HEY!! Just in case you want to convince someone (or perhaps yourself) that you were actually there, in #ds106zone, during the summer of 2013 with @jimgroom, @scottlo,  @iamTalkyTina and all those other characters, you can get a shirt!

Designed to look great on basic black, the shirt features a ds106zone star-field logo on the front, and the text “ds106 #4life summer 2013″ on the back. You can customize your shirt size all by yourself and get it shipped direct-to-you from Zazzle basically at cost.

• Link to the #ds106zone T-shirt on black, for guys.
• Link to the #ds106zone T-shirt on black, for women.

You can choose alternate styles and colours if you want to get fancy.

Make Your Own?

If you want to try doing a custom print using your own intended-for-dark-Ts-iron-on-transfer, you might try this .png file. Note that it won’t look like much until you print it on the T-shirt transfers for Dark Fabric. Also, I haven’t reversed the image, and “have left that as an exercise” for the do-it-yourselfer.  Let us know how it goes if you take this route. If we see you wearing your shirt with the logo upside down or backwards, it will be funny.

Really Fancy Aluminum Zazzle Water Bottle

Zazzle also does up a really stylish aluminium water bottle. I had some made for some of the #105theHive crew.

I’m going to order one in black.
(The 32 oz. bottles are really nice, but were out of stock. I had to select the 24 oz. bottle to get one in black.)

Note that I’ve also included my Twitter handle in the design in editable text. If you want one, be sure to use the “Change text” button and put in your own name or Twitter handle before you order yours.

But these are really, really nicely-finished bottles. I was very impressed with the quality.

“I am a poor man,
I have nothing,
I want for nothing.”

I first encountered this wonderful round during my B.Ed. year at Queens University, Kingston. As part of the Outdoor and Experiential Education course taught by James Raffan, we met once a week for a five hour experience — rock climbing, historical walk, a night hike, a campfire, a tour of a retired Canadian naval icebreaker. Each week a different group was responsible for preparing a meal appropriate to that week’s theme — we shared the food partway through the evening. Such a great part of a wonderful class.

I have fond memories of the “campfire” evening, which actually took place in a classroom at the Faculty of Education building — but which culminated in an after-class sing-along in a wonderfully acoustic stairwell that James led us to. I illustrated the simple lyrics in my journal (James Raffan and journalling — that’s another story), along with a picture of a drinking straw bagpipe that I played as we did Amazing Grace.

Experiential learning, to be sure.

Audio Assignment 1027 Row Row Polyphony for audio week.

Organ created using GarageBand, a couple of G’s played through.
Vocal was sung through once, then duplicated twice and offset by two bars each time to create the 3-part round.

Font is Herculanum.
Paper texture by akinna-stock

“ds106zone Trading Card Gums” by aforgrave, on Flickr

Gum from both the original card series release and the re-issue is still in circulation (we’re talking about mint-condition (not mint-flavoured), unchewed sticks here — there is little collector interest in chewed gobs that litter the sidewalks throughout the world) and tends to command a good price at card shows and fan conventions.

While prized for its appearance and nostalgia, remaining sticks of the original black & white gum from the sixties command a premium price due not to the palatability of the black liquorice flavour (which is poor — the stuff is rank), but due to the novelty — true fans can’t help but shelling out and then chewing a stick for a few minutes, “just to say they tried a stick once.”   You can still see them from time-to-time at fan conventions — the post-chew black lip look is hard to miss.

As for the later, mid-seventies re-issue gum — it is pink, and tastes like any other pink card gum, and thus commands a much lower price as it exists in much more significant quantities, and doesn’t have the must-try-once appeal of the original.  But the DS106Zone emboss still puts it several notches above the un-branded gums, and makes it worthwhile to root through a bulk-bin next time you have a chance at a fancon.

“Red Alert” animated GIF, by aforgrave, from “The Monsters are Due On Maple Street”

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own, for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is…that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

If there was ever an episode of The Twilight Zone that emphasized the fear of “the other” and the Cold War, The Monsters are Due On Maple Street would be it. Had they filmed this in colour, those lamp posts could have pulsed with Red light, and it couldn’t have made the point any clearer.

The hysteria in the closing moments is masterfully edited, and those wonky camera angles are so wonderfully characteristic of their time. I almost find the addition of the aliens on the hill at the end to be an anti-climax, and unnecessary. Had the episode simply wrapped with Serling’s closing commentary, it would have been even more real — no alien intervention required to push mankind off the edge.

Check out Brian Short‘s (@heystorytellers) masterful mashup edit of video from “Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and Kanye’s tune “Monster.” I love the way he cuts the edits to match the beat. One would almost think this episode had been shot and cut to suit the tune. So well done!

Kanye Is Due on Maple Street from Brian Short on Vimeo.

