Search Results for “animated gif”

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Ewww Brain!!! Now in 3D

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My DS106 maxim of Reuse, Riff & Recycle has once again resulted in a fun, creative morning project. Ewww Brain! Now in 3D.

Last August, DS106′s Talky Tina created daily GIF challenges to keep our creative juices flowing while we were waiting for the DS106 Headless ’13 course to begin.

Talky Tina’s DS106 animated GIF challenge August 2013 GIF Challenge #10: Monster Chiller Horror Theatre 3D Style GIF was to:

…look for a part of a scene in a 3D type movie where the thing comes right out of the screen at you. Find a way to emphasize the moving of the thing out of the screen and into your face in a GIF.

Ewww…Brain! was my answer to the challenge taken from a Sharkboy & Lava Girl- May The Best Dream Win movie clip on YouTube. (Link to original blog post for the ‘how it was made.’) Today while trolling my Twitter home stream a DS106 exchange about how to make a 3D GIF with the use of white lines caught my eye. (See twitter feed below.) The illusion reminded me of John Johnston’s GIFaChrome Layercake technology that I hadn’t tried yet. I decided to give it a go andd watched the video tutorial recommended by Mariana Funes.

Using the original Photoshop CS5 file from the Talky Tina challenge I created one white (two seemed excessive) mask line. I’ll be honest. I’m not sure how I managed to create a layer mask instead of the intended solid white line demonstrated in the video tutorial. But who’s going to complain? It made things much easier in the Studio B production department this morning. Lucky me!

Next, all I had to do was erase the portion of the line where the brain was popping out of the screen. Hmmm…. What to do with the brain goo as the brain slides down the screen? That presented a creative challenge all its own. It looked way cooler if I adjusted the erasing opacity to 50% instead of 100% to enhance the illusion of sliding down a glass surface. One final visual feature was to use the lasso tool to cut out a brain and have it slide down over the black border of the movie trailer clip.

Looking forward to using this technique in the future. Below is the Twitter conversation that sparked this project.

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Hacking – Word of the Year

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While brainstorming for ideas for today’s Daily Create, “Draw/Create an image that creates a positive connotation for the word “hacking”, I realized that I could combine this with our assignment to hack a website. What better way to give hacking a higher profile than to have the Oxford English Dictionary announce that hacking, in the sense of remixing, be the word of the year for 2013.

I used X-Ray Goggles to do the web page hacking and incorporated several chunks of text, and a couple of images, including an animated gif into the page. I found that I wasn’t able to edit all the text and tags that I wanted in the basic view, but the advanced option was more than sufficient.

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Trading Paradis

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Again I’ve not been keeping up with ds106, over the last couple of weeks the only thing I’ve managed to do is collaborate on the radio story. I’ve not even been reading other folks posts I am afraid. I did notice Giffi.us a Collaborative Story that is an offshoot of ds106 with folk taking some gifs for a walk and creating a story. Today I joined in with a quick gif from Les enfants du paradis.

As I had some time in my hands, I went back to design week and had a quick troll through the assignment bank, finding Movie Trading Cards

Design trading cards for your favorite movie. Grab a screenshot from a film of your choice to create a trading card in the spirit of the classic Star Wars movie trading cards.

And an animated gif one:

So I guess more than one assignment, but I am not counting stars.
Les enfants du paradis is a wonderful movie, I’ve not watched for a few years, I’ll have to make time for that soon.

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From Academia to Industry, from Bench to Plant. [3M-DS106 Repost]

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Originally posted Oct 4, 2013 on an internal 3M blog by “HC” a 3M-DS106 Salon member

From Academia to Industry, from Bench to the Plant. (3M-DS106 Repost)

“HC” 3M-DS106 Salon Member

This week one of my friends from Australia finally landed an industry position in the US after many years. He did his masters degree where I was doing my postdoctoral research and that was when our path first crossed. He later moved interstate to another university to do his doctorate (when I started working at 3M). He finished his research and then went to Virginia Commonwealth University for his postdoctoral research. As his project is winding down, he asked if 3M was hiring any inhalation scientists and at that time, we unfortunately weren’t. Found out this week that he got into PPD (Pharmaceutical Product Development) in Middleton, Wisconsin and one of his first comments was that “Industry is so different from Academia!”

