50 Eggs: A GIF story

I chose to extract my GIF from “Cool Hand Luke” starring Paul Newman. I highly recommend the movie, and without ruining it, the above GIF is from a scene where Luke, Paul Newman’s character, is eating 50 hard-boiled eggs as part of a bet he made and the whole prison population has money on either his success or failure.

I originally intended to use a different scene, where Luke says “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand,” after bluffing his way into winning a prison poker match, but it was too long and I opted for a scene that I felt was better suited for this format. I utilized the tutorial from the ds106 website and since I already had the movie in a digital format, I cut it down to size in windows movie maker before pulling it into MPEG Streamclip because I noticed some serious lag when I pulled the whole movie in initially. Following the tutorial, I then took the finished product from Streamclip and pulled it into GIMP to compile my individual JPEG’s into an animated GIF.

Before realizing there was a tutorial, I opted to do what I usually do which is google “How to (insert problem here),” in this case “How to make a GIF from video,” which led my to gifnija. So I took the trimmed video clip from windows movie maker, uploaded it to gifninja, and this was the final product:

I really wasn’t happy with the quality and wouldn’t recommend this method, even though it is easier and faster.

First digital story: Simply “Spell-tacular”

For my first Digital story I used various images from a Harry Potter movie.  It was difficult at first to find similar images with slight differences, but once I found images I used  www.makeagif.com to create my digital story. Below is the link that will take you to the digital story.

http://makeagif.com/i/f3zAuT

 

This conversation is being tape recorded

By the time Friday evening rolls around, I’m pretty useless.  Friday nights are good for a decent beer and maybe a movie.  Friday nights are also good for DS106.

I’ve spent the work week cataloging a slew of new books.  It’s boring, soul-killing work.  I did reward myself with some Makerbot time today though.  I printed a companion cube (today’s Makerbot daily print).

Daily print for 9/7/12

As it was printing, a group of upper school kids came in and checked out the Replicator as it was printing.

Kid A:  “What are you making?”

Me:  “A companion cube.”

Kid A:  “OH MY GOD!  ARE YOU SERIOUS?  I’VE GOT TO MAKE ME A COMPANION CUBE!  Hey, she’s making a companion cube!”

Or at least it went something like that anyway.  Unbridled enthusiasm–that’s what it was, and it’s what was needed at the end of a tedious week.

I also rewarded myself with some DS106 tonight.  I caught up on videos, thought about movie scenes that I could use for GIFing, popped in Clue, and settled in to read some DS106 blogs while keeping one eye on the screen.  I stumbled across a blog post by Kelsey Matthews.  She also GIFed a scene from Clue.  Talk about your plate of shrimp.

I decided to use the cut-away to Yvette in the billiard room with the tape recorder.  She’s recording Tim Curry’s explanation as to why the guests (Col. Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Mrs. Scarlett, etc. etc.) are being blackmailed by the party host.

In the billiard room with the tape recorder

It’s not as cool as I was thinking it would be, but that’s ok.  One day.  One day I’ll have something just as awesome and artful as this.

Immaturity at it’s finest

My assignment was to make a gif from my favorite movie. My favorite movie of all time is Uptown Girls… I need to watch it again soon actually.

BaiAGo on Make A Gif, Animated Gifs

Uptown girls is a movie about a woman that needs to grow up and a kid that needs to learn how to have fun, and how they help each other understand the world. This gif is a few clips from the ending, a dance recital where Ray (Dakota Fanning, who I feel like grew up really quickly between this movie and twilight) does a dance dedicated to Molly (Brittany Murphy).

Some back story: Molly’s dad was a rock star that died in a plane crash. She had her inheritance stolen from her by a financial advisor and had to find a job, which was babysitting for Ray. Molly and Ray struggled to understand eachother from the start and Ray (the grown up little girl that she was) fired Molly. Molly then had to auction off all her fathers famous guitars, but with a change of heart Ray has Molly’s ex-Boyfriend buy the guitars to use in an “I’m sorry” performance done to a song Molly’s dad wrote for her. This is obviously the super short version of the story, but the part I like most is that Ray looks like she is having so much fun, finally! I love happy endings.

 

I made this gif by:

  • finding a youtube video of the end of the movie
  • taking a series of screen shots
  • uploading those screen shots to makeagif.com
  • reordering the shots
  • and wah-la!

