For my second ever gif (I really like making them, even if my computer doesn’t!) I went with the Goof Gif assignment. I love blooper reels and if I could, I’d buy box sets of all of my favorite shows just for blooper reels, deleted scenes, and commentary. I had a hard time choosing whether I wanted to gif a blooper from the Office or from Parks and Rec – two of my absolute favorites, but I decided to go with Parks and Rec. Andy (Chris Pratt) is a wealth of physical comedy that doesn’t require a lot of context or dialogue to know when something funny is happening, especially when he does something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Here is the moment from the season 4 episode of Parks and Recreation Born & Raised when Andy throws the stolen briefcase back over the reception desk at the County Records office in Eagleton, but breaks the set lightswitch on accident. Oops.
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We’ve all probably done something like this. Maybe you’ve tossed your phone onto your bed, but it bounced and hit the floor. That instant feeling of, “oh, sshhhhh–ffffriiiiick,” knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop your phone from landing face down… all you can do is stand there dumbly and watch it happen. You Andy’d it when you should have been Bert Macklin-ing it the whole time. Then you have to assess the damage.
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NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
Something as improbable and unlucky as this has happened to me once before. I was vacuuming and apparently had forgotten my own strength – that or I gained Andy-like destructive abilities – and while trying to press the pedal that makes the vacuum recline, I stomped it off. It literally snapped off. That was not a good day. It’s pretty easy for me to relate to Chris Pratt/Andy in this gif, since I’ve accidentally demolished something when I was only trying to help. It’s also just really, really funny.
The process of making these gifs was similar to that from what I did last week. I began with a youtube video of P&R bloopers. In the URL of the video, I inserted “magic” between the “you” and “tube” so it would read “youmagictube.com/blahblahblah” and hit enter. I was redirected to a save-video.com page for that particular video and followed the instructions to download.
Once I had the video downloaded, I opened it in MPEG Streamclip and trimmed it until it was the length I wanted. I think I’m getting a little better at trimming videos – I still follow the directions from the DS106 wiki, but I think I’m learning to memorize the steps on my own. The trimming process began here:
Once I had the video trimmed just right, I had to export it as individual frames. This was done by going to File -> Export to Other Formats. It brought up this window, and I chose the options I wanted and where I wanted my frames saved.
Like in my previous GIF post, my computer refuses to export more than 51 individual frames at a time. I don’t know why it chose this arbitrary number, but I had to suffer through it and repeat the trimming process twice just to add about 8 more frames to the gif I was trying to create. I was not a happy camper.
Grrr. Once I was finally able to get all my frames, I opened up GIMP. It’s gif-makin’ time.
Go to File -> Open Image as Layers, then select every single frame of the gif. Every last one. Even the ones my computer refused to export. Then click OK!
Now to Filters -> Playback. Opens up a window where you can play all the frames together. Neat.
Finally, save that darn gif. But DON’T click Save As. You gotta click EXPORT AS…! Choose .gif as the filetype in the dropdown bar, and give it whatever name you want. I went for something incredible, clearly. Then hit export, and export again. On my computer, it was looking like GIMP was about to crash while exporting the gif. Praise be to Li’l Sebastian that everything turned out fine.
