My first ever assignment on this Blog!

The assignment is to; ‘ you’ll be creating an animated gif of a clip from your favourite (or least favourite) film’

As someone who loves films, to pick a favourite is so difficult! But none the less I persevered and came up with one of my favourite scenes from my favourite films.

Here is the animated GIF I made: The link to the original video is here.

I made this animated GIF using IMGUR’s video to GIF.  I found it to be the best GIF maker I have found, it makes high quality, smooth looking animated GIFs.

Keen films fans may recognise this GIF from ‘The Blues Brothers’.

I love this particular scene because of the story behind it, the filmmakers found an abandoned mall as their location, It being empty they approached retailers to fill the empty shops in the mall. The deal was that they’d only pay for what they wrecked. The full story is here. I highly recommend a look about how this scene was filmed, its highly interesting.

Story: As you may see, my first Digital Storytelling Assignment, is a Mean Girls GIF. This is a classic movie that I probably know every word to. Anyways, Lindsay Lohan plays the main character, who moves to a new high school all the way from Africa where she was home-schooled her whole life. She plays innocent Cady, who arrives having no idea about high school, weird boys, hard teachers, and of course mean girls.

Process: After reading our first Visual Assignment, I was excited. I always see GIF’s on the internet, they are brief pictures of any video clip or picture that has subtle movement. I was thinking about what movie I wanted to use; and I thought after a long week I could use some humor, so of course I ventured to Mean Girls. This clip is of the “Plastics” (i.e. this is what the mean group of girls call themselves in the movie.) dancing rather provocatively to the famous Christmas song, Jingle Bell Rock. May I add they are at a school talent show?

Work: I did some research and found a helpful site called Make a Gif, which led me to create my masterpiece. First, you can pick which method you want to use. I picked Youtube, but you can select others including pictures, webcam, and video. I uploaded my YouTube URL, and picked which part of the clip I wanted to utilize. From here, it shows you what the GIF will look like so you have some kind of idea, which is really great in my opinion. My GIF length is 5 seconds long, which is a perfect amount of time for these clips. After I was done editing the clip, I was done and my GIF was complete! It was simple and fast and I will probably create more after this.

—-SALTI SKINN

My favourite all time movie is Star Trek, and what better opportunity to experience the awe and brilliance of Benedict Cumberbatch.

The assignment required me to make a gif but also ‘making sure the movement is minimal but essential’ – This gif is not minimal, or short in that matter – because to be quite frank, it deserves the whole 6 seconds – because this essential scene is the unmasking of Khan Noonien Singh.

“My name is … Khan”

ughhhh – chills.