Cool Resources for The Monsters are Due on Maple Street

Some quick web searches also turned up gems like PDFs of the script, including one from a textbook that I’m sure I’ve come across over the years.

What a classic tale.

This evening when Brian posted his Mr. Hollis head trading Card, I decided it was a good opportunity to complete a couple more and add mine to complement his.

Here, then, are four animated Character Trading Cards from the Season 3, Episode 8 entry, “It’s a Good Life.”   I have posted static jpeg versions to the Flickr group for inclusion in the Gallery.  (Animated GIFs can get easily borked when posted to Flickr.)

“Anthony” animated GIF Trading Card by aforgrave

“Mr. & Mrs. Freemont” animated GIF by aforgrave

“Mr. Hollis Shadow Jack” animated GIF by aforgrave

“Mrs. Hollis” animated GIF by aforgrave

The Next Morning: In the end, after a good night’s sleep, I just couldn’t leave an animated Mr. Hollis Bobblehead unposted, and so here it is:

“Bobblehead” animated GIF, by aforgrave from “It’s a Good Life”

“Mr. Bemis is Sad” book cover by aforgrave, based on “Time Enough at Last”

The Inspiration

@cogdog (Alan Levine) inspired me this morning with his I Can Read Series: Eye of the Beholder children’s book cover, and upon quick reflection, it seemed to be a just perfect assignment to do for poor Henry Bemis in Time Enough at Last. The labelling of this book as a shared reading book makes it all the more poignant for poor, all-on-his-lonesome Henry.

The Process

I gathered my I Can Read series banner from a basically white-covered book Pete the Cat, which made it easier to isolate the banner using the Magic Wand Tool and there by erase the rest of the cover using the Eraser tool. In the end, I removed the existing drop shadow from the banner (also using the same process) as it was somewhat pixel-ly and distracting.

I toyed around with a few different fonts for the title, before settling on a simple, kid-friendly  sans-serif Trebuchet MS at 47 pt for the title and 11 pt for the “authors.”   I just eyeballed the font sizes with the slider to get something that seemed to look good.

Although I had originally planned on using an image of Burgess Meredith with the broken glasses, it was bit too difficult to get a tall enough book-propotioned crop that also showed books in the background, and so I moved ahead a number of frames to where the camera pulled back and it was easier to select a more vertical image.

I considered titles like “Henry Bemis,” “Poor Mr. Bemis,” before deciding that for a children’s book (and especially a shared reading book!) there needed to be a very clear connection between the topic of the book (the man is sad) and the title, hence “Mr. Bemis is Sad.”

The why of his sadness is our inside joke, as viewers of the episode. And including the book in the  I Can Read series is just the icing on the cake.

Submitted, for your consideration, as a candidate for Design Assignment 55: I Can Read Movies (where an episode, is like a movie, in The Twilight Zone ….)

“10 Animated Candles for WordPress” animated GIF by aforgrave, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The 10th Anniversary banner was found on the Manchester WordPress Users Group site, one of over six hundred organizations celebrating today with for-real, face-to-face, with-cake get-togethers.

The cake icon was animated from pieces of two separate icons from The Noun Project site:

Birthday Cake designed by Ben Rex Furneaux from The Noun Project

Birthday Cake designed by Consuelo Elo Graziola from The Noun Project

You can see that my cake is based on a slightly shorter version of the Ben Rex Ferneaux cake, with the Consuelo Elo Craziola flame flickering back and forth.

Given that I spend quite a bit of my time using the open-source, self-hosted WordPress.org WordPress to support a number of different sites, I think I’ll find myself a little bit of cake later today.

Thanks, WordPress — best wishes for the next ten !!!

Subsequent to posting, it became clear that the ds106 Digital Storytelling Assignment Bank did not have an Animated GIF Birthday Card assignment — well, it does now!!  For your consideration, AnimatedGIF Assignment 1086: “It’s Your Birthday, Happy GIFfin’ To You!”

“Katamit Trading Card, animated” animated GIF, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”

From Movie Trading Cards, to Animated Movie Trading Cards

Last night I worked on the Movie Trading Card assignment, creating a Trading Card aesthetic and then placing the Intruder and the Alien Woman within the template I had created. This was part of my attempt to work on some non-GIF assignments and get my 10 stars for The Invaders.

As soon as I had that done and posted, I gave myself permission to GIF, and placed three frames from my animated GIF Katamit within the Trading Card. The GIF is shown to the left.

The Katamit still finds humans awfully boring.

And then …

—- and then decided to place some other Twilight Zone GIFs-in-need-of-a-home within the Trading Card as well. I started, got 2 done,  but then sleep called and I left them in progress. Those GIFs will appear as an episode-focused collection in a future post.

