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A few gifs for the 1840s GIF party: call for submissions | Tate. I’ve already posted them on Tumblr, but thought I’d add them here. See the previous post for more details.

1870 Rehearsing the Service: Picard Variation” animated GIF by aforgrave

The more I worked on the Tate Gallery 1840 GIF Party submission  “No dona eis requiem” GIF, the more I kept seeing the piano-playing priest as Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation — the likeness is pretty much dead on — and the red and black in the robes made it easy to see the uniforms. The second priest, minus the beard, was clearly meant to be reinterpreted as Riker.

Once the hard work was done on the original GIF, it was a simple matter to add in images of a TNG communicator badge and the dedication plaque from the Enterprise – E. The Okuda-style touch controls were inserted in place of the piano keyboard using a number of the transformations — resize and skew being the two most important. The star field was a little trickier — I wanted the stars moving from left to right and so I did a movie screen capture of an HTML mouse-influenced star field and then snagged some frames using MPEG Streamclip. The original bible was switched for an image of a TNG tricorder.

I was originally going to have Picard spouting some technobabble, but then I recalled the episode where Picard is replaced by an alien duplicate who breaks into an old English sailing shanty in Ten Forward, rousing Riker’s suspicions that something is not quite right with the captain. In this instance, that provided sufficient grounds for Riker to give Picard a tap on the head with the tricorder. The lyrics for “Heart of Oak” were sourced at the fan site, Memory Alpha.

Here, courtesy of YouTube, is the alien Picard-imposter, trying to impress everyone in Ten Forward that he is, indeed, their captain:

The Tate Gallery 1840 GIF Party submission deadline is today, February 2nd. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to do another entry before the day ends in England — but this has been enjoyable! I’m looking forward to seeing the sharing of the submissions following the February 7th adjudication.

Everyone loves a good 1840s GIF party.

There’s an amazing collection of them growing as part of this DS106 assignment, at the GIFfight Tumblr, many by the CogDog himself.

I chose to GIF up this Oil paint on canvas Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889) by John Singer Sargent (1856?1925).

 The famous actress, Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928), is shown here in the role of Lady Macbeth. At the first performance in 1888, Sargent was struck by Terry’s appearance and persuaded her to sit for a portrait. He invented her dramatic pose, which did not occur in the production. Oscar Wilde, who saw Terry’s arrival at Sargent’s Chelsea studio, remarked, ‘The street that on a wet and dreary morning has vouchsafed the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler can never again be as other streets: it must always be full of wonderful possibilities.’

The first thing that occurred to me was to have blood gushing all over Lady Macbeth, like from a horror film and of course I thought of this scene from the Shining. I borrowed the GIF from one of the bazillions all over Tumblr and inserted Lady Macbeth over top (after carefully masking her out of her canvas).

REDRUM QUEEN

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!

- Lady Macbeth

Then I felt a bit guilty not GIFfing the whole thing from scratch, so I attempted to draw some blood over the poor dear.

Out, damned spot! out, I say!

I read Macbeth way back in Grade 11 high school English. I’ve always been haunted and intrigued by Lady Macbeth. She was such a pushy, overbearing wife but then in the end was consumed with guilt, seeing blood on her hands that she could never wash away. Ah, regret.

As part of my major end of term assignment I chose to do a magazine and one of the ad inserts was a cleaning product for poor old Lady Macbeth.

FiFi Five was somehow representative of something I thought clever, but I really can’t remember what any more.

Portrait of Sidney Wells and Older Sister Silent Tatiana Wells” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Well, you know that I am not one to talky about myself all the time. Because I am humble and stealthy like a ninja and a television star, and all.

But did you know that I have some of my ancestors that are in Art Galleries?

It was on ds106 website that there was thing called “The Tate’s 1940′s GIF Party” to find famous GIF paintings in a famous Art Gallery in the Tate Gallery (that’s in London, England) and so I took a little trip after my last overseas mission to check up on the family history. Because they want to have a special show of them.

