Getting Ready for OER19

Hiya! It’s been a minute since I’ve written a post on my blog, but I’m back! And ooohhh boy do I have an exciting post! Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working to animate our OER19 ad to display at our Reclaim Hosting table.

Lauren wrote about our process creating the Ad in her Be Kind Reclaim post. Sticking with our Reclaim Video aesthetic we decided to craft our own VHS covers to show some aspects of Reclaim Hosting and add them to our very own Reclaim Video shelf.

We put together the full ad within an afternoon and I’m very impressed at how quickly we worked! We all voted on the topics for each VHS (Lauren wrote a great description of each tape) and divided them up amongst the group. Tim was the choreographer and put all tapes on our shelf as we finished them.

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I started working on the OER19 themed tape. We were playing with the idea to pull in the ET theme from the lovely conference banner.

Once I saw the bicycle in the moon, I immediately started searching for the iconic view of Elliot and ET flying on the bicycle. I knew I could create a cool poster using that VHS cover.

I grabbed this image and opened up photoshop to get to work. I removed the bicycle and ET from the VHS cover using the clone stamp to give a clean slate. Then I ended up using the selection tools to grab a the bicycle from the OER19 banner and found a transparent OER19 image to use as the movie title. I thought it turned out really well!

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Here are the other tapes we created for the ad:

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Pretty sick right? It gets better. After some brainstorming, we decided we were going to display this ad on our table at OER19. And what better way to do this? Animate all VHS tapes to make the shelf come alive.

Thanks to ds106 (#4life), creating the Gifs were super easy– I just needed to find the pieces I wanted to animate. There were 8 tapes in total and each became their own unique side story to the full story of Reclaim.

Domains19– This one is a announcing our upcoming conference in June. Ryan Seslow created this sick glitch gif of a man in a hoodie that Lauren used in the tape. I added that Gif over her original to animate the hoodie.

SPLOTs— This one I created new layers of the rorschach test and decreased the opacity for each frame. Then I reversed the frames to bring the opacity back to 100%.

Cursed Gutenberg– Oh the horror of the WordPress update. I made the hand move up and down as if it were getting chopped up (grossly awesome, right?)

ds106– This one was a little tough to come up with. I wanted to animate the lava flow in the background but, this was proving difficult in Photoshop. Then I found Plotaverse and let me tell you, this was a game changer! I was able to animate the background on my iPad in like 20 minutes.

OER19– This speaks for itself. I made it look like Elliot and ET were flying

yourdomain.com– This one is based on our Splash page. Here I animated each letter to appear as if you were typing in your domain name.

Reclaim Video– This is one of the longest GIFs to do frame by frame but my personal favorite! Taken from the intro of our awesome Reclaim Video video I was able to make it look like the video was playing in the tape cover.

Devo– This is an ode to our Shared Hosting servers– we name each shared hosting server after 80s pop punk bands. I animated each letter to make them ‘dance’ to the music.

So after all of these were finished it was time to put them all together on the shelf! This probably was the most time consuming piece of the whole project, it was a lot of coordination to make sure the frames were running correctly and on time. But here’s the final look!

Putting this together made me so pumped for OER19! I also can’t thank the Reclaim team enough for making my job a little (a lot) easier to animate the VHS covers with their amazing originals. I’m so excited to hear all the awesome presentations and catch up with some Reclaimers to see what they’ve been up to in the past year. So stop by our Reclaim table and see the shelf in real life (or just come by and say hello!) See you there!