As a way of introducing more creativity into my daily routine, I decided to act on an impulse Wednesday night while making sugar cookies for a gathering at school the next day. My wife was helping me clean up from 3 hours of rolling, cutting, and baking up some of the best cookie dough we’ve ever made, and we looked down at two rather crisp looking cookie men. They were left over from the first batch of the evening, a batch that I had rolled out far too thinly, and thus had turned into crunchy little morsels of sugar and flour. Adding to their misfortune were misshapen appendages, pushed and pulled while still cooling into comical poses of surprise.
As we washed the last dish, and sealed the last of the cookies into a tupperware container to keep the mice that live in our walls from enjoying our Christmas confections, we picked up these two cookies and rocked them back and forth in a crude dance. We both chuckled, and looking at my wife, I mentioned it would be fun to make a stop motion movie with them. She pondered the idea a bit, contemplating whether we could stay up long enough to actually make such a project (it was 9 pm, the unofficial bedtime of many tired parents), but I felt as though it was a good excuse to bring some of the digital creativity I’ve explored in ds106 to my personal life. A movie however, would require a story, and would be much too long to produce given the hour or so our sanity and consciousness could afford.
Pulling out my iPhone, I fired up the GIF SHOP app, and mentioned something that all spouses and loved ones of those involved with ds106 are either loathe or long to hear, “let’s make an animated gif!” With a quick grin, my wife quickly went to her stash of art teacher supplies, and we began cutting paper, outlining the story, and deciding how best a care-free cookie boy could meet its demise. Thus was born the animated gif above, which my wife jokingly titled “nom, nom, nom, cookie!”
While we’ve posted it to our respective Facebook pages, and even to my wife’s blog about our family’s daily lives, I thought it might make an excellent writing prompt to share here. While I did have an opportunity to practice my prose in writing up this piece, I thought it would be fun to write a short poem in honor of the brave cookies lost in the making of this digital art. So without further compositional delay, the following is my poem for today.
sugar and flour
roll and cut, yield to the heat
nom nom nom cookie
If you have your own poem for these cookie people, please share!
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I am both relieved and frightened to see that I am not the only one dragging my wife into strange digital forays.
Good stuff.
Although my wife should be thrilled about the idea of ds106 (she’s an art teacher that focuses on the reflective piece and artist’s statement quite heavily), she’s very leery of anything I do “on the computer” that eats up such an unhealthy amount of my time.
That having been said, I actually got her considering making animated GIFs with her phone this week with one of her home-school classes 🙂