fine movie to renovate, I then proceeded to Pixlr to combine all the delightful GIFs I found and tell its story. And…

Voilà!

(That’s as far as I get with French, by the way)

As much as I love my creation. I cannot tell if it was done properly as I’m not sure if the GIFs are supposed to move since they didn’t in the original assignment.

Nonetheless, I think it came out absolutely splendid!

I hope this will inspire you to create your own movie story.

Digital Storytelling Project Flexibility Assignment

While I was on the DS106 Assignment Repository, I chose visual assignments because I’ve always liked those. When trying to pick which assignment to do, I couldn’t decide. It took me a while to find and decide which one I liked best and felt like I could do. When I finally decided, I choose Pop Star Out of Place.

However, I didn’t pick a Pop Star because I had a different picture in mind. Firstly I opened up Photopea to create my assignment. Secondly, I opened Pixabay to find a good quality picture of a river. Once finding the perfect one I opened it on Photopea.

For my “Pop Star” I selected two characters from one of my favorite shows, Friends. Joey and Chandler have so many funny moments in Friends that it was hard to pick. I found an image that goes well with this background. The only problem was that the image I picked wasn’t really transparent.

I knew I had to use the Magic Wand or Magic Cut to fix this. I took a while to crop out the white and grey but this is how my final result turned out…

The techniques I learned while creating this can be very useful for my future assignments. I can even tell a whole story using the same methods. I do hope to better my skills at editing such images so they can look more realistic. Both Photopea and Pixabay were easy and fun to use to create this. If I were to do another one, I would’ve chosen a different assignment to experiment more. Another assignment that stood out to me and that I want to try was Word Cloud.

Word Cloud was harder to work with and I kept having difficulties trying to open it up. However this was one of the first that caught my eye and I’m still going to try it soon 🙂

The Internet’s Own Boy – Reflection Post

For a longer reflection post,

We would like you to watch the portrait documentary of Aaron Swartz, The Internet’s Own Boy. Swartz was a prodigy web developer that participated in some seminal web projects – RSS, Creative Commons licensing, and Reddit.

He founded Demand Progress which successfully campaigned against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) with a broadly adopted 24 hour internet blackout of well know sites like Wikipedia. Swartz was later arrested by M.I.T. police for systematically downloading thousands of academic articles from JSTOR and federal prosecuted with charges of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act. Facing possible jail time, Swartz committed suicide at the age of 26.

Larry Lessig who was a mentor, colleague, and friend to the much younger Swartz commemorated his life and work with Lessig’s appointment as Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School with a lecture titled “Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age.”

**Assignment – In a new blog post, find a moment in either the documentary about Swartz or the Lessig talk that you relate to as an important idea/moment in Swartz’s work as a programmer and/or activist. Tell us why you find it significant and find/make a visual artifact that represents your thinking as well and embed it in the post.

Picking a Domain Name!

Domain Names!

It’s time to choose a domain name that can represent your digital self! <– (we will watch this video in Zoom class together)

You can’t (and shouldn’t) pick just anything.. this is important!

It has to be unique and also available! It should be relevant – it could be based on your real name, a nickname and or something meaningful to you.

You will need to search for its availability using a domain registrar and you can pick from a number of different ‘top level domains (TLD)’ – for example .com, .net, .us, and .org – then you can have an example like – “mypersonalsite.net”

As we go forward to select and register our domain names (don’t do this on your own please, I will be walking you through the process in class next week!) You’re also going to need web hosting, which will allow you to put files up online and will be discoverable through your new domain name! We are going to use a form of ‘shared hosting’ where you get a portion of a server – think of it as having an apartment in a building. With this shared hosting you will be able to do a lot of things including installing your own instance of WordPress! (via WordPress.org and not wordpress.com – they are a lil different) With wordpress installed you can then start building your website for your domain name. I will cover a series of demonstrations on how to do this and I will record all of the demonstrations and tutorials.

We use a company called Reclaim Hosting, with which we have a contract with so you can enter a coupon code and start your account for free.

The coupon code will be e-emailed to everyone starting next week – so I will be reminding you to check your York college e-mail address to get the code.

