Grease is the GIF
Well my chosen Gif anyway!
For our first assignment we had to chose our favourite, or least favourite movie, and then go on to create a GIF out of it for the ds106 page.
I decided to chose the film Grease, I love this film and honestly I’m a sucker for the happy ending. This song has always been my favourite to sing and dance to with my friends.
If you haven’t watched this film or want to know more about it, including actors, directors ect… head over to IMDB.
Directions: “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.”
10 years ago I had a mild obsession with the movie “Party Monster.” In this scene the main character, Michael Alig (Macaulay Culkin) is a newbie in New York and James St. James (Seth Green) has just taken him under his wing and is teaching him how to make a memorable entrance at a party. The movie chronicles the fabulous yet incredibly tragic rise to notoriety of Club Kid Michael Alig. The movie is anything but inspirational yet as a young impressionable 20 year old I took the advice in this scene to heart and it certainly dictated how I worked the crowd at events through most of my 20s. Oh memories, haha.
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Being self critical in regards to the assignment specifically, I don’t know if the movement in this gif qualifies as “minimal but essential.” Fluttering hands are hard to boil down to one specific move. ?
One of the first assignments for DS106 was to create a gif, but no instructions were provided for how to create the gif. I ended up Googling “make a gif” and used the website makeagif.com to make this gif of the Truffle Shuffle in the movie The Goonies:
The site made it super easy to make a gif!
I took my gif making skills to another level with this creation, however:
Coincidentally, both gifs are throwbacks to ’80’s movies!
Assignment: Say it Like the Peanut Butter –http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/say-it-like-the-peanut-butter/
When we were tasked with creating a GIF from a key scene from our favorite movie, I knew pretty quickly which scene I wanted to use. This is a scene from one of my favorite movies, “No Country For Old Men.” It comes towards the end of the film. Without spoiling too much, it shows the villain of the film checking his shoes for blood, implying he just killed the main characters wife. Earlier scenes indicated his careful avoidance of carrying evidence of his crimes, and by not showing the murder on screen, it allows the viewer to come to their own conclusions.
I love scenes like this. I think not spelling everything out and respecting the viewer’s intelligence makes a story far more entertaining. Not that simplifying things is a bad thing, but making everything very obvious takes away from the viewer’s ability to use their imagination to figure out things themselves. Anyone unaware of the film wouldn’t make much sense of this GIF, but anyone who has seen it knows exactly what it means, giving credence to the filmmaker’s creativity.
I had never created a GIF before, but I found it was pretty easy to make one. My friend Chris (at http://chriszimmerman.biz/ds106/) pointed me to MakeaGif.com, which makes the process incredibly simple. All I had to do was find a video on YouTube containing the scene I wanted, linking it to the site, and creating the GIF in the point of the video I needed. The site only allows the GIF to be made in terms of seconds of the video, so it might not be the most polished, but it worked well enough for what I needed. Then it was as simple as downloading it to my computer.
This GIF is a clip from Friday Night Lights. It is the scene where Boobie is injured.
The story
Boobie Miles is the star running back of the Permian Panthers football team. This is the first game of the season and the panthers are crushing their opponent. Coach Gaines puts Boobie in with 2 minutes left, because the reserve running back lost his helmet. The playcall is 28 sweep. As you can see in the GIF, Boobie is injured on the play. He tears his acl and his out for the season. Right then and there everyone is Odessa, Texas believes Permian’s season is over. However the season must continue and it is up to the rest of the team to step up and compete for a state championship.
The process, Narrated
This is one of very favorite movies, so my decision to take a clip from friday night lights was an easy one. To make this GIF I found a website called makeagif.com. Once I found the clip I wanted I uploaded it from YouTube to makeagif.com. I chose for the GIF to be 3 seconds long, beginning at 00:58 and ending at 1:01. This site gives presents many options for creating a GIF. The options are from picture to GIF, YouTube to GIF, video to GIF, webcam to GIF, or to upload a GIF already created.
“What if I look inside myself and I don’t find any gems? What if I’m just a rock?”
A year and a half ago, when I was a Sophomore preparing for exams and trying to dig myself out of a depressive rut, I went on a Studio Ghibli binge. As a kid, I had only seen Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro. I watched those endlessly. I watched them whenever they were on TV. As I grew older, I became aware that there were other Studio Ghibli movies, a collection of fantastical worlds that could whisk you off into a story you just couldn’t get in American children’s media.
When I was watching them that week, trying to cheer myself up or else just forget about my mountain of responsibilities, I watched all the classics from my childhood. I felt like such a kid again, and it was such a relaxing time. Once I had completed those, I began to branch out into the worlds I wasn’t able to explore before. Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Cat Returns; I devoured them because they made me feel better than I had in a while. But my favorite from that period of time, the movie that I connected to, felt in my soul, understood with all my heart and cried over several times, is Whisper of the Heart.