I agree with that statement, and now that I have about the same experience in industry (5 years at 3M vs 4 years as a research only academic) I see some similarities and a lot of differences. Some people prefer the deep understanding that being in academia can get you while some prefer taking that knowledge and commercialise into products. Academics live off grants (unless they get tenure, but even then, grants are still good), while in industry we use internal grants to fund research/development on projects that interest us and could lead to success for the business and company. There are plenty of articles comparing the two ‘worlds’ and I probably won’t add too much wisdom to that body of work.

Having said that, one thing that my academia friends might not get to see is the manufacturing plants (or even those friends in Silicone Valley). It is a complex facility that also require ‘magic’ to get products out. This is where 3M also excels in, taking development from the bench and scaling it up in manufacturing. Currently I am working through scale-up of one of the products that I am the project lead on and looking at the manufacturing path on how we can make the products. We typically draw a schematic of the process flow but what if we can animate it to understand the flow better?

One of the DS106 assignments had a topic that is “Spreadsheet Invasion“, where you use a spreadsheet (in this case, Microsoft Excel) to do your animation on. I decided to do a rough schematic that is kind of realistic (probably 80 % close) but not exactly the process I am using..

This shows how complex the manufacturing process can be, with multiple inputs at different site locations. It is also something we like to show how much work our Product Engineers do such that the end user does not notice any change in performance of the final product – that particular information has been animated using PowerPoint in a presentation and will not be shown here as it does show real actual manufacturing processes and the number of input materials as well as test standards to maintain.

Do most people know how complex manufacturing can be when they were still studying?

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Animated GIF notes:

Planned the images to draw and the sequence
Coloured the cells for the frame, do a screen capture of everything.
Paste As New Layer in GIMP
Save as GIF, as an animation.

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Tending to My Cherry Red

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Once again I’m employing my DS106 time saver maxim to Reduce – Reuse – Recycle by creating a video that takes a close look at the food we eat (for DS106 daily create TDC 633) with photos and footage I had already taken. This time it’s with my favorite birthday cake which has made several appearances in daily creates and other digital storytelling projects.

This beauty had to make another repeat appearance since fellow DS106er Stephanie Jeske was unable to view the time lapse video of me frosting my cake a few weeks back. I use a small section of ZZ Top’s Cherry Red as the sound track and YouTube in Germany has blocked it because of copyrighted content. I’m using an even longer section this time, but I’ve uploaded the video directly to my website, so no autobot is going to block it.

UPDATE 11/2/13: Just discovered there’s a video assignment for this type of project VideoAssignments1024. Yay! Yet another Reduce-Reuse-Recycle for this one.

How it was made.

There are a number of sections to this video that was assembled in Adobe Premiere Elements 12: Intro GIF, Time Lapse, Still Photos, Outro GIF.

The GIF at the beginning of DJ licking the frosting off of the number 2 that was on his cake was made with two photos taken fairly close together. They weren’t close enough to make a smooth GIF right away. I ended up doing some work in photoshop to adjust the size and skew of the photos so that they blended more when flashed from one to the other.

Using the Lapse It Pro app I photographed myself frosting the cake. In reality it took about 20 minutes (551 frames) that was reduced to 46 sec when all was said and done. The app did all the work. I just set my iPhone up on a tripod and went to work using the default settings since this was my first time out using this app.

2 yr old’s beauty

The cake really did look beautiful when I had finished, just like the one I made for DJ’s second birthday. But I made a fatal error by frosting the cake while it was still warm. I was in a hurry to get to my birthday massage and for some reason was driven to take the time lapse photography right then and there. Why I couldn’t wait is a mystery to me now that a little over a month has past since I made it.

Aaahhh! It melted!

