Well…. Gifs….. We all know and love them, especially on Tumblr. I never thought I would be the one making them until i discovered Ds106. Yay! Well, they’re not as easy as everyone thinks. To summarize an episode of The Wire with Gifs, I chose my favorite episode which was episode 2 “The Detail”. The title says it all. It’s an episode that tells you everything you need to know about all the characters, at least for now. So the way I understood this episode was it introduced us to all the characters and problems which is how i based my summarization. Here we go!

The Detail

Here’s my first Gif. This basically sets up the whole show because with the murder of the witness who testified against D caught McNulty’s interest

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Alright, so where do we go from here? The next important scene to me was when Deputy Daniels asks Pearlman to get him some better officer’s so he can do REAL police work. So this just shows that he really does want to do good work, yo.

So now we get introduced to D, officially. When McNulty and Moreland bring D in for questioning, well, mostly to see if he’s guilty of the murder of the witness for his case. So here he is, getting REAL emotional over the murder and showing signs of guilt. I really like this part because it showed that he isn’t THAT bad, at least when compared to his uncle.

So, we now know D has a soul. Here, when he goes to a party and talks to Avon Barksdale, his uncle, he still feels bad about the witness’s death. Specifically in the part that I picked for the gif, he’s talking about the murder. If he DID have nothing to do with it, it didn’t involve D and if he DIDN’T have anything to do with it, then it STILL didn’t involve D. I don’t think D is convinced though..

Don’t be fooled, the case isn’t JUST about McNulty and D. There are other good cops working on this case. Well… i’m not sure if i should say good right away. Why would they feel the need to prove that they’re the bosses around town? You have a badge dude…

Finally, my favorite scene from this whole episode, maybe even season 1 ;). After a long day, you get a peek at McNulty after hours. I guess McNulty just had a really bad day, so he’s parked in his car, obviously drunk, and gets out of his car to scare away some kids and just straight up rolls down the hill. After an intense episode, I just thought this was super funny.

From S1E04

This really summed up the episode for me as this was possibly one of my favorite scenes. It really showed some hardcore detective work going on, and to me, this also seemed to be one of the most realistic scenes as they were trying to figure out how/where the victim was murdered. I’m certain you all think differently, but it’s just my $0.02

You might have to click the image to get it to work!

After just finishing the first of The Wire, there’s one lesson that sticks out in the back of my mind. A very important lesson given by Freamon, one of my favorite characters.

This scene, from episode 8, resonates so well for me because of its multiple meanings. The obvious is his message to Prez. As a detective, most of the battle is a battle of minds. The intuition to know what information matters to a case is what makes or breaks an investigator. One needs to be observant, analytical, and sharp. Freamon knows exactly which information is pertinent, even if it doesn’t seem so on the surface.

Avon Barksdale knows this too. He is not a stupid person. With the assistance of Stringer Bell. the Barksdale organization managed to elude detection for so long because of their meticulousness and carelessness. They know which pieces are important, and which loose ends they need to tie up.

But the message is also important for the show as a whole. If there’s one thing I learned the hard way, it’s that The Wire doesn’t hold your hand. They don’t waste time on exposition for the sake of informing superfluous detail to the viewers. The audience needs to pick up that all the pieces matter. It’s the only way to properly enjoy and understand the show, and appreciate the goals of the writers and directors. This quote doesn’t just feel like a summary of the episode, but a summary of everything I’ve watched so far. It’s very fitting to me that this is the opening quote to the episode that shares the namesake of the program. This is where it all begins.

Making animated .GIFs for the first time was a big time sink, so I’m glad I started earlier in the week on the learning process.  At this point in the season, the development of characters is still new and under development, so I focused on their personalities as I summarized The Wire: Season 1 Episode 3 […]

For this week’s assignment to tell an episode of The Wire using only 6 GIFs, I decided to do Episode 8, “Lessons,” from the first season.

Process

Despite having made GIFs before in Intro to Digital Studies, I needed a refresher and found this tutorial to be helpful. However, there was one difference I noticed in the tutorial from what I had to do. Two of the menu screens in the tutorial while exporting from GIMP were merged into one.

This is the menu screen that I saw:

Another change I made to the creative process was that after I had exported it from MPEG Streamclip, I would put all photos in a file and flip through them, deleting the ones at the beginning and end that I didn’t need as I found it hard to make a precise selection of where I wanted it to start and finish in MPEG Streamclip. This gave me a lot more control over the content of the gif and also helped to reduce the file size.

Why I Chose This Episode

The reason I chose to do “Lessons” from The Wire was because I think there were some interesting moments in the episode like McNulty’s kids playing the spy game and Omar’s western-style shootout.

