Finally.  I got around to making a few animated Gifs.  I chose Ghost World.  I love Thora Birch’s interpretation of Enid.  Birch’s expressions are priceless, and kind of capture what I feel at least a few times a week.  Is it healthy to possess so much teenage angst at 36?  I’m not so sure.

I decided to use the first day of summer school since the expressions in this scene sum up how Enid feels about a lot of the bullsh**ery that exists in the adult world.  For those of you who haven’t seen the movie or read the comic, Enid has just graduated from high school with the provision that she take and pass a summer art class since she failed the class during the school year.  Enid happens to be a talented artist.  I wonder how Enid would have done if she were in a class structured more like an independent study…

Here are those Gifs…

There’s too much dead time at the beginning of this first clip, but it was the first attempt.

Thora Birch in Ghost World

This one didn’t turn out quite as I had imagined either.  I also screwed up on the resizing.  But these things happen.

More Enid in art class

This one is my favorite:

Yup. Enid in art class

I followed Jim Groom’s tutorial.  Very helpful stuff there.

Story: It’s been more than a quarter of a century since I first watched Paths of Glory. At that time, the experience of watching the nearly 30 year old film was profound. As part of my research into Timothy Carey’s career apart from World’s Greatest Sinner, I was delighted to find Kubric’s amazing World War I film available on YouTube (link above). Though Carey is only a supporting character actor, the scene of him approaching the firing squad is at the same time haunting and unforgettable.

My purpose in watching the film wasn’t to find a moment to turn in to an animated GIF. And the one above isn’t even of Timothy Carey. The scene in which this young soldier appears for a cameo comes at the end of the film and is also unforgettable but on an entirely different emotional level than with Carey. It suggested itself to me as an animated GIF immediately.

Assignment: This is my second stab at the Say It Like Peanut Butter assignment in the past week. I’ve heard there are some ds106 participants who think nothing of posting seven or eight animated GIF assignments in day so don’t think I need to worry about going back to the well so frequently. Besides it’s a good way to stay in practice.

Process: The process was essentially the same as described with the Repoman clip last week using layer masking to reduce the file size. As the original video was of higher quality that the stuff I usually find on YouTube and the scene so beautiful, I decide to sample the frames at the higher rate of 8 fps.

I’ve been trying to make the GIFs as small as possible recently and the best way seems to be reducing the number of frames. The color reduction that Mark suggested seems to be done automatically by GIMP as the file is created.

To do the layer masking, I created an oval selection with 5 pixels of feathering around the soldiers face. The layer mas was applied to 14 of the 15 frames that were created by MPEG StreamClip. So the rest of the tavern scene around the soldier is essentially a still photograph. The size of the GIF with layers masked as described above is 975 kb.

I created another one, for the purpose of comparison, with all 15 frames in tact. The size of this file was 1.6 MB.

It would appear that dramatic file size reduction can be accomplished with Jim’s layer masking technique (linked to in the repoman post. We should all be very grateful for the Bava, indeed.

I find these 3d wiggle stereoscopy animated gifs really fascinating, so I tried it.
I took a lot of pictures down at Lake MacGuffin this past weekend, so I found some shots that looked like they would work.
If you haven’t seen them before, here’s the basic idea. You take 2 shots of a subject from slightly different position or angle and then make them into an animated gif. If done right, you get a 3d-like effect.

If they’re not wigglin’, click on the image to get it going.

For the bird gif, I put the two images into separate layers in Gimp. I made one of them 50% opaque while I worked so I could see them both superimposed. Then I used the move tool, the scale tool and the rotate tool to try to get the main body of the bird matched up in both layers. Then I set the opacity  back to 100% and cropped the whole thing so that both layers were the same size and shape. I saved it as an animated gif and set the interval to about 150ms. I used the same general technique for the other one as well.

Here’s a few links with some more examples and explanations of the effect.

Jim Gasperini http://www.well.com/user/jimg/index.html
Wiggle stereoscopy – a new approach http://sunpig.com/martin/archives/2005/12/12/wiggle-stereoscopy-a-new-approach.html

That’s my story. Any Questions?