When I returned from my massage, I removed the cake from the refrigerator and this is what it looked like. To my horror my beautiful cake had melted. I briefly thought about throwing it out and starting all over again. But I didn’t want to do all that work again. It was my birthday and I wanted to play, enjoy myself, go get my hair done….. While I was running around having fun I came up with a brilliant idea on how I could pass off this monstrosity as something creative- if nothing else.

At 51 you’re showing your age.

My guests are accustomed to this gluten-free birthday cake and had just a few weeks earlier joined in the celebration of DJ’s second birthday. Of course a 2 year old’s cake would look fresh and new, no wrinkles or bags, or cracks showing through. But a 51 year old’s cake? Now that’s a different story. They all laughed and dug in. It still tasted just as good and moist as it always does. And really…. by the time I get it on their plates it’s a mess anyway.

51 in all her glory. No shame required.

The final GIF segment of the video clip was made with a series of still photos as I turned the cake slowly around in a circle. For a first time effort, it’s not too bad. (Note to self… Next time have a marker of some sort on the counter top so I can line up the placement of the object from shot to shot.) The photos were uploaded to Photoshop, assembled as separate layers into one file and turned into an animated GIF.

Music Attribution:

I certainly will give credit where credit is due though, and wish to express my appreciation to ZZ Top for making such good music. You can buy “Cherry Red” on

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It’s Finally Visual Week!

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I am one of the volunteer cheerleaders for visual week (aka Telling Stories in Photos) for Headless DS106. Alan said that we don’t need pom poms to be cheerleaders:

@madamezubidar @giuliaforsythe pom-poms not necessary #ds106—
Alan Levine (@cogdog) September 23, 2013

But I went ahead and made an animated gif of me as a cheerleader anyway. This is my third semester participating in DS106 – back in Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 I was an open participant. If you are looking for ideas for how to tackle visual assignments, you can check out my Visual Assignments tag or anything under (Digital) Story Time since there are also relevant daily creates there. I have a dearth of tutorials on this subject, so that is one of the things I will be working on this week as I cheer all of you along!

To get the ball rolling, I thought I would start out the week by completing the one strongly recommended and super easy assignment of creating a Post “Secret”.

Not really a secret except to those who don’t know that I write fiction, but certainly fits the bill for “biggest dream in life.”

So, on to visual week! Happy photographing and photoshopping!

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Scrooge Discovers Peanut Butter

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My first step in this assignment was to google the title “Say it like the Peanut Butter”. What allusion to popular culture had I failed to grasp and what key piece of information was I missing? Now I know how to pronounce the word “gif”.

The assignment was to make an animated gif from your favourite/least favourite movie capturing the essence of a key scene and to ensure the movement is minimal but essential. I may have failed on the “movement is minimal” part.

I used Gifsoup which is a web-based tool to create a gif of Alastair Sim in the Christmas Carol realizing that he has had a bad dream and that he is not dead.

The following steps can be used to create your own gif using the Gifsoup website:

Go to gifsoup.com and set up a free account
Enter the url of the YouTube video you would like to use
Enter the start and end times of the segment you wish to use
Click the “Create animated Gif” button
Enter metadata – title, tags and category for your gif

Once your gif has been created you can:

download it in two different sizes
link to it by url (or a shortened url)
cut and paste html in your blog or web page

The free Gifsoup account is adequate for an assignment such as this; however, gifs have a maximum length of 10 seconds and there is a GifSoup watermark at the bottom of the gif.

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Getting In Touch.

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Gif Fight means a page where you can find every two weeks an inspiration for an animated gif. The “fight” may mean that it is a challenge to compare yourself to other participants’ creations. Still, the challenge which was designed for the headless ds106 course of 2013 makes it difficult to think about a fight. I found this, two mannequins already peacefully side by side.

Only for me it seemed they have difficulties to get in touch. With my gif version I tried to help them with this.

I drew leaves on different layers which twine around the neighbouring arms of the mannequins.

Then I took an animated gif of a bunch of pink roses, which I found in the web.

One rose I copied to my tendril layers.