The scenes I chose represent some of the “lessons” present in the episode. I’m not sure if the moments I chose are necessarily the important ones, but I think they’re interesting moments. One weakness I do think is present in my gifs is that none of them have text on them. While most of them didn’t have dialogue to accompany them, several of them did and might have been stronger had I incorporated text. Another weakness I think is more inherent in the medium of the gif than in this assignment or my creation, is that the gif is really only good for a small amount of time. This show is really based on things occurring over time as many seemingly insignificant moments or details become very important later on. That just isn’t something you can capture well in a gif.

“Lessons” in 6 GIFs

1) McNulty goading his kids to continue playing the spy game. If you watch the whole scene, you can tell that he’s taught them well and that they actually enjoy and are skilled at doing it.

2) Omar’s van being consumed in flames. This is yet another retaliation.

3) Wallace helping the kid with his homework. I think this gif really struggles from there not being any text as well as it being such a tiny moment in a really excellent scene.

4) Stinkum being shot.  The gratuitous blood is very western and very Omar.

5) Wee-Bey hobbling across the road after being shot and discarding his gun. His pride is really shot in this scene.

6) I couldn’t resist making a gif of McNulty opening the bathroom door to see drunk Bunk in a pink bathrobe. Bunk’s slow downward spiral seems like a series a very hard lessons to learn for everyone involved. I’m not sure if this gif would have been stronger if I had included McNulty’s reaction in it as well.

I think so far episode 6, also titled “The Wire” has been my favorite, because for me this is where the story really became interesting. There are several characters in the series that I already felt for, like Wallace, but this episode also made me feel bad Omar, whom I didn’t think I could feel bad for. The police are also really beginning to figure out just how smart this group that they are trying to bring down are, as they figure out their codes and rules and begin putting all of the pieces together.

Telling A Wire Episode Through GIFs

The big part of this week’s assignment was learning to create a series of .GIF animated images to explain an episode of The Wire. Knowing that the process of creating the GIFs would require several programs already freaked me out a little. I saw that some of my other DS106 classmates had used Adobe Photoshop and video editors to create their GIF images and add text. Before falling into full panic mode, I took a deep breath (and reminded myself that it was only Thursday) and went through the GIF tutorial provided by Professor Groom.

I used the directions in the email (also sent to us by Professor Groom) to download Season 1, Episode 10 of The Wire, the episode that I would be explaining with my GIF images. I then went through the tutorial and downloaded HandBrake and MPEG Streamclip. As the video was already in a format MPEG Streamclip could work with, I realized I didn’t really need HandBrake. For each scene I selected from Episode 10 to transform into a GIF, I trimmed and exported in MPEG Streamclip to GIMP. I already had GIMP installed as I have worked with the program before (it’s truly a great free software!). I realized why the tutorial mentioned choosing short clips… some of my GIFs were over 40 layers (frames) long! I didn’t see this as a huge issue until I decided I wanted to add text to my GIFs. Using Google, I found an easy-to-follow tutorial on adding text to GIF animations in GIMP.

With this step, I had to be patient. Because some of my GIF animations were 40+ frames, I had to keep duplicating the Text layer and merging it down. Needless to say, there was a big sigh of relief when I finished making all 6 of my GIFs Thursday night. Making the first GIF wasn’t too bad–in fact if you followed the directions carefully, it was quite easy. The next five were a breeze to make after I got the hang of the whole process. Below are my six GIF images telling the story of Episode 10.

The detectives are getting closer to Avon, and Stringer realizes they need to tighten up.

Omar, Greggs, and McNulty question the Barksdale crew’s truce.

Orlando is given no choice but to take what the lawyer has offered.

Bubs makes moves to change his life, asking Kima for some support.

Lt. Daniels stresses that they still need the wire tap.

Kima senses something is not right, right before they are ambushed.

Four Daily Creates

Another one of our assignments this week was to complete four daily create mini-assignments. Below is each of my four creations with a short explanation:

For my GIF assignment I chose Season 1, Episode 2 of The Wire. After many hassles and programs not responding and attempting to download harmful programs to my computer, I finally was able to make five GIFs that I thought were important or showed ongoing themes in The Wire.

This was more of a struggle than anything else I have done thus far in this class. World’s Fastest YouTube downloader refused to recognize the links that I was putting in for the first half of the week. Today I tried again and it recognized them and told me it was going to do it and then it said it was connecting even after I waited ten minutes. Maybe I’m not patient enough, I’m not sure but I tried a different way anyway. When I downloaded and tried Free YouTube Downloader and it worked super-fast and without hassle!

Then when I got it into MPEG and trimmed it down and everything and went to export, MPEG stopped responding (insert angry face here). It finally exported! Turns out I didn’t have it in the right file format. I wasn’t careful enough when looking at the options for how to download it and it was a movie file. I obviously needed it in pictures. I finally figured out how to do that after trying to open the movie file in GIMP and it not working.

Thankfully, the second, third, fourth, and fifth GIFs went a lot better than the first. Once I cut down the clips shorter they exported with no problems and it made it a lot easier to edit when it was short.