Cowterspace: More Than A Cute Cow in Space Video

I’ve done my research. It’s a trope- Everything’s Better With Cows.

Watch the elegantly (student) produced animation story below. Retweet it. Facebook it. StumbleUponIt. It’s great.

Yes, I landed there via a Guy Kawasaki tweet to his link farm.

https://twitter.com/GuyKawasaki/status/538020816420888576

And that’s where most people aim.

The Big Final Shiny Thing.

I appreciate these kinds of sites. Neatorama. Random Good Stuff. Mental Floss. The grand daddy Boing Boing.

Somewhere there is a big listicle of all these “curation” sites.

To me the links they wrangle are not my end point, but the starting point. Sometimes I have followed about 4 links back from these sites to get to the source.

I started a journey from Holykaw. It;s kind of like a shopping mall. I watched the adorable video.

These I enjoy, but I enjoy the backstory more. So I step linked back to the site where this video resides, the Online Portfolio of Tristan Weis”. If you stopped at the scroll, you would get what most people consider an ideal eportfolio item.

The Shiny Final Product.

Yet there is so much more, just down the scroll.

Screen shots of the development process:

DEV PROCESS

A look to the “Action Sheet” showing how Tristan organized and planned this complex production

action sheet

A clip of the animatic, or a rough cut of the animation:

The animatic was very important to get a feeling for timing, camera perspectives and general animation flow. I had to create five versions until I finally felt confident enough to begin working on the real thing.

There’s much more- sketches and draft of the character development

Storyboards of the two of the project ideas for animation, one of which became Cowterspace.

I anything is missing (and maybe I cannot find it)- it’s what I asked for and often got from my ds106 students– what is the inspiration for the story? What are its influences? What does the story mean to them?

And it remains my stubborn focus on this idea of narrating our work, the impetus for the Notery idea.

I know the refrains “I’m too busy to blog” (not too busy for [fill in the name of some social media statusing site], eh?) (not too busy for binge tv watching?).

My ongoing wonder why we do so little of this in education, all the focus on the Final Shiny Thing, where the learning, the growth, is in the long process that comes before it.

Thankfully a few people, like Tristan Weis, are not only producing great video art (bonus because its made in the open source Blender software), but sharing the process behind it.

Maybe all you want is the funny cow.

I seek more.

About cogdog

I bark about and play with technology and web stuff. Harmless. I have my shots.

2 thoughts on “Cowterspace: More Than A Cute Cow in Space Video

  1. “My ongoing wonder why we do so little of this in education, all the focus on the Final Shiny Thing, where the learning, the growth, is in the long process that comes before it.”
    Knock-knock–hello, that hasty generalization just swept years of Portfolio Assessment with its emphasis on metacognition under the rug, and I do most heartily protest! I understand composition teachers aren’t the whole curricular pie, but we’re a huge wedge, and our collective preoccupation with metacognition is well past being a fad.
    That said, you may proceed…

    1. You do call me correctly on my over generalization (though I said “so little” and not “not at all”). I have no experience in this area, so in Portfolio assessment there is much learner reflection, documentation on their process, or is based upon on going teacher assessment of work in progress?

      The critical difference to me seems- in such a portfolio assessment (which I am not saying us unworthy) the audience is the learner and the assessor; my contention is the process changes wildly when the process is made public.

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