Month: March 2018

York College CT101 Students GIF the Portrait

York College CT101 Students GIF the Portrait – March 2018

My CT101 Digital Storytelling students rocked a series of digital portrait manipulations learning the ins and outs of image manipulations with Adobe photoshop. Many of the students are first time users of photoshop. What better way to experiment with something new than to work with a subject that inspires you?

Students were asked, who inspires you and why? Tell us about your connection to this person and how they influence and motivate you. They were asked to write individual blog posts for the class website over at ct101.us about their experiences and also working with photoshop.

The end results: each student produced a series of manipulated images and brought them together to form a stop motion animation. This brought the static to life so that basic animation skills were also learned.

We then submitted one single frame from the series to produce a collaborative portrait animation for the popular GIF the Portrait project here on the Net Art site for the commons.

Want to create a collaborative portrait GIF with your class? Reach out – Rseslow@york.cuny.edu

York College Students NET-ART the Commons.


March 2018

Im happy to finally publish and share some of the results generated from the fall semester of 2017.  The works were submitted by my CT101 -Digital Storytelling students at York College specifically for the NET-ART website on the CommonsBoth sections of the course contributed to two collaborative projects. The process for these pieces are generated quickly in an energy of immediacy as students were asked to work intuitively to generate their results. Part of the process is to simply ALLOW what one feels creatively impulsed to do, and not block or judge the process as good or bad. It is not an easy feet in a world where we have so much control over the way we use, receive and send communication via our mobile devices. Students suspended their judgements and engaged in the curation, composing, expressing and publishing of their works using various web tools for both desktop and mobile. These are the first iterations where results were produced. We used these pieces as the stepping stones of assessment and contrast.

1. Above, students experimented with creating Vapor Wave style net-art works using selected fragments of Internet culture, graphic assets and digital media from the web. Multiple skill sets were learned and applied. Both Desktop and mobile applications were experimented with (all of which can be found here on this website). The Vapor Wave pieces were contributed by students after screen recording their work using quicktime and converting the short videos into animated GIFs. It was decided upon by the class to show the works in a slide show format.

2. Below, Students participated in the GIF the Portrait project by first creating individual portrait GIFS. They were then asked to extract one frame from the sequence of manipulated frames that makes up the whole animation. They worked from people (fictional characters included) that inspired them. Students had to alter each portrait and remove the background contents to create a collaborative sequence of layers in a constant flow of change and transition…with no time delays of course.

Both projects are an introduction to converting static images into motion graphics and animations. Once you start, you can never stop!

Would you or your class like to participate in a project on the Net-Art site? Get in touch – rseslow@york.cuny.edu