**This Week’s Blog Post Assignment: Write a blog post that shares a few of the potential domain names that you would consider using for your website. List them and say a few words about why they would be good examples for the website that you will build.

What will your new website be about? This part is totally up to you! If you wish, you can use the website project itself for a specific project, for example, perhaps you want to share your passion for cooking and poetry. Which means you will be primarily writing blog posts about cooking and poetry. This can also be applied to sports, or gaming, or politics or journalism, or simply put, website that fused together many interests as well as your ct101 assignments. Share your thoughts, excitements, fears and any other sentiments about how you are feeling about this next chapter in your life as a website owner! Please include a few hyperlinks and or screen shots of some of your favorite websites, let us know why you like them!

Assignment 4 : DS106 PART 2

We start off going to the DS106 Website!

The assignment I will be doing today is taking a famous person

and adding a quote that the person never said. I thought It would be pretty

funny and fun to try this from the visual assignment section.

From this photo I took Michael Scott from the office

saying a famous quote from Spiderman and fusing it together.

For anyone that seen both the show and movie, this quote actually

funny enough makes sense which is why it looks more legit.

I choose this assignment because visual assignments have a massive variety of creative options and since I like making things outside the box I felt that this type of assignment would be best fitting for me. Next time I will try to challenge myself by doing a writing or video assignment!

Are Memes Art?

YES, YES YES ! Memes are definitely art. They’re Internet Art, which makes them even more special because everyone is on the internet now. Everyone has seen some classic memes like this one

Other come across memes when they’re trending. Either way memes some of my favorite way of expressing a feeling. That’s what art is all about to be honest and memes help me release stress and they’re…

Some people don’t believe memes are art because they’re so used to seeing painted artworks, photography, sculptures or designs, that they don’t realize that there more outlets of art. Everyone creates art in different ways. Not only to express a feeling but to tell a story, for influence, to highlight a social issue, or to communicate with others.

Yes they are so sit tight and get creative with memes!!

Assignment #4 – DS 106!

Hi everyone!

For my first assignment, I chose to do something with typography. I had a little intro to typography in my graphic design class and decided to try my hand at this cipher assignment because it looked pretty cool!

Cipher Typography Photo Images

Basically, you can encode any phrase that you want into a cipher, and use these alpha-numerical digits to form a picture. The final product should have two versions: one with the cipher, and one with the translated message.

For my project, I encoded my message to Base32 using Cryptii.com

As for the content, I kept using the theme of apples. You should know by now that I’m a huge anime fan, and I couldn’t think of a more perfect phrase to encode than this one:

Ver. 1 : Encoded

Ver. 2 : Decoded w/ under layer

This took me around 3+ hours to color and complete in Photoshop, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out! If you zoom in on the second image, the letters created this cool effect with the color under them. I had to make the cipher font really small because the spaces between the letters looked kind of inconsistent if they were any larger.

For my second assignment, I chose to try doing a book cover design.

Apocalyptic Alternative Book Cover

I’ve never really done any formal design projects like this, so I thought it would be interesting to try this. I hope I’ll get to learn a thing or two about what colors I should choose, what appeals to the audience etc. I think that this could go in soooo many directions: supervillains, killer robots, maybe even zombies!

Can’t wait to try it out!

DS 106 Assignment

This week’s assignment on DS 106 was pretty interesting. I got to explore some pretty dope content that I think I could possibly use for my own website when the time is right.

This week we were task with finding an assignment that we could try now and another in which we would later develop the skills to do it later. The first assignment I chose was from the “Mashup Assignment: Storytelling Through Text.”

If you direct your attention to the below this text, I’ve left a picture of what the page looks like. I also have hyperlinked the assignment name in the text.

In this assignment, I had to create a story through text. I’ve seen many of these examples on Youtube ads or on my Facebook timeline. Most of the examples I’ve seen have a thriller like a theme. It starts off as a normal conversation through text and one person always appears to be in trouble.

To complete this assignment, all I needed was my iPhone and an app called “Texting Story.” With this app, I have the ability to create a text tread between two or more individuals. Also, I’m able to edit the names of the people I’m texting and able to screen record the whole thing.