Up above is one that I found, of my great great grandmother Silent Tatiana Wells. She was born in 1856 and had her portrait panted when she was only two years old which would make this picture from 1858 which was only a year before the artist also painted another picture that is in the Tate Gallery of her step-brother Little Sidney Wells, who would not sit still. You can see how the artist was hard up for inspiration and kind of just repainted some of it the same a year later for her little step-brother, maybe because he moved so much. I made it into an animated GIF so you can see the family resemblance and then the artist’s remixing. Plus, both Little Sidney and his mommy died very young. But clearly my great great grammy Silent Tatiana Wells did not!!  ;-)

But can you see the family resemblance to me?

Plus I did a little digging and found another picture that was done about 40 years later of my great grandmother Outburst Annie and you can see that she looks even more like me! Plus, I think that artist (it might have been her mommy, Tatiana) just used the same old ripped baby suit where you can see their shoulders sticking out of it. But people used to keep old stuff like those moldy old christening dresses back then, so I guess that explains it.

“Portrait of Sidney Wells and Outburst Annie” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Well, I will do some more digging to see if I can find some other famous ancestor GIF paintings but if you are going to do it too then you have to hurry because the search will expire by February 3rd and then it will be over to have your GIF picture in the Tate Gallery exhibition with mine if they pick it.

Well, bye!

I’ve come across a couple of interesting projects this week involving animated gifs.
1840s GIF party: call for submissions | Tate and
The GIF the Portrait Project.

So far I’ve giffed a few images from the the Take 1840 exhibition. I then to find animating gifs as an end in itself, it is interesting that the both these projects seem to be thinking them as art.(there are some amazing examples at Tate Collectives tumblr).

I’ve also been reading The Academic GIF where Jim Groom is talking about how to:

integrate animated GIFs into a curriculum centred around film analysis.

The Tate challenge has become a ds106 Assignment, which already has some submissions, Tom Woodward producing beautifully subtle and a much more dramatic version of the same painting. Alan Levine puts both subtlety and humour in the same gif.

GIF FIGHT!! has a Special 1840 Edition which is filling up.

For the tate gifs I’ve changed tactics a little. I’ve been using photoshop to split the images into layers before switching to Fireworks for animation. Photoshop has superior selection tools.

I an unsure if anything I’ve done is Art but it is interesting in lots of different ways, from visual puns and jokes through problem solving. I wonder if gifs could become part of an arts curriculum in schools?

Click the little kicker to see her kick bigger

Don't Rage around Miss Cicely Alexander! This is a response to the Tate’s call for their 1840s GIF party — they have made images available from selected pieces of art from their 1840s room and inviting anyone to remix as a GIF.

That is such a good idea I made it into a ds106 assignment.

I chose as my subject James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872-4). I saw movement possibility in the pair of butterflies, but was curious about the item at the base of the window sill… it is just some sort of etching ?? but when I saw the image it reminded me of one of those silly rage faces.

The first step was selecting the butterflies and putting each in a layer. On the base layer, I clone brushed in beneath them.

To be able to animate the rage head, I selected the rough rectangle of the left pane, cut it and put it in a layer below. This way, the rage face could be n between the two, and appear to rise into the window.

And the swinging leg was less hassle then I thought, select an approximate shape, and as long as it rotated, it would work meshed in with the skirt. I was able to clone brush in behind it, and fill out the shape of the hat.

To animate, I did a series to loop the butterflies over the girl’s head– doing a New Frame, and then moving the two different butterfly layers. I got a way cheaply as I did not have to flip them. I then copies the series of frames and pasted them at the end to have 2 loops. Similarly I made a new layer, and began the same process to make the rage face appear and rise. Once in place, I made another 2 loop series as the butterflies moved over to the Rage head.

Since the leg swing involved a change of shape, I had to duplicate the leg frame 3 rimes, rotate it a bit each time, the last two also distorting the leg to keep it in frame. And then I had 2 copies of the rage head, to make it rotate and shrink as the kick was delivered.

The GIF comes in tiny, because most of the image is a base layer that never moves; thats the beauty of GIF compression. Even the big one, at 550px wide and 965pc high, is only 365k but has maybe 30 frames.

I hope we see some more ds106ers take on the Tate 1840s GIF Party challenge