2. tri-pod

additional equipment we might need are microphone and the light.  The microphone can help us to record

Yu-Lan Tsai

When using photoshop, there are a few basics that a user must always learn.  The first and most important thing is layers.  Layers in photoshop allow the user to place images on top of each other and add effects to said layers to make the bottom or top more visible.

Here we have a picture taken from a custom position zoom and color scheme of the mandelbrot set: (generated by a program I wrote)

And here, we have Monet’s Woman with Parasol:

Our goal is to replace the background of the impressionist painting with our mandelbrot set image to make some totally awesome avante-garde stuff!

Step 1)  Go into photoshop and set the Monet to the top layer and mandelbrot set to the background layer.

Step 2) Use the magic wand tool:

The magic wand tool allows you to select a part of the image defined by the colors around it.  The selection will not be a standard box shape – instead it will detect the color of the surrounding pixels and find where a sharp color border exists.

The magic wand tool is the sparkling wand icon in the left-side toolbox.  Now click on the back ground, and it should select most of the sky part of the image. (You may need to shift-click a few times to get all of it.)

Step 3) Simply press delete, and photoshop will set your selected part of the image to transparent.  This allows you to see the image behind it!

Now check out the result:

Whoa, totally trippy, right?  Using this technique, you can make all kinds of old art new again.  Its a great way for you to induce your friends who are into fractal art to the classics.

Final quiz: can you figure out how many flowers have been replaced by customized sections from the mandelbrot set?

Answer: Three!

My narrator is another Librarian in Babel. Unlike Borges’ narrator, however, mine is quite pleased with his lot in life, and thinks reverentially about the books of the Library. He has collected some of his favorite manuscripts in what he calls his “Retirement Hexagon,” and decides to share some of them with the listener. The books will be voiced by others, instead of just read by the narrator, because I feel like it.

The clips he shares will start out vaguely sensible, but as he’s an asshole, he holds them up as incredibly beautiful or deep or whatever. At first, the clips will grow increasingly weird and senseless. Then, he picks one that starts reading the actions he took but minutes before, and not being too complimentary. He tries to close it, but it won’t shut up, and he burns it.

I think Jorge would approve.

-Brendan

Brendan Sullivan

1. The text becomes smaller as each of the narratives progress. This visual cue engages in us almost a whirlpool or down the drain sensation. As the dates converge, so do the sizes of the fonts.

2. The word “light” never appears in the novel. This is because at its base the novel is about feeling over seeing. Teenagers, like Sam and Hailey, don’t give a flying fuck about the world around them; they just want to hang out and have sex. So, no “seeing” no light.” In this way readers are required to not make perfect sense of the novel, but get from it a general feeling.

3. I have no idea what it means, but I did notice certain words used in one of the narratives and not in the other. For insteance, one uses “begin” and the other “start.” What could this possibly mean?

The assignment for next week is a rough draft of your final project, which we will be critiquing in class. Please put it up on your website, or if you are hosting it somewhere else, provide a link on your site. All your work should be both up on your website, and on the flash drive you turn in at the end of the semester. If you would like to use some Flash in your project, Sarah will be at the tutorial this week (on Saturday from 1:00-3:00) for anyone who needs help.

This Monday is the final due date for any blog posts that have not been completed yet. If you do not finish all the assigned work, you will not pass. If you are unsure whether or not you are missing any assignment, blog post or otherwise, please send me an email or direct message @900_0001, and I will let you know ASAP.

Good luck on your final projects!
-Claudia

Surrounding the audio will be an interactive website, based mainly on html, but it may include some flash elements as well.

I will use parallel frames to directly compare the text of Only Revolutions with that of Whitman’s poetry. I will also link to pop up images: nature, death, Lincoln, imagery suggestive of both works. These images/themes/words appear over and over again in both of the author’s works. The similarities should be glaring and interesting.

The experience should be immersive, visual and aural. Think of it as a visual and aural mashup of the two authors.

-Clayton Mathis

There will be no dialogue, everything will be based strictly on images. I intend to use mostly video, but if it suits the mood better I may use some still-images. I won’t know until I’m working on it, though…like I said previously, a lot of my ideas come about while I’m actually making something. So my “script” isn’t really a script, so much as ideas of where I want to film. I intend to film in both natural areas (Schenley Park, perhaps Phipps) and urban (down 5th or Forbes or some other major street in Pittsburgh) and on buses (to simulate travel…because I don’t have a car).

I’ll be using either FinalCut or Premiere to edit the video together. I really have no preference for which, it just completely depends on what’s more convenient. I’m leaning towards FinalCut, though, because I used that in the last video project. I’ll also probably use my FlipHD camera again, however it has some stability issues…I have shaky hands and it has no image stabilization, so I may look into a better camera.

But those are the ideas I have so far. If I come up with anything more concrete, I’ll update it here.

Here’s the excerpt from my previous post:

“So I finally decided on this: I want to make a music video. I’m going to pick a song that I think sums up the book very well, and then record a music video that I think interacts with/mimics Only Revolutions. Tentatively, I want to say that song will be “Home” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes. It is a bit of a cheery song lyrically, but musically it is definitely a “travel song,” which fits the novel. The music also sounds, to me, a little bit melancholy. I just think it fits the feel of Only Revolutions extremely well.

The music video will contain a self-contained story of two characters, a boy and girl, trying to meet up with things continually getting in the way. Then when they finally get together, everything falls apart anyway–they struggle for contact, fail time and time again, and when they succeed it doesn’t last.

I know that’s a vague description of what I’d like to do, but a lot of my work happens organically…I come up with ideas and tweaks as I go along.”

- Joe DeMarini

Part One: Only Revolutions Fan Fiction

I’d like to create a piece of fan fiction for Only Revolutions. I really enjoyed the fan fiction assignment we did as well as the constrained writing exercise, so I think this would be a really cool way to combine the two. I’ll compose 8 pages of text for both Sam and Hailey, staying true to all the constraints of Only Revolutions.

***As far as the technical aspect goes, I’m going to try to recreate the experience of reading the book, so I think that using text on a webpage, with hyperlinks to turn the pages would be the best way to do that.

Part Two: Videos

Here’s where the project gets “critiquey” (I know that’s not a word, but I kind of like it.) I want to make 2 different videos for the same piece of fan fiction. There’s 2 reasons why I want to do this. I’m really interested in the factors that contribute to our overall experience as a reader besides just the text itself. When I read the book, it sounded totally different in my head than when I listened to it being read on the Only Revolutions website. With digital media, specifically podcasts, the tone of voice or background music, as well as images, can have a huge effect on how you interpret a text, so I’d like to make 2 different videos to showcase that. The voice track will be the same, but I’ll play around with effects, music, and images to try and create two very different videos using the same text.

I haven’t finished writing the fan fiction yet, so I can’t say exactly the two moods that my music and effects will convey, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the viewer will get a calm feeling from one – like they’re listening to a love story, and an eerie/apocalyptic feeling from the other podcast, similar to the way it’s read on the OR website.

***The second reason I want to do this is much simpler. I had a hard time working with Premiere, but in the end, I really enjoyed using it and I’d like to work with it some more. I think this will be a good way to improve my video editing skills. I’d also like to work more with Soundbooth and possibly experiment more with voice editing for the voice track. I want this to be a visual experience and well as an auditory one, so putting together sound effects and images into one video would (hopefully) give the viewer the overall experience that I intend them to.

-Julie Howell