Mean girls make GIFs…

 

Voila! This is my GIF from the lovely movie “Mean Girls”. It is when Regina George gets hit by the bus. I choose this movie because it is honestly one of those movies that you can just quote and everyone would know where that quote came from (“You go, Glen Coco!”) I choose this scene specifically because the first time you watch it, it shocks you. To get this scene I went to Youtube and searched “Mean Girls”. I found a clip labeled “The Best of Regina George” and knew this would be in there. I downloaded it using MPEG Streamclip, as the tutorial on the DS106 page says to do, and clipped it using “select in” and “select out”. Then I saved it and took it to GIMP to edit it (I actually added a motion blur to this GIF). Honestly, the toughest part was downloading the software and figuring out how to make it “move” in my blog! For the I googled how to embed images in WordPress blogs and found the answer (you have to keep it full sized). And there it is!

Link to clip:

Link to tutorial:

http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_Animated_GIFs_with_MPEG_Streamclip_and_GIMP

Link to WordPress on how to embed GIFs:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/images/

DumbleDead

Scene: Dumbledore falling after Snape Kills him.
Movie: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

First off, I’d like to thank Jim Groom for his awesome tutorial which made the process of making a GIF go ever so smoothly. It was step-by-step with screenshots and links to all the cool software(Fastest Youtube Downloader, MPEG Streamclip, GIMP) to use. I would recommend everyone to check it out, whether you’re in DS106 or just making GIFs for fun!

As for my clip, not only is this one of my favorite movies, but it is from my favorite SERIES of movies. Harry Potter has been a part of my life since 1999 when The Prisoner of Azkaban book was released. As a young kid, I was drawn to the cool looking covers on J.K. Rowling’s novels and decided I should read the first book of the series, The Sorcerer’s Stone, before starting the third book! Well, who knew that 13 years later I would have read all 7 books in the series and watched the 8 movies hundreds of times? If you’re reading this, chances are, you are a part of the generation that has grown up with Harry Potter. If you haven’t read or seen the movies(like my parents), go ask a friend or go to your local library and check them out!

A short summary of the clip: Dumbledore is the Headmaster at Hogwarts(Principal of a magical school) and is the only thing standing in the way of Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters (the antagonist in the series and his followers) from killing off all non-magical beings in the World. Voldemort is weak(literally and figuratively) and assigns one of his followers, Draco Malfoy, to kill Dumbledore. When he chickens out, Professor Snape follows through with Voldemort’s orders and kills Dumbledore.

You’ll notice, I didn’t mention Harry Potter once in that summary. Want to know why the series has his name in the title? Go find out for yourself like I did! It will hopefully take you on an exciting adventure and encourage you to read/watch the whole series over and over again!

 

WTF is a GIF? Annie wants to show you!

I had no clue what a GIF was before this assignment. At first I found this assignment extremely intimidating, but once reading Jim Groom’s tutorial on how to make a GIF a few times I felt like I was ready to give it a try. The first thing I did was download all the software I needed. I used YTD video downloader to download the clip from youtube. Then I used MPEG Streamclip to trim down the clip and provide a sequence of images. Finally I used GIMP to create my GIF by layering all of the images together.

“I’m not drunk!’

This week’s digital storytelling assignment was to create a GIF from our  favorite movie. At the moment, my favorite movie is Bridesmaids. The GIF above is the scene where Annie gets pulled over and does a little dance for the cop to prove she is not drunk. I thought it was kind of funny that instead of just doing his sobriety test she choose to dance for him and it actually worked.

 

The process of creating GIFs is pretty easy once you get the hang of it especially when you have a handy dandy tutorial to help you out along the way. After I made one I went straight back to make more!

 

Like this one!

“I’m ready to party!”

This is the scene on the airplane on the way to Las Vegas. The evil Helen gives scared to death of flying, Annie an “anxiety pill” that gives Annie a ton of energy and she obnoxiously announces that she is ready to party. Annie outburst gets them kicked off the plane.

Annie is ready to party and now that I have made my GIFs, so am I!!