However, today, while I was away from the computer, Jim Groom jumped in, and extended his assignment to provide Movie Trading Card — Now with More Animation for use with Animated GIFs, and placed his animated Intruder within a similar Trading Card format. He created a landscape formatted card, which I immediately realized would be better to fit in a full-width scene from a movie. Thanks for that Jim! I’m pretty good now at remembering to turn my iPhone into landscape mode when shooting a movie, but had used a character focus last night for my cards and so had designed them in portrait mode.

Therefore, this evening, I set about to update my Trading Card to support a scene-based, landscape formatted card. Once that was done, it was easy to select a still from To Serve Man, and place it within the landscape frame.  Given that my landscape format highlights a scene, I added space for a caption below the image to help set the context.

“Good News for Earth ??” scene-based Trading Card, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”

Of course, having done the “good news” moment from the episode, it made perfect sense to do the “bad news” moment as well — and as I looked to select one frame, I got caught up trying to GIF it. (Durn GIF-eye-tis, it keeps acting up!) Unfortunately, there was a real problem with the lady in the background who moves as much as Penny. Mega-distraction. I spent over an hour trying three different approaches to deal with her (layering over her with an unmoving image, layering changing background images over top of the changing image, and  placing a static image at the bottom of the stack and erasing her and the background from all of the changing images) — and in the end went back to the first approach, compromising in the end order to get the GIF done and into the scene-based Trading Card framework:

“Nope. Bad News for Earth, Worse for Chambers” scene-based Trading Card, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”

As fate would have it, I finally got the card posted — with the lady still demonstrating some bizarre neck aberrations, when I noticed that all of the text was jumping on one frame and there was a blinky gap at the bottom for most of the frames. So I revisited the .psd Photoshop file, managed to resolve the text issues, and took another run at fixing the lady in the background, too. In the end, it works pretty well. Tidied up nicely.

Sharing is Caring  CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

@cogdog (Alan Levine) suggested that I make the .psd files available for folks to use in making their own ds106zone Movie Trading Cards — they could be either static or animated — and so I share the two files below. (UPDATE: May 28 – two .xcf files for GIMP are now also available.)

A couple notes:

Layers for the Scene-based ds106zone Trading Card

Reduce during Save for Web

1. Paste your intended image into the .psd file and drag it to the bottom of the layers stack — it will show through the transparent space in the artwork layer. Once in place you can use the Move tool to reposition it. I find that the Edit  >>> Transform >>> Scale is invaluable, together with the Move tool, to getting the image properly framed.  Depending on the dimensions of your original image, you may need to do some cropping.
2. There are three editable text layers in the Character card, and four editable text layers in the Scene card.  For consistency, I would suggest that you do not change either the fonts or the font sizes unless you are looking to take the file and transform it into a completely different (non Twilight Zone) theme. In case the font assignments are not preserved, here is the font information:
   • Character Card: BlairMdITC TT, 30 pt Character Name, 20 pt Season/Episode, 27 pt for Episode Title
   • Scene Card:  BlairMdITC TT, 27 pt Scene Title, 20 pt Season/Episode, 27 pt for Episode, caption Tekton Pro at 28 pt.
3. Once you have finished placing the image and edited the text layers, you are ready to use the File >>> Save for Web …   The workfiles have dimensions that are designed to be reduced upon output. While the image sizes are 752×1128 pixels (and 1128×752 pixels), they are designed to be saved out at 300×450 — just change the dimensions in the Save for Web … dialogue — I normally set the smaller dimension to 300 px, and the link keeps the ratio constant and changes the other to 450 px.
4. You can do what you like, but I have been saving the files as ds106zoneTradingCard_Scene_EPISODE_SceneName.gif and ds106zoneTradingCard_Character_EPISODE_CharacterName.gif — just helps me keep them organized.

And so, without further ado, I present the following two files for your use and enjoyment. I would suggest that you right-click on the link and do a “Save as Download” (etc.) to get the Photoshop .psd or the GIMP .xcf files onto your computer.

PHOTOSHOP PSD file to download: ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_scene.psd
GIMP XCF file to download: ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_sceneGIMP.xcf

PHOTOSHOP PSD file to download: ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_character.psd
GIMP XCF file to download: ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_characterGIMP.xcf

I look forward to seeing your ds106zone Twilight Zone Episode Trading Cards, for scenes and characters, still, and animated.

UPDATE: May 28th Thinking that there may be a number of folks who might be interested in “building a collection” of ds106zone Twilight Zone Trading Cards, I have created a Flickr Group ds106zoneTwilightZoneTradingCards so that those of us who post our cards to Flickr can add them to the collective group — and then they will display here in the ds106zone The Twilight Zone Trading Cards Collaborative Collection. Sound like fun?

Keep making art, dagnabbit! 

