Audio Poem: Before Dawn/Walking Home

SeeSound Audio Recorder

The image above is a visual wave-file representation of an audio poem I wrote for the learning cycle of Walk My World — where the focus is on the dawn. And it turns out, the YouShow theme recently has been audio, too. The audio recording here was done in a very nifty online tool called SeeSound, which I found thanks to two Maker/CLMOOC friends — Stephanie and Rob. I love the audio-becomes-visual element, and I wish I could download the live view as video (I guess I could take it as screencast).

I wrote this poem in the hours before dawn, when I am up before the world is up (mostly) and writing every morning. It’s just the dog and I, in the snowstorm this morning, and he goes back to sleep after our walk through the neighborhood while I pound on the keys here. I am often awake before I am awake. If I am working on an idea, I wake up, knowing my head was working out phrases and concepts during the night. If I don’t wrote, I lose it.

So I write before the sun comes up, just about every single day. (Like, right now).

Before Dawn poem

Here, then is my poem: Before Dawn. What I did was record it via SeeSound, downloaded the audio file, and then used the “reverse” switch to make the audio file go backwards (take that, Led Zep!), and tacked it on to the end of the forward file with Audacity, so that the poem is me moving forward and backwards. The poem then is hosted at Soundcloud.

Peace (in the visual poem),
Kevin

Annotated Song: Walking (With the Thoughts of You)

I’ve been working on this demo song that meshes nicely with Walk My World and the YouShow project. It is inspired by a friend but also, some distant memories of my hiking days. So here it is:

And this version via Zeega:

Interestingly, Terry “remixed” my Zeega, which means that at the end of mine, his version begins (new song and new media). Be sure to experience both.

Director’s Notes

The guitar part for the song is an echo of a very old song of mine, one I wrote about my grandmother when I was first starting to write songs (oh so long ago). I didn’t want to lose the chord progression after rediscovering it and I kicked around with it for a bit before the lyrics started to take hold here. The words are sort of a gift to a friend who is going through some difficult times right now and who spends many days hiking in isolation as a way to think and understand the world (truly, walking the world). I put the final lyrics into the app Notegraphy, which makes words look fancy, and then downloaded the lyrics as an image file. I uploaded the file into Flickr, and then used Thinglink to “borrow” the image for annotation. The song was recorded very simply (live take, no dubs) in Soundtrap and then exported into Soundcloud for embedding here, there and everywhere, including Zeega (which borrows audio from Soundcloud).

Peace (in the muse),
Kevin

Identity Exploration: Not That Kind of Writer

Not the WriterAt Walk My World, we are diving into identity in this cycle,which is always a fascinating topic to explore when it comes to who we are in digital spaces (or whom we project ourselves to be) and who we are outside of those digital spaces, and where are the intersecting lines.

With my sixth graders, our work around avatars is centered on this concept of identity — who we choose to be when we are online, and how to make sure we have that choice. Want to see an interesting collection? Go to the New York Times piece about avatars in gaming environments. They put photos of the real person with their avatar, and it is a stunning example of how people project who they want to be in digital spaces.

This poem of mine is one way for me to think of my own act of writing and publishing in online spaces, and the question of: Is that really me writing there? I think we all hold back part of ourselves, even those who dip over the TMI line, and so what you see in these words here is just a glimpse of me as the writer. I wrote the poem, trying to show the veil that is there for all of us, and how the push into the digital spaces we inhabit both foster this concept of multiple identities and collapse it … sometimes doing both things (expand and collapse) in the same moment.

Director’s Notes:

I took the photo on my iPad as I wrote the poem as a draft. I had this idea of writing a few lines about writing (the first line was my first idea) and I wanted a shot of my with pencil on paper. Not keyboard and screen. I still write a lot on notepads, particularly when I am writing poems and songs. Those drafts then get written on the screen, but only after much scribbling and much reworking (and sometimes, head scratching over what is that word that I wrote anyway …).