Assignment 1: GIF

This is my awesome amazing GIF. I created it with a little help from DS106 Handbook. I love Dr. Seuss’ books and I especially love the movies made from them. Recently, I watched Dr. Seuss’ the Lorax and the message “Change the Future” struck a cord with me. For most my peers they are either just being college or nearing the end of their college careers, either way there is a lot of pressure to answer who are you going to be? I believe when confronted with the prospect of the future we all look confused and frightened much like Ted in this GIF.  All I can say is watch the Lorax and be inspired; maybe even save a tree!

Assignment 1

LLAMA FACE

Our assignment this week was to create an animated gif image that showcased part of a favorite (or least favorite) movie. If this works, I’m going to build MYSELF a summer home on top of an ancient Peruvian village.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOLY LLAMA FACE BATMAN, IT LIVES! IT LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES!

And now I know how to make animated gifs. Aahaha. AAHAHAHA. AHAHAHAAHAHAH!!!

Beware, ds106. You have unleashed a monster.

I chose this particular scene from “The Emperor’s New Groove” because it perfectly sums up Kuzco’s character–self-absorbed, a little bit ridiculous and convinced he’s the coolest thing out there. Doot-doot-doodle-doodle-doot-doot-doo-doo, KUZCOTOPIA!

Below the gif I wanted to make originally. I used Jim Groom’s excellent gif-making tutorial for both of these. I had to cut this one down a bit because, for whatever reason, MPEG Streamclip gets all ornery if you try to export a clip that pushes the 1MG mark, at least on my laptop. Laaaaame. Still, I managed to create this wonderful gif from the iconic movie “The Iron Giant.” Meet Dean McCoppin, sexiest and most long-suffering animated character of the late 90′s:

Again, it sums up his character pretty nicely. Chill, down-to-earth, and completely unprepared for the barrage of insanity that’s about to overtake his life. If you grew up in the 90′s didn’t see “The Iron Giant” as a kid you had a deprived childhood. Deprived! Do yourself a favor and go see it. Just make sure you bring tissues for the last part of the film–it’s one of those “Oh God, where did these FEELINGS come from?!” movies.

This assignment was both more difficult and significantly easier than I’d at first assumed. The process itself was way simpler than I thought it would be, but again, I had some serious technical difficulties. Like I said earlier, MPEGStreamClip decided to get annoying on me and crashed a couple of times, and then outright refused to export the entire set of images I needed for the whole gif I wanted to create. I did really enjoy the fiddly bits though–finding the perfect moments to start and stop my gif, getting the timing right, fixing the size of the first one in GIMP. Those little details are things I could spend hours on–and did, actually! But it’s incredibly frustrating when the tools you’re working with aren’t reliable, which is proving to be the biggest issue with my ds106 work so far.

Creating my First GIF

I’m just going to say it right now that creating a Gif was the hardest thing I did this week.  I did a lot of research on how to do this and downloaded a ton of different software to figure it out.  First thing I saw before I even started thinking about how to make my own gif was Martha’s twitter post about first UMW student (I believe the student’s name was Alex Spangler).  So I clicked on the link to the blog and read a little about how his made his gif.  I also found the tutorial on the DS106 website that I found very helpful: http://ds106.us/handbook/tools/creating-animated-gifs-open-source-software/  The software I downloaded that I actually used was Fastest Youtube downloader, and MPEG Streamclip.  What I found most difficult at first was figuring out how to download youtube videos.  That’s when I read about Fastest Youtube downloader on the tutorial site.  After that it was really easy for me to search for a youtube video to download.  After the video downloaded and I saved it I opened up the MPEG Streamclip.  I followed the directions on the tutorial to shorten the clip to the part I wanted.  I had trouble at first figuring out how to trim, and select in and out of the movie clip, but I finally got it.  I then followed the directions on the tutorial on changing it to other formats.  I changed the format to different screen shots and then I uploaded them to the website http://makeagif.com/ and then it created my gif for me.  It felt really good to me that I figured it out.

So after saying all about the process of how I made my gif and frustrations I had I’m now going to talk about why I chose it.  This scene is from the movie The Hunger Games.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/ In a short summary there are 12 districts that every year they offer up one boy and one girl from each district to fight to the death.  I won’t tell too much for those of you who have not seen the movie. I chose it because it was one of my favorite parts of the movie.  It is when Katniss is saluting district 11, and it is one of the main turning points in the movie that will start a rebellion in the future. I am very happy about how this gif turned out.

 

 

Riul7f on Make A Gif, Animated Gifs

make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif