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Are your photo editing skills up to the challenge? Create an animated GIF with at least 3 seperate animation zones. [See example here] I suggest starting with a simple movie poster, photograph or greeting card. You’ll be becoming best friends with the lasso tool and layers, so you may want to brush up on those. This is definitely a 5-star assignment.
Back in the 1800s, stereograms were a popular way of creating the optical illusion of depth in a static image by placing two very similar images side by side. they could be viewed using a stereoscope to create the illusion. The New York Public library has an extensive collection of stereograms, and recently created the Stereogranimator tool (http://stereo.nypl.org/) to allow people to turn these into animated GIFs, which are just as effective in creating a sense of depth. Use the Stereogranimator to create an animated GIF that makes the image appear to be 3D, or try manipulating the frames to create another interesting effect (e.g. http://stereo.nypl.org/view/41623)
This is a cat Gif….
“Katamit Trading Card, animated” animated GIF, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”
From Movie Trading Cards, to Animated Movie Trading Cards
Last night I worked on the Movie Trading Card assignment, creating a Trading Card aesthetic and then placing the Intruder and the Alien Woman within the template I had created. This was part of my attempt to work on some non-GIF assignments and get my 10 stars for The Intruders.
As soon as I had that done and posted, I gave myself permission to GIF, and placed three frames from my animated GIF Katamit within the Trading Card. The Katamit still finds humans awfully boring.
And then …
—- and then decided to place some other Twilight Zone GIFs-in-need-of-a-home within the Trading Card as well. I started, got 2 done, but then sleep called and I left them in progress. Those GIFs will appear in a future post.
However, today, while I was away from the computer, Jim Groom jumped in, and extended his Movie Trading Card assignment to include Animated GIFs, and placed his animated Intruder within a similar Trading Card format. He created a landscape formatted card, which I immediately realized would be better to fit in movie scenes which are landscape in nature. Thanks for that Jim! I’m pretty good now at remembering to turn my iPhone into landscape mode when shooting a movie, but had used a character focus last night for my cards and so had designed them in portrait mode. Therefore, this evening, I set about to update my Trading Card to support a scene-based, landscape formatted card. Once that was done, it was easy to select a still from To Serve Man, and place it within the landscape frame.
“Good News for Earth ??” scene-based Trading Card, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”
Of course, having done the “good news” moment from the episode, it made perfect sense to do the “bad news” moment as well — and as I looked to select one frame, I got caught up trying to GIF it. The problem was the lady in the background who in the scene moves as much as Penny. Mega-distraction. I spent over an hour trying three different approaches to deal with her (layering over her with an unmoving image, layering changing background images over top of the changing image, and placing a static image at the bottom of the stack and erasing her and the background from all of the changing images) — and in the end went back to the first approach, compromising in the end order to get the GIF done and into the scene-based Trading Card framework:
“Nope. Bad News for Earth, Worse for Chambers” scene-based Trading Card, by aforgrave, from “To Serve Man”
As fate would have it, I finally got the card posted — with the lady still demonstrating some bizarre neck aberrations, when I noticed that all of the text was jumping on one frame and there was a blinky gap at the bottom for most of the frames. So I revisited the .psd Photoshop file, managed to resolve the text issues, and took another run at fixing the lady in the background, too. In the end, it works pretty well. Tidied up nicely.
Sharing is Caring CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
@cogdog (Alan Levine) suggested that I make the .psd files available for folks to use in making their own ds106zone Movie Trading Cards — they could be either static or animated — and so I share the two files below.
A couple notes:
Layers for the Scene-based ds106zone Trading Card
find that the Edit >>> Transform >>> Scale is invaluable, together with the Move tool, to getting the image properly framed. Depending on the dimensions of your original image, you may need to do some cropping.
Reduce during Save for Web
Reduce during Save for Web
And so, without further ado, I present the following two files for your use and enjoyment:
| File | ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_scene.psd CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 |
ds106zoneTradingCard_BLANK_character.psdCC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 |
| Looks Like |  |
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From The Twilight Zone, And Beyond …Assignment, this is when the lady strikes the “invader” out of the attic.
click here for the gif:
From The Twilight Zone, And Beyond …Assignment, this is when the lady strikes the “invader” out of the attic.
click here for the gif:
It’s April 12th! It’s my Birthday! What better way to celebrate than a special edition of “My Animated GIF Day“! Come back throughout the day for updates with new GIFs…if you’re into that sort of thing 
5:56 am
I’ve been up for about 30 minutes or so. I woke up before my alarm went off, putting me in a slightly off mood. Sometimes I welcome an early start, and sometimes I feel as though I’ve been cheated out of a few minutes sleep when my body decides it’s time to wake up before the alarm. Regardless, toast helps right any early morning grumpiness, especially toast with butter and jam. Yes, my toaster is a bit grubby. It’s my birthday today, I’ll clean it tomorrow.
6:24 am
In the last year I’ve taken up running 3-4 days a week with 50-60 crunches, 20-30 push ups, and a few other exercises on most days. I’ve lost nearly 25 pounds, so while I’m not terribly fit, I’m getting there. Yes, I know I have terrible form. Yes, I know my bedroom looks cluttered. No, I will not show you my pathetic attempts at push ups.
This animated GIF update to Andrew Allingham‘s original logo seemed just another example of one of those thing that just suddenly jumped out as needing to be GIFfed, by hopefully paying homage to the original, and promoting the slight change to the new. Things will be the same, but updated.
And I’m so happy that the GIFfing process was so much easier to do now, than it would have been at the initial outset of GIFestivus2012. Thanks to ds106 for the continuing motivation and support, and for the great radio tunes and fantastic community along the way. Learning is happening here. #4life.
“ds106rad.io Animated GIF ‘Your NEW Old Radio Friend’ “, by aforgrave on Flickr, based on the original image by Andrew Allingham
So for my first animated GIF I chose to make a clip from one of my all time favorites, quite possibly the most epic war movie ever made, Liberation!. This Soviet film (well, series of films) tells the story of … Continue reading
I came into DS 106 rather late, so I’m playing catch-up and will be posting the bootcamp content out of order. Just for fun, I thought I would start with the animated GIF project (Say It Like The Peanut Butter).
I decided to create a GIF from my favorite movie, American Beauty. The film is rife with shots and moments that would lend themselves well to this medium. The famous footage of the plastic bag floating down the street would probably be the most obvious choice, as well as the most overdone, so I decided to go with the brief but important scene when Lester Burnham catches his wife Carolyn in her affair when she stops at the fast food chain where he works. The dialogue is sharp, the situation is characteristic of the film, and Jeanine’s interjections into what could be a very dramatic scene solidifies the element of irreverence that runs throughout the film.
This particular shot is of Lester’s look of approval to Jeanine and her authoritative dismissal of Carolyn, demonstrating that through this misstep Carolyn has lost her position of control.
Video Source: http://youtu.be/LYmO9oXsTF8
Software Used: PwnYouTube, MPEG Streamclip, Adobe Photoshop CS5
I had a lot of fun using the Animate feature in Photoshop, so I decided to also create a GIF of the full version of the Kurt Vonnegut quote that I use as my blog header:
Quotation Source: Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country
Software Used: PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop CS5
Note: For some reason the GIFs aren’t playing in the published version of the blog post, but if you click on the image it will open in a new window and play. Still trying to figure out why this is happening…
