One Picture Story
The goal was to take one photo and chop it up to make something that tells a story or creates some kind of tension by breaking the image into pieces. I had the idea for the “assignment” after seeing this shot1 on #FFFFFound.
I’ll rate this one a partial success. It’s not quite what I want. I don’t feel the upper shots are as interesting individually as they should be. I wanted to make it seem like the boy was walking into the woods seeing nothing, then as he traveled deeper he spotted the deer and that moment- when he froze finally seeing the deer is the moment captured in the final pane.
1 Which isn’t a single image but is close enough for me.
Related posts
Losing Arguments Cards
I’ve always found the following use of Godwin’s Law to be an interesting idea. For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.[8] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin’s law. I ran into one a week or two ago at VCU’s online summit. Someone literally said to me “Well, I’m older.” My response was something like “You’re really going to play that card?” and so Losing Arguments Cards has been in my head ever since. The following is my homage to this particular losing strategy. There was a time when merely surviving to old age meant you were wiser than just about anyone. You could find food during famine. You knew the poisonous berries and where to find good water. You survived the bears, wolves, and radioactive cannibals. You earned respect by simply not dying . . . However, we live in a civilization. There are legions of people dedicated to keeping you from dying of your own stupidity. Things are labeled poisonous even if no one in their right mind would ever eat them. We killed most every animal that might eat you. Maybe you learned something […]
Markov Chains, Horse e-Books and Margins
In discussing trajectories, elements of engineered serendipity, “thought vectors in concept space” with Gardner and Jon yesterday the following occurred. Gardner shared this video (which is well worth watching and I rarely have the patience for videos). That led to a discussion about creating and using a MOOC/hashtag specific Twitterbot (like horse e-books but realReally fake, I mean. I guess.) using Markov ChainsI’m not really sure if that should be pluralized or not. to create algorithmically driven conversations/connections that occur in the margins of intention and result.There’s a whole additional piece where you think about larger scale curricular design which incorporates random elements and assignments that use algorithms to push people in new directions. That starts to get really interesting. I am considering how the assignment and maybe a browser plugin could create contextual variables based on what site you were on at the moment that would then be incorporated into the larger assignment- kind of a #ds106 remix on contextual steroids. So I began messing with the idea last night. Given I have a completely illusionary knowledge of programming I looked for people to tell me how to do this. I found the metaphor a minute tutorial which will help me out with the Twitterbot end of things in the near future. I also found this PHP based Markov […]
Costic Acsinte – 30 Minutes of Healing
I found Costic? AcsinteThe name “Acsinte” is also written on the page as “Axinte.” Neither translate to anything on Google Translate but the “axinte” version leads me to a LinkedIn profile with the job description “mechanical at Magic Systems SA.” It hints at interesting things but probably just in my head. which is a new Flickr Commons participant. It also has a Twitter account. I really like these photographs and the backstory is interesting as well. They almost seem to good to be true but I’d almost be more excited if they were. In any case, the images are awesome. A number of factors coalesced last night- these photographs, returning from taking too many present day photos for the VSTE conference, and some inspiration from Stephen Downes’ ‘Half an Hour’ site. I decided I’d spend 30 minutes each night making something. It’s not Daily Create (although it might be at times) and this isn’t a pledge to you in order to keep myself accountable. I tend to trend much more towards self-directed inspiration and react against most, if not all, outside pressures. With my self-analysis session out of the way, I decided last night to try to “repair” one of the photos from the Costic? Acsinte group. I say “repair” because I really love the artifacts of decay in the […]
Comments on this post
Actually I think the upper three could work without the bottom one. I think I’m going to add this to my pre-ap design class.
This assignment is super tough. You need a photo that has small details separated enough to pull out.
I might disagree with Brandi. The three alone do not say anything. The trick is to look at the top three w/o seeing the bottom one first.
If you can block out the bottom, you introduce a character, then a place, then a second character- without the bottom, there is no connecting the boy to the deer.
Or maybe without the bottom one… there i a sad boy, he goes for a walk in the deep, scary woods his parents told him to stay away from. The boy walks through a magical sheet and turns into a deer.
Okay, maybe that is more fun.
No end of fun.
I think Brandi has a point. I just really like the end shot so it’s hard to drop it. That may be more from an emotional connection than any sort of narrative need.
Maybe I should have set it up so that it was wider than the viewable screen and had the final shot “off stage” so that you had to scroll to see it.
This is yet another great assignment, did you submit this to ds106 with your brilliant example?
Submitted. Alan already did one with a horse a week or two ago. I used a pigeon picture from #FFFFound for the example.
What is ds106? Does your district archive lessons?
It’s an open online course organized around digital storytelling. It’s being run through UMW and it’s in the MOOC format.
We archive some lessons- around 21st century skills and some other work depending on the subject.
that first link doesn’t work!
Sorry about that. It’s http://ds106.us/. I think I did .org by mistake the first time.