Join in the brand

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Me and the gals learned to stop worrying and love the propaganda.

Because we’re in DS106 now.

This is an ANIMATED propaganda poster. I used Photoshop and very crudely selected out the bits I wanted to erase, used the eyedropper to select the background colour and filled in parts. This was not satisfactory in some sections so I had to use the rubber stamp tool to clone and get the right variety of colours. Thanks to @cogdog I was able to use the opacity animation feature to make a layer 100% to 0% visible across the animation timeline. I never knew that was there! There are also animation ability for position which would have made my bread head assignment way easier to do, instead of using nudge, you can just set key frame position and Adobe figures out the tweening for you.

Learning, learning, always learning! (hmm…sounds like another propaganda poster)

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Oh Captain my Captain!

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I knew as soon as I read the assignment which movie scene I wanted to do. I haven’t watched The Dead Poets society in a long time, but you only need to see it once to have this scene stick with you. It always made me feel left out to be sitting down when Tom takes to his desk in blatant disregard for the authority of the school and says, “Oh Captain my Captain”, with the rest of his class close behind. It almost makes me forget that Robin Williams did Flubber.

Making this GIF was a little harder than my other ones. I tried to do it on my own, but every online gif maker I found wouldn’t let me put the pictures together fast enough and it came out really jumpy and bad. So instead, I followed Jim’s tutorial: ripping the scene from YouTube to MPEG Streamclip, pulling it up in GIMP and exporting the JPEGs as a GIF. It was pretty straight forward, but I didn’t have any of the software when I started so I had to download all of it and get my bearings in GIMP. I’m happy with the result though. I think this is the perfect ending to an amazing movie and it is the part that everyone remembers.

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Color Splash Gif

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I felt like I needed to do one more assignment to get the number of stars needed for the week, even though I’m not doing this for a grade. I really wanted to try the movie summarized in gif ones but the movies on my computer right now didn’t really lend themselves to that assignment.
I really liked the color splash assignment but I was itching to make a gif for the Say it Like the Peanut Butter assignment. So I combined them, and here’s the result.

It’s the scene from A New Hope where Obi-Wan is about to face Darth Vader, I haven’t seen the movie in awhile but I remember it being a pretty pivotal scene considering the outcome of the battle.

I wish Obi-Wan didn’t lean to the side, and only the lightsaber was moving but it was hard enough trying to get just the lightsaber be the only thing in color. I also wish that Obi-wan had the red light saber because I feel like that would’ve stood out more in the black and white gif, but alas he was not on the Dark Side.

There is a tutorial I was working on for this but it ended up too long so it’s going to get its own post. It should be up before the day is over.

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Dog Man

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All the Cat Breading and Dog Swapping shenanigans that have been going on around ds106 reminded me of that crazy scene in the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the dog man comes running up to Donald Sutherland, Veronica Cartwright, and Brooke Adams, it was pretty much a total freak out for me as a 10 or 11 year old young kid.

So, there was just one thing left to do….

Section 1 of ds106 at UMW #4life. Everything else is for the mandogs.

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ds106 come out and play!

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It was only a matter of time before I did an animated GIF assignment from the 1979 classic The Warriors, a film that seems to be an integral part of the ds106 fabric. This one was actually pretty easy to do—I’ve done many an animated GIF—and while this isn’t the best GIF I’ve ever done, I love that Rogue gang leader Luther is featured here doing his infamous “Warriors come out and plaaaaaaaaay.” You can see the scene below, and if you haven’t had the opportunity to see the film you really, really should, I mean what could be better than a gang film set in NYC during the late 70s, early 80s.

In terms of my process. I used the beta version of MPEG Streamclip to download the clip from YouTube, which is a great tool for ripping and converting YouTube videos for animated GIFs, mashups, etc. What’s nice is you can trim down the scene you want from the YouTube clip an then export to your desktop, from there you need to play with GIMP to create the animate GIF. I’ve created a tutorial just for this occasion, and you can find a tutorial for ripping YouTube clips from MPEG Streamclip and create a GIF using GIMP here. Hope it helps.

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Pure Bread is two steps away from In Bread

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I’d like to tell you a story of bread and spandex.

First, there was this tweet…

#ds106 docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_9l8… I give you this as a present.

— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) February 8, 2012

Then @noiseprofessor up and @JimGroom-ified that breathtaking toe-tapping, spandex spectacle and transformed it into a piece of beauty.

Strangeness ensued with Cat Breading

“Cat Breading” – of course – tinyurl.com/83eqda2

— Andy Rush (@rushaw) February 8, 2012

which led of course to the subsequent DS106 Cat Breading Assignment

OF COURSE the natural progression would be for @cogdog to do some @jimgroom breading

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Well, friends, we’re on a roll here, why stop?

Now you’ll notice I added some bread heads, specifically @jimgroom and @twoodwar but I left some blank bread heads. This is mostly because it’s 1:22AM and I’m toast. But also, because maybe YOU would like to add some heads to that bread.

*Bourgeous Closed System Warning*
Photoshop instructions ahead.
(I’m sorry I want to learn GIMP but I’m in love with Photoshop. I can’t leave her. Yet.)