Taking the photo required a bit of human origami. You don’t see my left hand reaching out behind the Ipad, twisting my thumb to the large circle that will take the shot. There’s got to be a better way …

I moved the photo into an app I have called Fragment, which allows you to mess with the photo in any number of ways. Since this piece is about identity, and mixed identities, I thought it would make sense to fragment the photo itself.  I then moved the photo into the free Aviary app (a must-have),  added a border and then finished the poem itself.

I liked how one of the tools in Aviary allows you to color in small sections, so I kept the color focus on the pencil and my hand, writing. This brings the eye into the writing, which is the heart of my identity in this poem.

The photo is hosted at Flickr, which allows embedding in media sites.

Peace (in who I am right now in this writing),
Kevin

 

The Snow Tells Stories: A Video of Vines

After sharing yesterday’s post about using Vine to make a multimedia poem about Vine, Terry suggested that maybe a collaboration with Vine might be something to consider. Yep. We jumped right on that, with each of us shooting our 6 second segments and then pulling them together into this video story:

Director’s Notes

Script:

Terry set up a Hackpad for us to write collaboratively. He started with the beginnings of a poem about snow, and even linked to some published poems. That would have been great, but reading Terry’s poem and thinking of the snow falling outside, I hit on the idea of a short narrative about the stories of snow. The script came together quickly (helpful, when each scene is only a line or two long at most).

Video Shoot:

Terry, in Kentucky, and me, in Massachusetts — we each took our phone or device outside for a little walk. I went as far as my backyard, and had to time my shots with the sounds of the city plowing crew. Terry has more room to roam, although you can just glimpse the cat and hear the famous rooster crowing in the soundtrack. That rooster made my day. I don’t know about Terry, but my shots went pretty smooth. A few retakes but nothing too bad. The most difficult part is that Vine requires you to hold the screen with your finger and getting yourself in a shot while doing that is tricky. Terry has a few shots where the last word gets either clipped or cut, particularly in the last shot. I suspect the six second rule was challenging for him. But he took some beautiful footage of the snow.

Sharing of Files:

I suggested we use Dropbox for him to send me his files. Terry set up a shared folder and invited me in. He could have emailed them to me, too, I suppose.

Editing:

Here’s where it got tricky for me. Terry’s files were in an odd format that my iPad did not want to accept as I tried to transfer the videos to my camera roll to use in the PicPlayPost app for a media collage. So, I had to get on my laptop, figure out the right file format and convert all of his files to something my iPad would like (which I first did as .mov but that didn’t work and then converted again to .mp4). I had to straighten out a few of his video files, too, which were taken with the lens on its side (although I thought about keeping them, just to add the odd effect). Then, I had to upload those back into Dropbox, then open my iPad and try again. (It worked).

Now I had all of the files — Terry’s and mine — on my iPad and in PicPlayPost, I began to discover another difficulty: the labels of the video files are not visible when importing into PicPlayPost, so you have to go through each one and figure out not just which video to import, but the sequence of the import (so that the overall collage will run in order). Terry sent me a lot of files of winter, so that took some time.

Publishing:

PicPlayPost allows you to publish directly to YouTube, so that was a snap. I decided to try out an alternative version with the Storehouse app, too, just so I could use more of Terry’s winter footage as buffers between the “story” we were telling. I still like the PicPlayPost better as a more seamless narrative, but Storehouse allows you to scroll through the story with a bit more agency. One drawback is the viewer has to allow the sound through, or it seems muted. Odd default setting that I can’t figure out how to change.

Peace (in the snow, with more on the way),
Kevin

Diving Into Tumblr: Some ‘Splaining to Do

comic tumblr
So, it’s not that I don’t know what Tumblr is. It’s just that I never had any real reason to create a Tumblr blog site. But this weekend (Thanks, Greg!), I took the plunge and began a site called Got Some ‘Splaining to Do where I will share out comic-style tutorials for apps and technology that I use. I won’t guarantee that it will be all that regular, but as I work within Walk My World and YouShow projects, I figure it can be a resource/portfolio of some of my work.

