Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Visual Tapestry – Flight

I’m continuing to help prepare for next week’s educational symposium “NEW RENAISSANCE: A Revolution of Creativity and Learning” to be held at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond on September 30th. Peter Donaldson is our main speaker and event consultant, and will be role-playing Leonardo da Vinci the entire day. To create atmosphere and ambiance, Peter has asked our event media team to create a series of “visual tapestries” which are 10-15 minute image montages focusing on a specific motif related to da Vinci’s life and work. These are the guidelines we collaboratively wrote for the student and educator media team creating these visual tapestries:

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.

Attribution for "Visual Tapestry - Flight"

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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