VisualAssignments2 – Assignment Bank

Perfect Blue… and the imperfect path to that gif

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Check it out!!

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For my first visual assignment, I decided to Say it Like the Peanut Butter with Satoshi Kon’s 1997 thriller, Perfect Blue. It also just happens to be one of my favorite movies. This is the pivotal scene in which Mima (a pop idol who quit the music biz to jump into acting) is consumed by her paranoia. It is also the first scene in which the viewer is shown a glimpse of who Mima’s “lookalike” stalker truly is – her own manager, Rumi, who had grown disgusted by Mima’s foray into the more adult world of television acting. Mima’s paranoia is justified, but she remains in grave danger.

This project initially started off being MUCH more ambitious. This gif is only 12 seconds… the one I wanted to make was 45! Kon’s ability to convey a sense of unease in a place as small and cute as a young lady’s apartment is unmatched. My computer certainly could not match it, and I had to continuously trim down the video. Welp.

I began with this video of the scene in its entirety and downloaded it at http://www.save-video.com/. It’s easiest just to put the word “magic” between the “you” and “tube” in the original video’s URL, because you’ll be redirected to the site automatically. Once I had the video downloaded, I used this guide from the DS106 Wiki on how to create animated gifs using MPEG Streamclip and GIMP (both of which I had to download).

The directions on the wiki are fairly straightforward, but darnit if I didn’t nearly lose my mind trying to trim things in Streamclip. That definitely took more trial and error than anyone should ever need.

The roughest part was having to start over a few times after realizing that the gif I was trying to make was just too long and that it would crash Streamclip after 50 or so frames. Very unsatisfying.

Once I finally got the clip trimmed down to a reasonable length, I ended up with 98 JPEG frames. Imagine that. And if you can’t, here’s my Mima frame folder.

Next up was actually making the gif! Still using the wiki guide, I brought up GIMP and imported all 98 Mimas. They were very cooperative.

I never actually knew how gifs worked until now. I suppose it’s pretty obvious and I should be facepalming myself into another dimension… but wow. It’s a flipbook, but INSIDE THE COMPUTER.

Forgive my audacity for categorizing this assignment as my best work. I’m just really proud of it! (/o\ )”

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Let’s GIF Moving!

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This GIF has been created following the Say It Like the Peanut Butter DS106 assignment. I created this GIF using a great site called GIPHY. This post should also feature on the main ds106 site by using the correct tags ‘VisualAssignments & VisualAssignments2’

The aim of the assignment was create a GIF capturing the essence of a key scene from peoples favourite or worse films. In this case I decided to choose from one of my favourite films The Inbetweeners Movie. And as this was one of my favourite scenes of the film I decided to capture the dance that initiated the whole scene. I also wanted to created a more humorous gif rather than something serious this was probably because I was in happy mood.

You can also view this gif on the GIPHY site here.

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Replay – Need For Speed

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For this assignment we had to take a moment from on of our favourite movies and turn it into a GIF animated image which captures the essence of a key scene.

For this I chose the movie Need For Speed which is one of my favourite movies due to it’s automotive subject and since I used to play the Need For Speed video games. For the GIF as you can see above I used a scene of the iconic one-off Ford Mustang which is used throughout most of the movie. It’s an action driving scene showing the car racing on public streets which sums up most of the movie subject/content.

To create this GIF I sourced the movie scene from YouTube and then used the online service Giphy to turn the video into the animated image. This was a simple process by just inserting the video link and then specifying the start time from the video and the duration that the GIF should be. The website will then process this and render the image for you to save.

I also created this second GIF for fun using this YouTube video for the movie footage. I think this is somewhat more effective than the first GIF since the scenery and background of the shot stays mainly still while the cars through it.

If you wish to view this assignment you can do so here!

GIF 1 on Giphy

GIF 2 on Giphy

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Say it Like Peanut Butter

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My first ever assignment on this Blog!

The assignment is to; ‘ you’ll be creating an animated gif of a clip from your favourite (or least favourite) film’

As someone who loves films, to pick a favourite is so difficult! But none the less I persevered and came up with one of my favourite scenes from my favourite films.

Here is the animated GIF I made: The link to the original video is here.

I made this animated GIF using IMGUR’s video to GIF. I found it to be the best GIF maker I have found, it makes high quality, smooth looking animated GIFs.

Keen films fans may recognise this GIF from ‘The Blues Brothers’.

I love this particular scene because of the story behind it, the filmmakers found an abandoned mall as their location, It being empty they approached retailers to fill the empty shops in the mall. The deal was that they’d only pay for what they wrecked. The full story is here. I highly recommend a look about how this scene was filmed, its highly interesting.

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DS106: Digital Storytelling Assignment #1

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I have done quite a bit of video editing using several video editors, but haven’t created an animated GIF. Its’s actually pretty simple, but does require a few programs to complete. Luckily, you can find them all for free. Below is my first assignment for the DS106 course. I call it “Scared Frodo”. I chose this scene, because I remember the first time reading Lord of the Rings as a child and just how frightening the black riders seemed.