After this I animated the arms of the mannequins, the way that they finally get in touch. After the arms have gotten in touch, I added the animated bouquet as a result of their new relation, which may mean creating together is better than fighting.

For the appropriate assignment idea of the ds106 assignment bank you can click here.

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It’s Showtime!

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“It’s Showtime!”

Link to fair use movie poster source in Wikipedia

One of my favorite movies of all time and characters is Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice. The ghostest with the mostest. This 1988 comedy horror film directed by Tim Burton is a scream and I’ve always thought quite romantic too. [Wikipedia Post]

And look at that… the official movie poster? Yes. There are indeed headless ghosts running around from time to time. But none of those scenes seemed as appropriate to sum up the movie and capture the essence of a key scene as when Beetlejuice, a self-proclaimed “bio-exorcist”, is being released from his exile in a small model town in the young couples attic. Indeed… It’s Showtime!

Talk about perfect source material for completing the DS106 Headless 13 week two assignment, Visual Assignment 2 “Say It Like The Peanut Butter” Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene.

This is not my first movie GIF, [See Ewww... Brain] so I’m pretty familiar with my GIF making tools now. I’m also getting better and better at choosing the right kind of source material to work with to make things go smoother and faster in the production process.

For the video clip I knew this was a key scene and someone on YouTube would have posted this small segment and I wouldn’t have to search through my own DVD to find it. Yep… there it was, and even better… It was an HD version to boot. I downloaded the clip to my Mac with the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox. I then imported it to Adobe Premiere Elements 11, located the 3 second clip and then exported it as a JPEG sequence at 10 Frames per second.

Publish+Share => Computer => Image (use for exporting still image) => open the advanced menu and choose “export as sequence” under the video heading, then save.

I opened the 36 images in Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 and placed them all into one file as separate layers. The original images were quite large, so I reduced the image size to 500px which is the upper limit to post to Tumblr.

File => Save For Web => Click on Animate => Animation Frame Delay set at 0.1 => Save

That’s it. Simple once you know how to do it. Not so the first few times as I was learning how. [See Hula Hotseat] For those of you just starting out…. hang in there. It gets easier the more you practice. [See Batman & Robin Behind The Scenes for a good photoshop elements GIF tutorial]

And a whole lot more fun is coming your way! Soon YOU’LL be saying, “It’s Showtime!”

Video Source: MOVIECLIPS.com

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Technology is Great! (When it works.)

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Tim Owens (@timmmmyboy) and Alan Levine (@cogdog) – DS106.us heroes

Keeping the DS106 server happy.

Technology is great… when it works. And keeping the DS106.us site up and running has been a labor of love and a real pain at times – especially this week. So Talky Tina’s August 2013 Animated GIF Challenge #9 was to make an animated GIF celebrating the behind the scenes work that keeps the ds106.us server happy. Giving some love and recognition to the folks behind the scenes that keep the web servers and internet tubes running. Tim Owens and Alan Levine were on the battlefield this week.

This was also an assignment before there was an Animated GIF category — found hiding in the Design Assignments category as @cogdog‘s wonderful Design Assignment 842: Rainbows and Unicorns in the Server Room. Make an animated GIF of a server room that includes both rainbows, unicorns, and a message of thanks. The cheesier the better. Bonus points for elves and pink ponies.

WOW! What a difference. Making the GIF this time around I discovered the wonders of the full version of Photoshop CS5. No more manually merging the layers before I can take a test drive, and I can easily change the animation screen time for each image seperately. In Photoshop Elements you don’t have that flexibility. I’ve had to use the brute force method of saving several versions of files with the individual layers, different merged images, etc. so I could go back to them when I wanted to make a change. A few of my past blog posts walk you through this time consuming painful experience.

Yes. Technology is great…. when it works. And I can tell you, the full version of Photoshop works! No wonder some of the DS106ers can crank these animated GIFs out in no time.

Images:

Server Room
Rainbow Image found at OpenClipArt.org
Unicorn animated GIF found on a free clip art site with a page dedicated to unicorns

A few other server images you might enjoy