Want to get fit without leaving your chair? According to the infomercial, the Hawaii Chair is for you. “It takes the work out of your work-out.” by hula-ing your way to fitness. And Jim Groom is so excited, he’s doing his little happy dance right there on stage.
Rene Magritte, in his painting The Treachery of Images, gives us lessons in what is the meaning of the artwork we create. Just as the painting of a pipe is not the pipe itself, and the canvas and paint aren’t the pipe itself, and the statement about the pipe is not the pipe itself, so a moving image of Jim Grooms is not Jim Grooms himself.
This is not Jim Grooms
Thanks to Talky Tina for the template of the dancing images of Jim Grooms. The image of the original painting is public domain. Since it is not a pipe, it follows that the image is not the original painting.
I’m currently reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop, which would describe this disconnect of image and reality as an analogy. Even the pixels used to display this blog post on your screen make an analogy of the words and images. In fact, this is all just a figment of your imagination.
Watch Jim Groom literally dancing on the world, amongst the stars and astral phenomena as the ds106 shuttle craft flies by. The “headless” astronauts even come out to play once Groom heads off to bed.
How on EARTH did I miss the #DS106 GIF challenge in preparation for headless DS106, which begins August 26th? I blame my absence from Twitter. But August is only 3 days in, so it’s easy to join the challenge without feeling overwhelmed.
I’m guessing Talky Tina is responsible for the GIF challenges. Challenge #2: “Dancing Jim All Over the World” can be found here. Go ahead. Click the link. I’ll wait….
…. It’s funny how Talky Tina and Alan Levine both really like to throw out challenges. Alan just issued a Daily Create challenge back in July. So odd…
I was just thinking today how I missed DS106 and how I haven’t blogged lately or made anything lately. And my thinking about thinking about WordPress rabbit holes isn’t something I want to unpack right now. The GIF challenge really couldn’t have come at a better time.
Here’s my submission for challenge #2:
Dancin’ Jim & the Headless Horseman
Boy oh boy do I love the Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
I’m pretty sure we watched it every Halloween in elementary school, so there’s lots of youthful nostalgia attached.
I did another Dancin’ Jim assignment back in the spring. Despite that, I couldn’t remember the steps I took to build the Bava in the Boardroom project, so I spent a lot of time trying to find tutorials that made sense to me. Bits and pieces of this 12-minute Youtube tutorial was helpful.
I was going to attempt to insert the dancing Jim into a short clip from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, so I downloaded the last several seconds of this Youtube video using Clip Converter:
In the end I opted to use a still from the clip I downloaded. I opened that still in Photoshop and then opened the dancing Jim GIF.
Photoshop screen shot
I duplicated the still nine times since there are nine frames in the Jim GIF.
Photoshop screen shot
I then duplicated a Jim layer for each layer of the headless horseman. I made sure layers corresponded (layer one of Jim was visible in layer one of the horseman. Layer two of Jim was visible in layer two of the horseman. You get the idea).
Photoshop screen shot
I previewed the GIF, noticed that Jim was dancing way too fast, and changed the duration of each frame to 0.2 seconds. I then saved the GIF for web and devices and called it a night, because it was late.
Photoshop screen shot
I don’t remember there being as many steps the first time I tried this assignment, so I feel like I did things the hard/long way. I really need to work with Photoshop on a daily basis, or else I forget EVERYTHING.
Guess I should assign myself my own daily create challenge.
What the H-E-double-L is THIS?!
Merging a shelf/Jim layer onto a fridge background layer.
So I was out of town for a week, and when I got home I opened the fridge to…what the H-E-double-L is THIS? Jim Groom in my refrigerator? Okay, I’m a bit creeped out now. At least he seems to be having a good time. Maybe he ate all the food and just left the sparkling water and the Metamucil.
This is the Dancing Jim All Over the World ds106 assignment, as part of the August 2013 GIF challenge created by Talky Tina.
This one was not as difficult as I feared it might be, in large part thanks to some very helpful instructions posted by Rockylou and Brian Bennett.
I used an earlier image I made for a ds106 daily create as the background and foreground for Jim.
The process
(You can see screenshots of some of this by clicking the tiny arrows next to the image at the top! Or clicking on the image, which will give you access to all the images in the post)
1. Opening and duplicating the background image
I opened (as layers) the wireless mic version of the Groom template that Talky Tina created into GIMP. Then I opened (as layers) the almost-empty-fridge-blues image I had from the earlier daily create assignment.
I put the fridge image on the bottom so that I could see the Jim layers above it—this made it easier to see where I needed to scale and move Jim’s layers.
I then duplicated the fridge image so that I had the same number of fridge layers as Groom layers.
2. Scaling and moving the Groom layers
There were 9 layers in the Groom gif, and in order to move them together and scale them together, I had to do two different things, as explained in an earlier post.
