Loving Alzheimer’s

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Alzheimer’s disease is defined by the Alzheimer’s Foundation fo America (AFA) as “a progressive, degenerative disorder that attacks the brain’s nerve cells, or neurons, resulting in loss of memory, thinking and language skills, and behavioral changes.”(http://www.alzfdn.org/AboutAlzheimers/definition.html) My Grandmother has Alzheimer’s. She is 86 years old and has been suffering from the disease for the past 6 years. She had been showing signs of poor memory and being flustered by little instances of memory loss, but nothing severe until 2006. Her self confidence was shattered and her health began to decline much more drastically. She had been diagnosed with dimentia/Alzheimer’s. Watching someone you love and cherish slowly forget who they are and who you are takes a toll on a family. I chose to do my documentary on my grandmother’s and my mom’s dealings with the disease because it has impacted my family and myself greatly. Everything changed when she forgot. My mom, aunts and uncles had to step in and take care of their mother as if she was their child. My uncle took over as power of attorney and my mom and aunt saw to her personal needs. From the hard decision to move her in to a nursing home to taking over her care, my family had to adjust to losing their mother. So she forgot us. Alzheimer’s didn’t just take my grandma’s memory, it took my grandma. She was no longer the laughing, joking, sassy woman I had grown up loving. As the disease took over she remained lighthearted and caring as best she could, but the jokes, stories, and memories were no longer there. The essence of my grandma was disappearing. At this moment the woman that is my grandmother is no longer my grandma. She is barely recognizable to me and yet I still love her as much, or even more than I did before. She isn’t grandma, she is Alzheinmer’s. Her jumbled brain and slurred speech make it hard to communicate. With my documentary I had hoped to capture the emotions behind the process of forgetting as well as what my aunts, uncles, mom, and grandma gradually went through.

 

Week 15 Summary

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Tutorials

Assignments

Final Project

For my final project I wanted to try and tell Snow White’s story through a realistic lens. I attempted to blend key aspects of the story with real life scenarios as well as creatively and successfully tell the story through a series of media. Its a culmination of the storytelling skills I learned in ds106 and am proud of all that I have learned and am now able to do.

Advice to Future ds106ers

Best Work Category

I chose these assignments because they are my favorites and ones I am proud of. I also enjoyed creating them the most which is probably why they turned out the best.

Week Three Storytelling to Me

Looking back on my definition of storytelling it hasn’t changed too much. It has definitely broadened to include many different forms of media and types of stories. Stories don’t have to be the traditional beginning, middle, and end. They can just be a simple declaration or description.

This semester has been for the most part fun. I have enjoyed most of what we have done. It has been a lot of work and a big time commitment, but if it hadn’t had been so enjoyable it would have sucked.

Advice to Future ds106ers

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I wanted to share with future ds106ers some advice I wish I had taken. It would’ve saved me a lot of stress and sleep. I chose posters because its something people can just look at, they aren’t real time commitments and people are more likely to take the couple seconds to read them than to watch a video. I also wanted to use some of my ds106 work to show off what we do in the class

Created Assignments Summary

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When thinking about what assignments I wanted to create I thought back to what assignments I enjoyed the most. I loved the design and visual assignments so I knew I wanted to create assignments for those categories.

For my Colorize it assignment I came up with the idea after finding my grandparents’ wedding album after cleaning out my grandma’s attic. She got married in the forties so the photos are black and white. I started thinking how I wish I could see what the day was like in person and how it would’ve looked to them instead of colorless. So, when I first tried to color a black and white photo I used one of my grandma’s wedding photos. It was a disaster. Since I knew the people in the photo I was not happy no matter what I did to the photo. I didn’t feel like I was doing them justice. So, I went on Tumblr to find a black and white photo. I found one that I loved of a portrait of a woman. I loved her hat, her dress, her fur, and the expression on her face and immediately knew I wanted to make her hat dark purple, her hair light brown, and make the fur pop with a dark brown. The hardest part was finding a skin tone that looked natural. But, I think I found one that was successful and love how the photo turned out in color.

For my PSA Billboard assignment it just kind of came to me. People picking their nose in their cars really bugs me. One, you shouldn’t pick your nose at all its just gross. Two, people can still see you in your car, so don’t pick your nose. Its like people think they’re safe in their car and no one can see them because they just pick away with no inhibitions. And it happens a lot. And its disgusting. So, I figured what better way to express my disgust than with a ds106 assignment. My choice of telling the public that picking your nose in your car is not right was through a billboard. To mimic the area of a billboard I set the canvas dimensions to 680 x 300 and went to town with text and images. I varied the styles, color, and sizes of the font to express the feeling behind the words as well as added an image to visually demonstrate what I was talking about.