Check out Got Some ‘Splaining to Do

You will see this as a recent post, as I share out using the free Make Beliefs Comix app on the iPad. It’s nifty, free (I said that, right?) and fun, with some limits.

Making A Make Beliefs Comic

See you on the web!

Peace (in the frame),
Kevin

Showing the Work of Showing Your Work

Show Yer Work #walkmyworld
The other day, Terry left a comment here about the need for more of us to show our work when creating digital compositions. It not only provides reflection points but creates a path forward for others to also make things and learn from others.

That led me to create the comic there (I guess Terry is the giraffe), using an interesting view tool in Firefox that allows you to access a 3D version of a website, and then twist and turn it.

In the interest of showing your work, here is how to use Firefox (I think it only works with Firefox browser) to explore the architecture of a site and its connections beyond.

First, with Firefox open on a site, right-click mouse on your screen. Select “Inspect Element.”
Explore Web Architecture1

Second, there is a little 3D box in the lower corner of the screen. Click that to access 3D view mode.
Explore Web Architecture2

Now, use your mouse or cursor and drag the screen. The perspective will shift and spin, giving you a view of links and media, and even a true behind-the-scenes views of a website.
Explore Web Architecture3

Have fun!

Peace (in the share),
Kevin

A Fake Comic Tutorial on Using a Real Comic App

I posted this comic yesterday to the Walk My World twitter stream because a series of tweets had me laughing.

Bring the Dog #walkmyworld

Greg, over at Walk My World, then asked if I might create a tutorial on the comic strip app that I use quite a bit these days — Comics Head. Sure, I thought, and then realized it could be a bit subversive, too. So the tutorial is a comic making fun of making a tutorial of the making of a comic.

Using Comics Head app

Head spinning? Yeah.

Then, in the spirit of the YouShow15 project and its emphasis on the Director’s Cut of making media, I used the audio feature in the app (which is a cool new function) to create a fake “Director’s Cut” of the making of the comic … I won’t do the whole recursive thing again.

Peace (in the share),
Kevin

Walking Through the World

This is another teaser for the Walk My World project. I just had to use Marc Cohn’s song, and tapped into Mozilla’s Popcorn Video Maker to create a video with animated gifs.

Check out Walk Through the World


And I am adding some “Director’s Notes” as a sort of cross-reference to the YouShow project now underway:

I have long loved Marc Cohn as a songwriter, and this particular song from an early album has resonated with me over the years. It seems like a perfect fit for the theme of Walk My World, although he is writing more about a relationship than about media literacy. Still …. I first wanted to make a Zeega, but then could not find the song in Soundcloud. So, I went with Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker. I found the song in YouTube and layered it down, turning off the video and keeping only the audio. Then, I searched for “walking” in the Popcorn search engine, using the Giffy site as my main focus. I wanted it to be Zeega-like. I listened to the lyrics, adding in non-walking pieces where it seemed to fit (I loved the gif of the girl on her bed, reading, kicking her legs back and forth). I only used a verse and chorus (and wish Popcorn had a fade music button). I like how it came out.

Plus, here is a visual tutorial I made on using Popcorn Maker:
Using Popcorn Maker

Now, go make yer own! Or remix mine!
Peace (in the world you walk),
Kevin

Are You Ready to Walk My World?

Just walking

Last year, I saw some friends of mine — Ian and Greg — launching a project called Walk My World. They were dipping into ways that new literacies could be used in connected ways, with connections to ongoing exploration and research they are doing on literacy, and so I hopped on board. It was a very low stress, low barrier endeavor, with some classes of university students and other outliers (like me) joining in for media creation activities.

You can see what I did last year via this Storify that I had made.

Well, Ian and Greg around walking the world again, and as it was last year, you are invited. Find out more as they do a “slow launch” this week of Walk My World and see what unfolds in the weeks ahead.

Walk my World

I made these comics to help get the word out. Interested? Check out the Walk My World overview at Ian’s blog. Or go to the main Walk My World page, where prompts will be provided and resources shared.

Peace (in the walk),
Kevin