Week 12: Casino ds106

4/05/19 – 4/12/19

Make a Tutorial

This week’s main focus will be on mashups and remixes, but we also need to make tutorials. You may have noticed these in the Assignment Bank. Some assignments have them, some don’t. Was there an assignment that gave you trouble this semester? Something that you had to work to figure out? Something that you found a different way to do? Make a tutorial to help out the next generation of ds106ers. Put together a detailed description of how you did an assignment. It could be a video, or it could be text with images – whatever makes the most sense for the information you need to convey. You can do it for an assignment that took a lot of work, or you can do it for one that was a lot of fun. Put it in a blog post and tag it with the appropriate tags – just like assignments, tutorials need to have two tags. You can see the tags on the right side of each assignment page:

Assignments

This week we will be focusing on Mashups & Remixes. The terms mashup and remix are often associated with music, but they don’t need to be limited to it. So what is a mashup? What is a remix?

From the ds106 open course:

For this unit you’ll be exploring the culminating ideas of ds106, remixes and mashups, the recasting of existing media into new forms by creative combination and editing. This will build off of your previous work in all media forms. And we will even remix our own assignments. Some will split hairs over the differences/definitions of remix and mashup. Let’s try to say that remix is usually a creative edit of one form of media, such as the recut movie trailer below or the musical remixes of Girl Talk; mashups refer to the mixing of media/content of from disparate places. Both involve the creative act of making something new from previous works. We ask you to try and sort it out and tell us if the difference really matters.

A mashup example that I saw recently on Open Culture is Todd Alcott’s work combining lurid paperback covers with song titles and lyrics.  I think what really makes them work are the design elements and attention to detail. The use of color and typography make them look real.

A remix could be as simple as editing a conversation into a monologue:

Garfield Minus Garfield

A mashup might involve adding some new sounds:

Friday 13th Part 3 with Laugh Track

Or editing together a new trailer:

Hercules (X-Men: Apocalypse Style) from a legendary ds106er!

You could say Everything is a Remix. This week everyone gets to join in the fun.

Mashups and Remixes

Let’s have fun with the assignments this week and involve your agent character in as many as humanly possible.

Mashups – Do 10 stars of mashup assignments. Don’t like the assignments? Make up your own!

Do 2 Remixes – Choose two assignments from any category and use the Remix It button on them. We’re not counting stars on Remixes. Just do two. Here is an example of using the Remix button:

Can I make a mashup or remix from something that has been created for the class already?

Certainly! Not only can you, but you should! Let’s build on what we’ve made. Use something created for the course for at least one of your projects this week.

Posts of the Week: What is the Best of ds106 this week? Pick your top three posts and enter them in this form.

Looking ahead: Next week we will be starting on our final missions. Last week we generated some ideas. Since we’re in remix/mashup mode this week, let’s further develop our mission ideas by remixing and mashing them up with ideas from the rest of the class. Here are some basic parameters for the final mission:

• The mission has to involve in some way the class theme and the character you have been developing.
• You are encouraged to collaborate, but you can choose to work solo.
• The mission has to incorporate multiple media types that we’ve worked with over the past months (image, audio, design, video, web, etc) around a central story idea.

My plan was to mash the mission ideas together into a slate of options, but the class may well have better ideas than me at this point. This will be a two-week project, so think of something on the scale of the radio show project, but bigger and using more media. Put your thoughts in a post tagged missionremix.

Commenting

Same as always, except more.

Daily Creates

Two, please.