 

Tutorial Summary

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PSA Billboard Tutorial

Colorize It Tutorial

The tutorials were actually kinda fun to make. I tried to keep in mind things I wish I had known or tutorials had said about making assignments. I also wanted to incorporate photos that showed what I was doing and how certain things looked. Sometimes words can be confusing or not convey things right, so I tried to add as many images as I could because those are what really helped me the most.

PSA Billboard Tutorial

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Tutorial for PSA Billboard and the PSA Billboard assignment.

First: Decide on an idea, then Open Gimp. Once you have Gimp open go to File -> New. The Create a New Image window will pop up. For image size change width to 680 and it should automatically scale the height to 300. If not, just put 300 as the height. This will give you a work space similar in shape to a billboard.

Now that you have your work space. . .

You’re ready for Text! In the main Gimp window you will see a large bolded A. That is going to turn your pointer in to a text pointer. Click where on your canvas you want your text to start. That will bring up a smaller text window for you to type in. Each time you click it creates a new layer. When creating mine I used many different text layers.

TIP: If you find you want to move your text, just make sure you have the right text layer selected then go to Tools -> Transform -> Move.

 

To edit the style, color, and size of your text in the main Gimp window you will see the panel to edit your text.

If you want to add images to your billboard go to File on your canvas window then Open as Layers. This will put your images right over top of all of your text. To move the images behind the text in the layers window make sure you have the layer that you want to move forward or back selected and then click the up or down arrows that are at the bottom of the layers window.

If you want to move them around, when your images are in your project make sure you are on the image’s layer and go to tools -> transform-> move. Its the same process if you want to rotate or scale the image, tools-> transform -> rotate or scale.

And now you have a billboard!

Black and White re-imagined in Color Tutorial

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Tutorial for Black and White re-imagined in Color or the Colorize It assignment

So I decided to turn this classy lady:

in to a classy lady in color:

First off you need to choose a black and white photo. Originally I was going to do one of my Grandmother’s wedding photos but I realized I was too close to the subject of the photo and no matter what I did it looked wrong, soo I went on Tumblr and found this lady. I loved her hat and her positioning and right away knew how I would recolor the photo.

I used Gimp to recolor the photo.

So, step one:

Open Gimp.

Step Two:

Open whatever photo you chose in to Gimp.

Step Three:

Prepare your work space. You are going to need to open up the Layers dialogue box. That can be achieved by going to the Dialogue Tab and selecting layers:

Step Four:

Once you have your Layers window up, you are ready to start colorizing your photo. On the main Gimp window you have your foreground and background colors, the black and white boxes. Decide which  part of the photo you want to start coloring first. Once you have decided on the section, click on the black box and change the color to whatever you want that section to be.

After selecting your color you will see a box like this:

Select foreground color as indicated by the red oval.

Once you have your color selected, go to the layers tab and select new layer. Name the layer whatever area of the photo you are recoloring. Example, I did the hat first so I named my dark purple layer Hat. DON’T FREAK OUT! Your image will be totally filled with whatever color you chose.

Don’t worry, its going to be OK. Right click on your new layer in the layer window and select add layer mask.

After selecting layer mask another smaller window will pop up.

In this window you want to select Black (Full Transparency).

Now in the layers tab towards the top there is a drop down menu called layers mode. Click on the menu and select Overlay.

The Overlay feature allows the shades and the texture of the photo to really come through the color and make the coloring look more authentic. Now you are ALMOST ready to color. In the main Gimp window you are going to want to select the erase tool and use the scale option to increase or decrease the amount of area you are coloring.

It may seem counter intuitive to use the eraser tool to color a photo, I mean wouldn’t it make more sense to use the paint tool? Well, no, because what you are doing is erasing the black and white of the original photo so the color layer you created can show through.

NOW you are ready to color. I’d suggest zooming in so you can get around edges well and so your lines are crisp.

TIP: If you are coloring skin, its really hard to find a good color. If you are looking for a color similar to mine I used ebdeb9 as the HTML color notation in the color selection window. If you enter that in you can use the different hue, tint, saturation, etc controls to adjust it from there.

Once you are finished with your first color you are ready to move on to the next one. All you need to do is repeat the process all over again. Select a new color, open a new layer, create a layer mask, select overlay, and erase away!