“THE WIRE 106” animated gif by @aforgrave
Jim Groom (@jimgroom, on Twitter) is bringing it for the latest incarnation of the DS106 Digital Storytelling open online course (as well as for multiple sections of for-credit learners at UMW). Following on the summer 2013 session set within the world of The Twilight Zone (#ds106zone), the fall 2014 session has the course within the context of the HBO television series, The Wire (#wire106).
You can catch up by checking out Jim’s tagged writing so far (and all that follows) at wire106 on bavatuesdays.com, monitoring the #wire106 tag on Twitter, and keeping tabs on all the posts syndicated to the ds106.us site blog flow.
Jim Groom Daily Create Challenge
In celebration of the upcoming segment, The Daily Create for August 13 prompted “@jimgroom prepares for his next run of DS106. Make an appropriate poster from this image,” providing access to a wonderful photo portrait of Jim taken by Tom Woodward (@twoodwar on Twitter).
My take on the challenge:
“The Bava Bring It Like Nobody Does” by Andrew Forgrave, on Flickr
The Second Best TV Series of All Time ?
Having never seen an episode, I was intrigued by Jim’s suggestion that The Wire “might be the second best TV series of all time …,” (after The Twilight Zone) and decided that such an endorsement was worthy of some study. While a local DVD shop provided me with season 1, I had to travel down the highway to find seasons 2-5. I lucked into an amazing DVD shop with a huge selection of old TV shows (as a child of the television age, I’ll be going back — this winter: The Avengers) and the two folks at the checkout both praised The Wire, extolling the writing and commentary on life in the US. I’m now about halfway through season 2, and trying to distill the show into GIFs and images.
Jim and Paul Bond (@phb256 on Twitter) talked about a pre-course warm-up discussion which has made the official start-up date a bit fuzzy for me, but I’m thinking that things are starting up now or next week (or the week after?), so it’s time to start GIFfing.
How about a T-Shirt?
A conversation last night with GNA (@DrGarcia, on Twitter) about T-shirts had me wake this morning in the mood to design one. I spent some time this afternoon working on an image and caption for the front. With the image as rendered, the image is destined for a black T.
On two occasions now I have tried to find a font similar to that used for The Wire season 1 logo — to no avail. Neither whatfontis nor whatthefont led to anything close. While it might have been a nice choice for the caption on the front of the shirt, I’ve decided that it must be a custom title rendering (not a font). I’m still in the throes of selecting a font for the caption — you can see fonts cranking through the mill in the GIF below.
“The Bava Bring It,” T-shirt font, final caption font TBD, animatedGIF by @aforgrave
I was able to extend The Wire characters to create a 106 — so we can have a course logo for the back of the shirt.
Wire106 logo
“WIRE106 logo” by @aforgrave
It was a fun challenge to take the existing letters — T H E W I R E — and cut, paste, trim, rotate, clone and merge the bits to get 1 0 6.
- 1 – easy, copy the I and rotate it 180 degrees.
- 0 – a bit trickier, uses 2 copies of the second E, one rotated 180 degrees, both middle sticks erased, overlapped and adjusted for width.
- 6 – worked on this for a bit, finally settled on the left part of the first E, bottom right of the R, lower left of the first E (flipped horizontally), and the upper right of the second E (adjusted left and right until the 6 looked right).
Once the 106 were finalized, I applied a 60% opacity to them to let some of the black background show through and thus visually separate the WIRE and the 106 into two separate, but related, elements.
These frames show the building of the 106.
“Constructing the WIRE106 logo” animated GIF by forgave
T-Shirt Designed …
And so, we arrive at The Jim “Bava/Nobody” Groom WIRE106 T-shirt. Any takers?
As of Tuesday, August 19th they are in The ds106zone store on Zazzle.
Zazzle has a .com domain for the US and a .ca domain for Canada.
Check for your local country Zazzle domain and put /ds106zone after your country’s domain-specific Zazzle URL to navigate to the ds106zone store.
CANADA: for guys | for women US: for guys | for women
“The Jim (Bava/Nobody) Groom WIRE106 T-shirt” animated GIF by @aforgrave
Brilliant stuff Andrew, great gifs and a bonus t-shirt. I think the course has a logo now.
I’d disagree with Jim on the wire being second best series, my favourite. Makes this round of ds106 hard to resist, your logo settles it. I am sold.
I’ll have to think long and hard before I can put a number to The Wire. It may be that I’ve watched too much television over the years to be able to make a fair evaluation, or even make any kind of a top five list. Off the top of my head, I wouldn’t know where to start. It would be a good challenge for me to undertake over the course of the session — developing a list of potential faves and then working to rank them based on some solid criteria. Not a lot of belly laughs in The Wire. But some.
John and Andrew,
The more I watch and read about The wire, the more I see comparing The Wire to the Twilight Zone is a bit unfair. I think they are both brilliant, but Twilight Zone is episodic by nature, and intentionally unrelated narratives. A new slate every evening. The Wire is a novel for TV, and it’s episodes are quite the opposite, deeply interrelated, dependent, and non-formulaic. But I can see why anyone would but The Wire #1 for sure. One of the things that struck me when I was watching “Where Is Everybody?” and “Walking Distance” last night. That show was deeply existential, and I can’t help but think the same thing when listening to D’Angelo’s conversations with the young hoppers in the first four episodes of season 1. Both the Twilight Zone and The Wire push hard on ideas and are deeply contemporaneous—I think that’s why they are so brilliant. I might even do a course dedicated to The Prisoner one day—my third favorite 😉
Oh! Oh! If I weren’t in the car right now, I would do the logo! Dibs on cottage 106! I am not a number! I am a free man!
That’s a great tutorial on how to get new letters from an old logo – thanks so much for sharing the process.
I searched using the amazing WhatTheFont and the best match I saw was “Halfron”. It does seem quite odd that no-one has made a font to match the logo… how many stars would *THAT* be, Jim?
After having success getting 106 from T H E W I R E, I briefly explored the notion of getting a full alphabet. The notion was rather quickly discarded as I considered the letters that might be the most difficult to create with the available bits — A G J M N Q S X Y Z. A partial alphabet wouldn’t work too well.
Also, after having completed the 106, the logo, and the GIFs, I realized that I had worked with a white on black background lower res THE WIRE image, and that I also had a higher res white on transparent logo that I should have used. It would certainly provide for a sharper logo for the T-shirt back. I may revisit the process with the higher res image, but first, some ART!