For anyone wanting to try to make their own animated GIF, you can find the instructions here: Creating animated GIFs using open source software.

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Fast Cars… Catfight!

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Wow, Unit 2 has been rather demanding and my job has been too lately, so my blog and my DS106 progress has suffered a little, but I’m back! This is my first Gif assignment, although technically, it’s my second Gif, my first one was a daily create but I’m sure you already knew that. Anyway, the quest was to make a Gif of my last seen movie or one of my favourite movies and I did just that. I am a huge fan of the Fast and Furious movie franchise, so for my Gif, I picked a scene from Fast and Furious 6 which is my favourite of them of all because I feel it was very funny. The last one was too sad for my liking because I love happy endings. I’ve attached my Gif link below, wish the image was showing here but hey, we cant get everything we want. Enjoy!

http://giphy.com/gifs/digitalstorytelling-visualassignment2-visualassignment-IfQIi8t38Vk4w

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Say it Like The Peanut Butter

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First ever GIF here for Western106 assignment and I went ultra complex using two whole images making the results worth two thousand words. Although lots of those words are the same so if you cross reference, eliminate remainders and carry the zero, it’s worth about 1150.

I fear I did not quite capture the essence of this scene, but this visual from Trainspotting always stuck with me. From Holy S%^t to S%^t-eating grin in 100 milliseconds. GIF is a hell of a drug.

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Visual Assignment – Say It Like The Peanut Butter

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"That's your lucky coin!" — “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?”

After much deliberation, I finally chose my first assignment for the week. Not wanting to get too difficult for my first, I went with something I’m familiar with, which is creating gifs. The assignment “Say It Like The Peanut Butter” is fairly straightforward, tasking students with the creation of a short gif that captures the essence of a notable scene from a movie or show. As you can see, I went with Anton Chigurh’s coin toss from No Country for Old Men (which is considered a neo-western). For those who haven’t seen the movie, Chigurh is a ruthless hitman tasked with the recovery of money from a drug deal gone wrong. A cold-blooded killer, he decides the fate of random people he meets by a coin toss, often unbeknownst to them. In this scene in particular, Chigurh is accosting a gas station employee, demanding he calls the coin. I won’t spoil what happens, but the scene is one of the best in cinematic history in my opinion, so check it out at this link if you haven’t seen it before.

Now for the gif creation itself, I used a freeware program called GifCam that is able to record your computer scene and output as a gif. It’s a great program if you haven’t used it before, no install required and very flexible in its options. Considering I own the movie, I just recorded this part of the scene. After that, I used Photoshop to trim some of the extra frames, but that was to help it loop better more than anything. All in all, it was a fun little assignment, definitely on the easier side for someone who has done this sort of thing before. I don’t know about you guys, but watching that scene just made me want to watch the movie again, which is how I’ll be spending the rest of my evening. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed!

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A study in one-eyed fat man motion

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Let’s make a #western106 GIF today.

Inspiration

A Western that I do really like is True Grit. I like the 1969 film and the 2010 version.

There is a scene where Mattie and LeBoeuf watch from a cliff as “Rooster” Cogburn takes on Ned Pepper and gang (watch the scene dubbed “Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man” from 1969 and 2010). I wouldn’t say this is my favorite or least favorite scene. But a brief shot in the 1969 version, where Rooster rides through a wide shot, firing his rifle, that always reminds me of Eadweard Muybridge‘s often-giffed study of motion of a horse and rider.

Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, 1878

The sequence is set to motion using these frames, originally taken from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion series, (plate 626, thoroughbred bay mare “Annie G.” galloping) published 1887 by the University of Pennsylvania

Result

So I decided to make an animated GIF of that scene, which doesn’t work as well as the Muybridge photographs because of all the timber. I think the horse’s motion works quite well though, and even the shooting.

Process

The GIF was easy and quick to make using the new-to-me giphy.com. All I needed to do was paste in the URL of the movie clip on YouTube. There was a little bit of trial and error with the start and endpoint sliders. Eventually I found it easier to enter 00:38 as the start point after pausing on that spot on the YouTube video, rather than try to hit a specific point using the giphy slider. For duration, I made guesses, starting with entering .3 seconds and eventually settling on .5. I captioned the GIF using the “Subtitle” choice on the text tool. Then I used giphy’s Advanced tab to download the GIF to my computer. From there, I uploaded it to my blog post so that it’s mine-all-mine.

But I also tagged it #western106 on giphy and assume it will remain available there for at least awhile: http://giphy.com/gifs/western106-10HUe8Wvn5VuO4

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Say it LIke the Peanut Butter

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As a general rule, animated gifs annoy me. But that was my first assignment for DS106. Turned out to be fun to do.

I created mine with help from this tutorial. I used MPEG Streamclip and GIMP to put this together. Both are open source. The original assignment can be found here. Basically, we were to create an animated gif from an essential scene in our favorite (or least favorite) film.

Who doesn’t love this moment from the Shawshank Redemption?