#blogjune End of Hecuba's Story

Hecuba, a photo by Hecuba's Story on Flickr.

This is going to be the hardest #blogjune for me so I am going to get it over very quickly. This blog, Hecuba's Story, which I used for Web 2.0 and continued to use for general technology posts was named after my cat Hecuba. The reasoning behind it doesn't matter. You will note that the previous post to this one was in October 2010. The end of the feline Hecuba's story came on 3 November 2010 and I haven't been able to post here since. I tried a couple of times to do an Animoto tribute to her to post here but it hasn't quite happened. And maybe during June I will manage to achieve that.

Meanwhile by a very strange coincidence yesterday someone on Flickr accessed twice one of the series of photos I took of her after she had died! How amazing is that! The photo above (not the one viewed) shows her laid out in her shroud with flowers and one of her favourite plastic bag toys to play with in eternity. You can see her other gravegoods in Flickr and the lavender and daisy bushes that mark her spot.

So one Hecuba's story is finished, but the other Hecuba's story which involves the excitement of technological change lives on! And I am glad that the blog bears the name of the feline Hecuba who loved lying between me and my keyboard when I blogged!!

#Octshowntell #5 Dvolver

For the last day in October I decided to try out another tool for #Octshowntell. So I tried Dvolver as @jobeaz had tried it recently. Like her, my #Octshowntell posts aren't showing up in Twitter search, so I thought I would copy her last tool and tell a pretty poor story about Melbourne weather. The tool was quite easy to use and allowed for three scenes with a variety of backdrops, skies, music and text. I initially chose to do a soliloquy but other options were available such as dialogue. I was a bit confused about how to load it here as you actually had to email the movie to someone befor
re the option was given. But here it is! thanks @jobeaz!





My second go used a couple of characters; they weren't quite right as I had the following person going last but you get the idea!



Now we are all just wondering what we will do in November!!

#Octshowntell #4 Animoto for recipes

For my fourth #Octshowntell, I went back to Animoto to see if it would work for another type of story: a recipe. there are a number of site where you can upload videos of cooking recipes but I have never really liked them or the result. I thought that Animoto might work. In preparation I took step by step photos while I was making basil chicken balls in tomato sauce. This time I loaded the photos directly from my own drive so that I could select them more easily. I then played around with some different formats and different music. Which one do you like best? Do you think Animoto works for recipes? Would it be better with a full length video as opposed to the free 30 seconds?

The first was done with original Animoto style to Mozart's overture to the Marriage of Figaro.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The second was the same style and music but done with a one click remix.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The third used the original Animoto style but changed the music to another piece of Mozart.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The final version used the Color Fold style and the same piece of Mozart.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

#Octshowntell #3 Storybird

As Storybird was one of the sites that I played around with today I thought that it was probably useful to do something with it before I forgot. I really think it is unlikely that I would use this site for work or play again but you never know. It is probably quite useful for a children's librarian or a school librarian and would certainly be useful for kids to learn storytelling skills.

Telling stories is not my forte but I created a short one about my cat Polyxena and her names, called the Story of Polyxena. There are informational videos and it is quite easy to choose a theme or art work to use. The facility to embed it in a blog was supposedly available and weirdly I discovered it seemed to be an option with other stories I read on Storybird. Just not mine! I will be interested to see if others get the option when they link through.

PS This morning when I was on a different computer that didn't recognize me on Storybird I managed to get the code to embed the story. Fingers crossed that this works!

The Story of Polyxena on Storybird