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

When you open an animated GIF in Photoshop, open the animations menu bar. You’ll notice as you click through the frames that it also switches to the corresponding layer visibility (noted by the eye). Select all frames. Insert a new layer. Paste in the head. Meticulously go frame by frame and nudge the head into the right place. I wasn’t so meticulous, hence the bobbing effect.
There are cool ways of using masks when you only need to change movement on a section, but this glorious dancing piece it’s no benefit.

Well that’s how *I* did it. If you know a better way, please tell me!

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the 488th day of summer

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The scene featured in the animation above is from (500) Days of Summer, which is one of my favorite movies. It tells a realistic story in a hopeful way. So many movies about love either have a cliche romcom ending or a depressingly sad ending. (500) Days of Summer is “not a love story,” it is a “story about love.” It’s truthful and heartbreaking and comforting all at the same time.

I chose this scene because it’s the anchoring point of the movie. As stated in the script (pictured above), the movie opened with this scene on day 488, then went all the way back at day 1. Throughout the movie, different days are shown, highlighting snippets of Summer and Tom’s relationship, and finally day 488 rolls around again.

Summer holding Tom’s hand was a sign of comfort and reassurance. It was her unspoken apology and promise that everything would be okay.

To make this animation, I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 and this tutorial I found on Google. First, I found the video clip that I wanted to use, edited it down using Windows Live Movie Maker and saved it. I then followed the tutorial to convert the video clip into an animation and voila! A finish product. Using Photoshop to make animations is very simple. You can crop the entire animation, add text and captions, and many other things. For this assignment, I simply cropped the picture and resized it, but I look forward to making more animations in the future.

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American Werewolf in London Animated Movie Poster

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Writer, director John Landis is best known for his comedy work in the 80s, particularly the Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and Three Amigos. But the cult classic, An American Werewolf in London was one of two forays he made into the horror genre (I never saw Innocent Blood, but reviews were pretty bad). Admittedly I’m not a huge horror film fan, but what I loved about American Werewolf was the dry sense of humor that Landis brought to this pretty gory film.

There are a number of subtle things – like a cut away to a little wide-eyed, arms outstretched Mickey Mouse figurine almost looking to hug David as he graphically and wrenchingly transforms into a werewolf. And after having spent the evening slaughtering half a dozen people, there’s classic Shakespearian comic relief the next morning as David wakes naked and confused in a zoo cage with wolves. He spends the next ten minutes streaking London, until he steals a lovely women’s coat which he wears on a bus ride home.

So the original poster blends the droll and the savage sides of the movie quite well, I just gave each of them a little animated accent.

To create the vibrating werewolf head I used two frames from the scene of David’s metamorphosis and replaced them on the poster in Photoshop. The nod to the British lady that catches David covering himself was created by using the puppet warp tool on a selection of him. And in order to have the nod be brief with a long pause between, while the werewolf head kept moving a lot of duplicated frames are needed in the animation (42 in total). I wish I knew how to do this with the fewer frames and keep the file size down, as there are only five unique frames needed to make the animation.

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Say It Like the Peanut Butter

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So far 218 people have completed this assignment.
It has 11487 views.

Submitted by: Tom Woodward

_cokwr: Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential., _cpzh4: Visual, _cre1l: 28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l2wd71vvuy1qaw14to1_400.gif, _chk2m: Tom Woodward, _ciyn3: 2, _ckd7g: VisualAssignments2, _clrrx: VisualAssignments, _cztg3: VisualTutorials2

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My Dog, My Muse

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Must. Make. DOG. GIF. ASAP!

Ear flapping Flying Dog

Why must I make a dog gif? Well, let me take you on a journey through my thought process.

As you may know, I have already written how much I love photograph nostalgia like Dear Photograph.

Yesterday my friend emailed me a link to Back to the Future. Be still my heart! What is going on there?!

The artist, Irena Wirning writes:

“I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them…”

I can really relate. I love other people’s photographs, old and new, in their homes, in their albums, in their ancient projectors, in their Flickr streams. You know that Flickr picture with 1 view? That’s me clicking through creating little narratives about the context for each photo.

The way she sets up each shot is so meticulous. I found myself revisiting the site and on the fourth visit, I started clicking around looking at other pages and then- I came across Irini’s Muse: Chini the Chinese Crested dog!.

Now, I have also been reacquainting myself with the joys of dogness in my life.

Most of all I enjoy the walking again. In past winters, I have been prone to semi-hibernate into a mild turpor when cold weather comes. Stella’s necessary walks have been great motivator to get us out of the house.

This weekend on our evening walk, we noticed Stella’s ears looked like she was flying and my dog became my own muse; I thought how cute it would be to make an animated gif of her funny little ears flopping. I filmed a short 10 second video last night on my iPhone.

Then I notice in the twitter stream these hilarious definitive collection of cat gifs. Martha and Alan shared an exchange about the lack of dog gifs, so without a minute to lose, I transfered the video from my phone to my computer, imported into MPEG StreamClip. Set in and out at the appropriate 2 seconds.

MPEG StreamClip screenshot, Select OUT

Exported to QuickTime.

Imported Video to Photoshop as Layers.

On the Mac: in order to import video to layers in Photoshop you need to ensure that you are running 32bit mode. This can be changed from Finder-Applications-Photoshop- Info (cmd+i)- select “open in 32bit mode”