“ds106zone Trading Card: Alien Woman from The Invaders”

I am pleased that dear @JimGroom created the arbitrary constraint of doing 10 stars worth of work from within the context of the season 2 episode, “The Invaders.”  Having to scour the Assignment Bank (scour is too rough a word) for assignments that lend themselves to the episode just puts a nice focus what is quite a pleasant task. Seeing assignments that “don’t fit” or which I can’t see myself “making fit” helps in the challenge of understanding exactly what each assignment is getting at.  Although browsing the Bank with absolutely no context can let you perhaps more easily choose any assignment such that you can knock something out, looking through the Assignment Bank with a focus becomes a creative exercise in problem solving, and requires you to think a bit more deeply about the particular characteristics of that particular focus.

Having said all of that, the first assignment that I arrived at that spoke to me as a fit for The Invaders was The Bava Himself‘s Design Assignment 488: Movie Trading Cards — the wonderful benefit being that now having come up with a design for ds106zone Twilight Zone Trading Cards, I am now all set to start cranking them out for previous and future episodes.

So while I am about 30 minutes past my self-imposed deadline of midnight for reaching my 10 stars — this particular assignment is ranked at 4 stars, and so, were I counting, I’m over the top at 12 1/2  for The Invaders.

My Process

Given that The Twilight Zone is so wonderfully a child of the black & white era of television, I decided to draw upon the characteristic opening sequence star field as the basis for the background of my trading cards. I used a previously captured existing star field image that I used for my @The Focus Zone twitter avatar (turning off the text layers in the existing Photoshop .psd file reminded me how easy it would be to GIF that … but I’m not GIFfing tonight!) as the background — I had to extend the Canvas and duplicate the layer (rotating it 90 degrees to avoid an appearance of tiling) to get a non-square canvas, and then imported my existing “the ds106zone” logo (from a few days back), scaling it down and placing it in the lower left of the card. Then, using the Rectangular Marquee Tool to define a large space with an eyeballed consistent width border around the perimeter, I used the eraser tool to create a rectangular hole in the card through which each of the trading card characters will be displayed. After adding a thin white border to match the edge of the hole, I placed a photo of the Invader below the frame levels, and was almost done.

Working from Initial Starfield card through to Finished Trading Card Template

In deciding on where to place the text, I moved things around a bit until settling on the final locations. Having the character name in the top left makes sense from a focus standpoint — and by placing it on the black star field background, it will always display consistently as white on black. (At one point I had the character name inside the white frame — but that would introduce complications as the text colour there might have to change as different photos were introduced. Too much work, and aesthetically inconsistent. So not good.

“ds106zone Trading Card: Invader, from The Invaders”

In placing the Season/Episode information and the Episode Title, I shifted things around until finalizing the Season/Episode info above — where it will essentially take the same amount of space each time, and the Episode Title below, where titles of varying lengths should have sufficient space to expand to suit. Had the two been reversed in sequence, then the Season/Episode numbers would have had to float up and down with shorter and longer titles — or there would have been a gap between the two for short titles. So I’m happy with where everything finally arrived.

So, What’s Next?

What’s next will be:
1) lots more ds106zone Trading Cards
2) some kind of animated gallery so they can be easily viewed

But first, sleep. Perchance to Dream.

First I’m taking a run at former UMW #ds106 student Nancy Belle’s (@bellekid) Design Assignment 960: Minimalist Book Cover.

In approaching this assignment, I decided on a primary dark cover (the episode is quite dark, taking place at night and with minimal lighting), maintaining clean lines with a simple san serif text, and building the limited images out of existing primary shapes within photoshop, going with shades of grey to complement the black. (The episode was shot in black and white anyway!) . While my original plan was to place the saucer on the roof, and include a silhouette of the giant lady holding her knife through a window in the hut, I decided to simplify things and only show the saucer in the sky, and the hut on the horizon.

To balance out the larger title text at the top, I added an author line and a “based on” reference line at the bottom — keeping the lines of the text long and linear, and thus hopefully low-key. Each was reduced to 40-50% Opacity so as to not stand out in relation to the title and the other two images.  I also applied a reduced opacity to the 95% grey rectangle that provides the “sky” — trying to find a shade of grey that suggested a dark sky without being too light.

In hindsight, I might like to see how this would have turned out with a non-primitive constructed hut — something that might more accurately reflect a curved, sloping roof slightly slanted walls — but my timeline is calling for compromise — and I need to keep this minimalist.  And as I take a final look at the image before posting, it would be nice to go with a gradient of lighter to darker grey for the sky as you move upwards — suggesting some light in the distance on the horizon, but fading to the dark of space as the eye rises.  However, it is time to post.

As I look at the star count for this assignment, I think it’s a bit high – 3 1/2 stars for this, as opposed to only 2 stars for an @iamTalkyTina Twilight Zone animated GIF?  I typically spend a lot more time on most animated GIFs than I spent on this.