Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

I knew about some of these influences from watching videos about “the making of Star Wars” in the past, but the references to Joseph Campell’s book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” or the “The Hero’s Journey” referred to as a “monomyth” were new to me.

The idea of creativity as “standing on the shoulders of giants” as well as your peers is also clearly communicated in the 2007 Creative Commons video, “Get Creative.”

Are you encouraging your students to remix the media of our world, and providing opportunities for them to do that constructively for course credit?

Hat tip to Alec Couros for sharing the link to Kirby’s video via Twitter.

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To view the full proposal a free account on CrowdSpring must be created. Please share this with anyone you know who is a designer or wants to design our next logo! The proposal is open until May 22, 2010. View it on:

http://www.crowdspring.com/project/2284772_storychasers-logo

It’s going to be exciting to see the proposals which come in for our logo in the next ten days. CrowdSpring and the opportunity to tap the creative imaginations of a connected community of thousands worldwide is a very “flat world” thing to do. This has great potential to be an instructive experience for us all!

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Did you know Oklahoma is home to a growing black bear population and just had its first open hunting season for bears this year? Brad Hill used photos from his own game camera to create the 1 min, 17 second video, “Bears of Leflore County.”

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

When you think of tar pits, you might think of southern California and La Brea. You also should think of Lawton, Oklahoma! Alba Dissinger used her own photos to create and share the video “Fort Sill Tar Pit” to tell about this unique archeological site in Oklahoma.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Do you know the bison herd in Western Oklahoma in the Wichita Mountains was repopulated thanks to several bison sent from New York and the Bronx Zoo? These facts and many more are shared by Sydney Perry in her video, “Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.” Sidney used the free website drop.io to have friend and refuge docent Katherine Hunt narrate this six minute video using her cell phone!

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Kacey Kinsey leads a Girls’ Circle each week in the after-school program at her school, and it continues to make a HUGE difference in the lives of students who participate. Her video “Girls Circle” tells this story, including the voices of her students.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

What’s the longest marriage you’ve heard of? Michelle LeAnn Slay’s grandparents have been married for 70 years! Michelle used iMovie along with Audacity to create the touching video, “70 Years of Love and Marriage” during our COV workshop this week.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Isn’t it amazing to see the creative and powerful media messages Oklahoma educators can craft in an intensive, 2.5 day workshop on digital storytelling?! All these videos and more (494 in all, as of this writing) are available for FREE and OPEN access in our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices online learning community. Our collaborative storytelling efforts continue! Great work, Oklahoma educators!

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Student media team members will create, prior to the Sep 29/30 events, a series of four to five short videos which will be used during the events as background media during and between sessions. These videos will include pans across high resolution images for relatively long takes (10 – 15 seconds) followed by shorter, juxtaposed images which complement and extend the videos metaphor or motif. These videos should function as visual tapestries during the event, and each should be:

1. Rhythmical, but with surprising variations
2. Meditative
3. Metaphorical (a feather is like a fern is like gear teeth on a bike is like classic wrought iron architectural detail is like tree branching systems is like a watershed is like neurons in the brain….)

The creation of these video / image montages will provide an opportunity for student media team members to play artistically with media and ideas, particularly those which reflect the work, interests, and ideas of Leonardo Da Vinci. While media team members are welcome to use their own photos to which they have copyright, members are encouraged to utilize openly licensed images such as those found using the websites CompFight, FlickrStorm, and Flickr Creative Commons. On Compfight and FlickrStorm, be sure to adjust settings/advanced settings to search for “Creative Commons images only” before searching. Student media creators should keep a careful record of photo source URLs, so proper attribution for images included in each video can be provided. We want to model good respect for copyright / intellectual property with these projects!

The first visual tapestry metaphor is “flight,” and the themes / suggestions are: long pans on feathers, close up birds, birds in flight, leaf falling, kites, hang gliders, airplanes, and helicopters. This is my initial attempt at a visual tapestry for this theme. It includes 47 Creative Commons images from Flickr, which were all located with FlickrStorm. I used iPhoto ’09 to create this video in 2.5 hours last night. This tutorial from Basics4Mac explains how to set custom Ken Burns effects in iPhoto ’09. By using FlickrStorm, we have a single URL which provides Creative Commons attribution for these images. I used tinyurl as a URL shortener so this attribution link could be included as the final image of the video. It is tinyurl.com/flight-vt.

Here’s the final video, “Visual Tapestry – Flight,” in an iPhone-compressed format. This does NOT include an audio track, and runs 10 min, 41 sec. I uploaded this to Vimeo instead of YouTube since it’s just over ten minutes long and YouTube limits videos to 10 min.

Visual Tapestry – Flight from Story Chasers on Vimeo.

I’ve linked the larger / high resolution M4V version of this file as well as this iPhone version M4V from our “Storychasing Creativity” website. Feel free to use this visual tapestry as well as the others we’ll be creating in advance of next Wednesday’s event for your own classroom activities, conference events, presentations, etc. Please just give credit for the Visual Tapestries to Storychasers and Storychasing Creativity.

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