In order to scale all the Groom layers together (rather than one by one) I put them all into a “layer group” (click the link to see how to do this). Then I could scale them by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on the layer group folder and choosing “scale image.” I made Groom the right size to fit into the fridge shelf.
But I also needed to move all the layers together so they’d be in the right place. Unfortunately, due to some strange quirk of GIMP, you can’t move layers together in a layer group. Instead, you have to “link” them. Then you can move them all at the same time.
3. Creating a foreground in front of dancing Jim
I already had 9 fridge layers to act as background for the Groom layers, but now I needed to create a foreground for him too. To do that, I duplicated the fridge layer one more time, and then used the “lasso” or “free select” tool to select the shelf that would go in front of Jim.
I then created a layer mask on that image (go to Layer->Mask->Add layer mask) and clicked “selection” in the dialogue box. This made it so only the shelf was visible and the rest of the image was transparent. In GIMP you also need to “apply layer mask” to the image after adding it. You can do this by clicking on the layer with the mask, and going to Layer->Mask->Apply layer mask.
I needed 9 of these foregrounds as well as 9 of the original image as backgrounds. So I just duplicated the image that had the layer mask applied.
4. Putting Jim between the foreground and background, and merging
I first put a fridge layer under each Groom layer so that each Groom has a background. Then I put a fridge shelf layer above each Groom layer, so each Jim has a foreground.
Time to merge down. First, I merged a fridge shelf layer with a Groom layer. Select the top layer and right or control-click to get the dialogue box and choose “merge down” (see screenshot). Then, I merged the fridge shelf/Jim layer with the fridge background layer beneath it using the same process. And repeat for each threesome of shelf, Jim, fridge.
5. taking layers out of the layer group
You can’t animate the layers in GIMP if they’re in a layer group, so you have to take them out. You can do this anytime after scaling and moving them, but I kept them in for awhile just to make sure they were in the right place.
Move the layers out by just clicking and dragging each to the top or bottom of the layer group, keeping the same layer order. Then you can delete the layer group by clicking on it and control- or right-clicking and choosing “delete layer.”
6. Changing the animation speed
Jim was dancing too fast at first, so I exported as gif again and changed the dialogue box on export to read 200 millisecond delay between frames. That got him about right, I think!
Now, if only I could get my act together and add some music! But I’d have to do it in WordPress, I think.
P.S. I have learned over the last couple of GIFs that if you put one on Tumblr over 1MB, then it won’t animate on the blog. It will animate when you’re editing the post, but not when it shows up on the blog. At least not with my theme! Even 1.1MB didn’t animate. Had to make it a smaller image.
If you have not seen the 2009 video at the Sasquatch concert where one dude got a whole crowd going:
What the handheld video left out was a just before he started gyrating, he was got his moves from the Bava
This is a few days late for the ds106 Month of GIF mania suggested as a prelude to the headless ds106 course starting on the 26th. This is totally not required, you will get plenty of chance to be GIFfing in the first two weeks of class.
This is a ds106 assignment, Dancing JIM All Around the World:
Take the template gif of Jim Groom dancing and add a background and foreground, to make him dance in an interesting place.
Ti make this, I used my pwnYouTube bookmarlet to download the YouTibe video clip. I then brought this into PhotoShop CS5.5 with File – Import -Video Frames to Layers… one small trick is to before I do this, I changed the video’s extension from .mp4 to .mov so PhotoShop would allow me to import it. I selected just a portion of the clip that had the dude dancing alone on te green grass, to give some background to work with, and grabbed every 8 frames.
This put the dancing man in an animation, open the animation window. I tossed a few frames not needed and dropped it to nine frames. I then opened in PhotoShop the Dancing Jim GIF John Johnstone created. It’s a lot bigger then I needed, so I cropped it and then resized Jim to be about 500px wide. In the animation palette of the dancing Jim gif, i select all frames, then use “Copy Frames” from the little menu in the top right of the Animation pallete.
In the dancing man one, I go to the last frame, and used the same animation palette to paste frames (after current frame). This is merely to get the layers in the file, I then delete these animation frames.
Going from frame 1 to 9 of the dancing one, I selectively make visible one Jim at a time, and if those layers are on top, he is dancing over the other guy.
My next idea was to get rid of the dancing guy, so in each frame of the original video, I clone brushed him out of the scene. O then positioned Jim’s GIF to be over the head of the man in front. For each frame, I made a selection around the people, and subtracted it from Jim’s frame, to make hime appear to behind the crowd.
Lastly, I went to one unused layer of the dancing guy where he was standing, and just copied him, and then pasted him in a layer above the animation ones but below Jim’s.
This is whey I live using Photoshop because of the control I have in layers. I could probably figure it out in GIMP, but,,,, well I like my way.