This is what the app looks like for iPhone users

This app is quite effective in creating this assignment. The harder part is just coming up with a storyline to make the text thread interesting. It was a little weird because I was basically talking to myself. But I made it as interesting as possible.

Here is the finished product of my recreation of “Storytelling Through Text.” Hope it is as entertaining as it was creating it!

The second part of the assignment was to find something that I needed more informative knowledge to create. For this assignment, I wanted to learn how to create my very own Logo. this assignment could be found in the Visual Assignment folder.

This how the assignment looks. I wanted to know more about this process because when creating my own blog website, I intend on creating making my very own to put off my site. This would personalize my work a little bit more and people tend to do better with remembering visual rather than words. I would love to create a logo that helps me become memorable with my CT101 peers.

To do this website I’m not sure what I would have to use as yet. But I intend on doing some more research. I’m pretty sure in this day and age I could find some app to help me with the process.

Louannie N. Smith

Digital storytelling

For this project I have chosen to do one of the visual assignments and one of the video assignments.

In the visual assignment I will have to create a logo. I have chosen this assignment because I always imagined myself creating my own logo representing something that I love to do or even myself, so this is a great time to start doing so. To start this, I will need to find a website that will allow be to create my own logo.

However, in the video assignment I will have to make a video from the perspective of my character. I think this assignment will be very interesting because it’s going to force me to really focus on who I really am.

To really do these assignments correctly, I think I will have to make more than 5 attempts, especially for the logo project. This is because I am not familiar with the websites that help with these kind of things, so I will explore multiple sites to find the good one.

Both assignments will not take me one attempt because I am not use to creating and editing videos or pictures. However, once I get the hang of it, it will help me for the future. Imagine I have a business or company of my own and I used these techniques. Less stress for me!

Heres an example of a logo I created for a bakery shop.

Assignment 4 DS106 Assignment!

Today I will be working on the DS106 Assignment Bank

Click on the photo above!

In terms of my two selections I picked one visual and one mashup

Here is my visual assignment!

I picked this visual poster because I thought it would be something

cool to do later on in the future. Customizing a current poster and making

it silly always seems like a fun idea.

Next is my mashup assignment!

For this assignment I have picked this because I thought it would

be cool to take two brands and mash them together.

This is the assignment I will be doing!

The photo above is my take on the mashup assignment.

I combined both the McDonald’s slogan I’m loving it with Dunkin Donuts.

I felt that these two slogans go well together and it just seemed fun to do

Assignment #4 – DS106 Exploring

Today, I will attempt one assignment and discuss another from the DS106 Assignment Repository website.

For my first assignment, I chose a visual assignment called Pop Star Out of Place by Courtney Rodenbough!

Pop Star out of Place

This assignment asks you to take a picture of a pop star and put them in a place where you would probably never see them. Their example is the following:

First, I searched for an image of a pop star on google and saved it to my computer. Then, I searched for a background I thought would be odd for our pop star and kept that too.

I used the website Pixlr to cut out Ariana Grande from a concert and place her in the background I chose.

And…

Voilà! We have our pop star out of place!

After completing the first assignment, I searched for other projects I could be interested in.

The next one that caught my eye was the following hyperlinked photo…

This assignment, submitted by Jim Groom, instructs you to pick a movie poster and animate it.

Why not choose your favorite! (I thought)

Now, it may seem simple to do, but I wouldn’t get past choosing my favorite movie poster to work on.

However, our friend (the author of this assignment) posted a link to a tutorial from Michael Branson Smith. –> Click Here to Visit

That being said, I do hope to someday be able to complete such artistry!

Learning to simply photoshop might not cut it this semester. I believe there is more to a simple meme or assignment, such as the ones described above. We need to learn to create movement and add sound to images and videos, starting from scratch. Those are skills I hope to gain this semester in CT101!

Digital Storytelling Project Flexibility

There is A LOT of CT101 – Digital Storytelling Project Flexibility..

***Below are the Zoom class Video recordings from 9/24, 10/1 & 10/6 with this project demonstration, description and process – enjoy!***

Professor Michael Smith introduced me to the DS106 Assignment Repository several years ago. I am glad that he did!