FYI, I am posting my GIF here since my blog has been under some DOS attacks lately and I cannot even get to my login. Sign. The open web makes me feel less like dancing. Thankfully we have GIFs..
Well, Friends.
The DS106 Community stepped up for the August 2013 Animated GIF Challenge #2 and got UNCLE @jimgroom animated in John Johnston’s Dancing Jim All Over the World assignment, with SEVEN new entries showing now as being syndicated through to the assignment page and at least two others seen in the wild and perhaps waiting in some queue to get indexed. (Be sure to tag your assignments with both the AnimatedGIFAssignments tag and the AnimatedGIFAssignmentsXXXX numbered tag so that it gets onto the assignment page.)
It was so fun to see Jim dancing here and there, and I just had to have another go at making him dance before I went to sleep. Both @dogtrax and @Rockylou22 had Jim dancing on top of the world, and I was inspired by their work to riff-a-GIF and show all the different Jims dancing on the world at the same time like a UNICEF logo.
In the end, my little enthusiasm pushed me through the sleepiness (and ds106rad.io is great middle-of-the-night company!) and I wound up with a DS106 Promotion Poster, and a new Animated GIF Assignment 1183: Tell the World About DS106 GIF
Since we are in the GIFfing weeks leading up to the next session (Fall 2013 #headless13, starting August 26th), it seems appropriate to have everyone make a DS106 Promo Poster GIF to get the word out to the great uninformed masses. Perhaps we can draw in some newcomers who need to see the DS106 light. There must still be a few out there. LOL.
NOTE: Click on the GIF to hear the music that all the Jim Grooms are dancing to. (Thanks, John!)
“All These Jim Grooms Can’t Be Wrong” animated GIF DS106 Promo Poster by @iamTalkyTina
The MIDI version of “It’s a Small World” was found at Willie Wonkas Free MIDI Music Factory Downloads. The site is glorious in its application of old-style GIF animation and hand-built HTML, and is worth a click through for the sake of nostalgia.
Since this GIF also made use of yesterday’s Dancing Jim Groom theme, I also tagged it for the Animated GIF Assignment 1001. So it’s a two-fer.
Okay — get out and promote your favourite aspect of DS106 to the world with a special GIF!
Jim Groom is out of this world with joy dancing to DS106 Radio.
Today’s DS106 animated GIF challenge was Assignment 1001. We are asked to take the template GIF of Jim Groom dancing and add a background and foreground, to make him dance in an interesting place. The title of the assignment “Dancing Jim All Over The World” inspired my GIF of dancing on top of the earth, as well as one created here by Kevin Hodgson (@dogtrax). I also had an astronaut floating around at one point. But it looked “odd” with him in his space suit and there was Groom out in the open, unprotected, dancing and whooping it up with DS106 Radio. Okay… I admit it… No matter what I did with Jim it was going to look weird, but the astronaut stayed inside the ship during the final GIF merging step. As you can obviously tell there are several image layers involved with the final GIF image. 
Assembling in Adobe Photoshop 11 Elements
My astronauts can float around now that Jim Groom has gone home to bed. And it looks like they’re all ready for the Headless DS106 to start on August 26th, 2013.
Headless DS106 Astronauts- Now there’s a sight you don’t see everyday. [NASA Images]
So you don’t have to go through the hassle of lassoing the images (I already did that for you.) to add to one of your future art projects, here’s my DS106 space shuttle and astronaut.
My computer is getting pretty full of photos. I’ve been taking more, but it is also housing nearly every photo taken since my wedding in 2009. I know that is chump change to a lot of people, but it’s been bugging me.
I was going back through some of my kitchen remodel photos from earlier this spring and…well…I don’t know how I missed it, but some random guy is dancing in my back yard in one of them. I have no idea who it is. I also don’t know how the hell I missed it the first time through these photos.
Who the hell is that guy?
I haven’t finished going through my pictures, and I haven’t seen him since the tear out day back in May. But since seeing…whatever it is…I’m worried about walking past that window alone at night.
—
This assignment was tough because I needed to find a way to keep my image small (original is over 2400 x 3200, and over 2MB) and make sure Jim stayed outside. So, I converted my image to 64 bit and resized it to 650px tall (173KB final size, with all the layers). That dramatically changed the file size, which was awesome. To get Jim outside, I imported the modified GIF as frames (thanks Talky Tina) and then cropped, scaled, and positioned. I merged Jim with the background image.
To get the window frame, I used the lasso select to pull the glass part, being careful to cut around objects on the window sill to keep some depth perspective. Then, it was a matter of duplicating this cut window frame and merging it into each later of the project to sit on top of Jim.
I had tried to do this back during the summer #ds106zone sequence, but couldn’t figure it out or something. I don’t remember.
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