Now that we are getting comfortable with publishing blog posts to our class website, embedding media like images, GIFS, videos and hyperlinks, its time to push things further with content creation and deciding on how you will go about it.

Prof. Smith wrote the following in a blog post from a previous semester;

“In CT-101 you will have the opportunity to create many, many different pieces of media throughout the semester. Inspiration for these projects can come from a number of places. Two are websites that inspired this class and are hosted by a digital storytelling class at the University of Mary Washington.

One is their ds106 assignment repository which has project prompts that are categorized by a variety of media types (visual, design, audio, video, mashup, writing, fanfic, and animated gifs). You can browse through and sort by most examples completed, most viewed, newest, and more..

The second is also a site known as the daily create which gives a daily project prompt to “make something” using various media. If you post the completed piece with tags to the sites they feed from, you’ll see your work on that page as well.

Finally you can also browse through the main feed of the old CT101 site and see works completed by students in the previous semester. Or find a particular site that has a media piece and/or project type of interest to you (Tumblr and/or Reddit can be fun for this – Photoshop Battles is a favorite of mine.

Browse through these sites and find two projects that you think you would like to do. One that you believe you already have the skills to do or you believe you could figure out on your own. And another (hopefully of a different media type) you don’t know how to do yet and would like to learn.”

*The ASSIGNMENT – In a New Blog Post – working from the DS106 or the Daily Create site select, describe and hyperlink to two assignments/project ideas and tell us why you’ve chosen them. What do you think you’d need learn to do them? How many of these kinds of projects do you think you should be doing in this semester so that you might learn and build both emergent storytelling skills and use new tools to create them? Why do you think these skills are or are not important? Be sure to actually complete one of the assignments and add it to your blog post. Also, be sure to leave a comment or two on one or more of your classmate’s blog posts! Prof. Seslow will go over a example in our class time and screen record the process.

*Below are 3 various Zoom class recordings taken from 9/24, 10/1 & 10/6 with the project demonstrations, descriptions and process – enjoy!

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/OugtiaQ9Ea39tzNX8fr6yLWQhgk-KS2laZ-OvKXe-6142y-KklI9BqtkhkIQ7gd6.9nPnxhVslwgiDtSd

Passcode: $Br7G4EJ

Above – recorded from 9/24

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/u6ZGsEMBkdZpMIaG8tk1iO0879fjd8TR38K_apWG3CF_Go_FdOwfdPyPLL2qjjZK.3E9uH2zLNqVsLIW7

Passcode: wr^NJsw1

Above – recorded from 10/1

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/play/fzWkSKAQ2BVKsHEn0y6XWiiCu78SKky2nhn41aOZH0_s2K1F8kckVIbNagbS-W0a1wsm8Mxd9WlQVkFL.qFzO4zftRKlE6cpP

Passcode – R!4?UW3q

Above -recorded from 10/6

Assignment #3 – Memes = Art?

Hi everyone!

Memes are a form of self expression, much like many other renowned artworks, so why is there such a hesitance when it comes to acknowledging them as art?

Something we covered in one of my other classes was that throughout art history, creating and owning art was often a symbol of class and status. A working class artist would have to try 10 times harder to succeed than his upper class counterpart!

That’s part of why I think that there’s such a controversy over recognizing memes as art. On one hand, you’re expressing your self (the textbook definition of what art is considered to be), but on the other, everyone’s doing it, so does that negate it’s artistic quality? Does that make it less special?

I always liked this piece by Duchamp, because I considered it to be the very first meme:

L.H.O.O.Q (1919) depicts the Mona Lisa with a moustache, and the text is an abbreviation of the phrase “elle a chaud au cul”, meaning “she has a hot butt”. Basically, it was a part of the Dada movement, which emphasized the humorous and nonsensical things in life.

Memes are basically the seasoning of our lives. We can express how we feel, infer how others feel, and relate to each other in this way. I can say I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by this year:

But looking through memes online always put me in a better mood:

On top of everything, I get to make memes for homework!

Soooo, are memes art? I definitely think so. Art is subjective. I believe that it can be anything that you want/consider it to be, and anyone can be an artist; but that’s just my opinion.

Tag: ct101