A story about a girl who loves literature, but struggles in school. She reads books like they’ll disappear any second, and eventually decides to write her own book. Of course, novel-writing isn’t easy, and she has her doubts, her motives questioned or belittled by her family, a lack of support and the isolating feeling that comes with trying to write a novel is so short a time.
Whisper of the Heart is me. It is how I feel when I write anything, and I doubt myself. It is how I feel when I don’t do well in school, but I throw every ounce of myself into something I love. I choke up during the scene where she is shown a geode and told that artists are like this geode; when an artist first creates something, it is raw, with gems inside it. This scene, while inspirational, is heartbreaking, with the girl still wondering if she is like that geode at all, or if she’s just a rock.
Process of Making the Gif
For the “Say it like the peanut butter” Assignment, we were required to make a gif of our favorite (or least favorite) movie scene, and capture the main point of that scene. While I did know how to make gifs in GIMP, I had no idea how to turn a video into a gif. My initial idea was just playing and pausing the video as quickly as I could, taking screenshots, and then throwing them into GIMP, but that seemed like a tedious and frankly ridiculous idea.
And while there’s a lovely tutorial on how to take Youtube videos and turn them into gifs using Imgur, I was (un)lucky enough to only find this scene on IMDB, which, if you’re wondering, does not work with Imgur’s video-to-gif feature.
So to truncate a lengthy process with a lot of failed attempts, I eventually downloaded a (admittedly dubious) video capture program called Video Download Capture. Trust me, while I downloaded this program without hesitation, I would be wary and seriously look into it before you download the trial (I’ve made many mistakes in the past with downloading random programs). But, while I was suspicious of it, it did the job. I used the screen-recording function and recorded this scene (and a few seconds around it to be safe).
Next (after more failed attempts and work with a different program that proved useless), I uploaded this video to Youtube. Only temporarily of course; it was recorded without sound and, frankly, looked like a mess because the screen-region I captured was larger than the video’s region (I did that because the program has an unsightly watermark that I didn’t want getting in my gif).
When I found out Imgur still didn’t want to turn my video into a gif, I went to Make A Gif, which was more than happy to work with me. I was once again pleased that my screen region was bigger than the actual part I wanted, because Make A Gif also adds a watermark to the bottom corner of the image. But it worked perfectly, and I downloaded it and opened GIMP.
In GIMP I just wanted to crop out the unnecessary bits and (because Make a Gif made the image really small) increase the size. I would have tried to increase the quality, but GIMP was refusing, and it had already been a long process. I apologize for the quality.
Then I just threw it into TinyPic, and that was that.
After dealing with Nukes jammed eyelids and his dad watching him, Jose’s cursed glove (needing a live rooster to take the hex off), and NO ONE seeming to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present; Crash comes to this metaphysical conclusion.
This post is for the first visual assignment of Digital Storytelling 106. The original assignment can be found by following this link:
Visual Assignment 1 – Say It Like The Peanut Butter
The assignment is to make an animated GIF capturing the essence of a key scene from a movie. The movement should be minimal, but essential.
The Story
I started off by thinking about what kind of movement would be small, but essential to a scene. My first thought was capturing the look on somebody’s face as they have some important realization. The slightest movements of a person’s facial features can really change the emotion they are portraying. I tried to think of movies that contained such a scene, but I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head.
So instead of trying to come up with the movie, I scrolled through my selection of movies to see if anything would pop out at me. As soon as I saw Jurassic Park, I knew what my GIF would be.
When Jurassic Park was released in 1993, the effects blew people away. Most effects-heavy movies show their age, but when I watched Jurassic Park four months ago, I was amazed by how great everything still looked. This allows the movie to have the same effect on viewers today as it did 22 years ago. People are still scared by the T-Rex and raptor scenes.
I chose the shot of the T-Rex’s claws on the electric fence because I believe it best represents the film. In the two second long shot, you see that something dangerous enough to be kept behind a 10,000 volt electric fence is about to escape. If that’s not scary enough, this creature is about to be unleashed in a wet, dark jungle. With the information given just in this short shot, you can almost see what the rest of the film will be like.
The great thing about Jurassic Park is that it not only inspired fear in the viewers, but also curiosity. Paleontology was suddenly a hot career after the movie’s release. It may not have been completely accurate, but it didn’t have to be to to have an impact. Very few movies, especially Blockbuster hits, can be pointed to as a reason for the advancement of a scientific field.
The GIF
The Process
I know that there are sites that allow you to easily create GIFs, but I figured that I should learn to use some tools while I’m in this class. The final product isn’t as smooth as it could be, but I’m happy that I learned something in the process of creating it.
GIMP was mentioned during the Week 2 Video, so I decided I would learn how to use some of its features (I also work with Linux computers, so GIMP is a handy thing to know). I searched for instructions on using GIMP to make GIFs and found the following link:
http://www.elearnhub.org/how-to-make-an-animated-gif-in-gimp/
It seemed simple enough as long as I could get pictures of what I wanted to piece together. I have a copy of Jurassic Park, so I decided I would play it on my computer and figure out how to get screen captures from that.
I did a google search and found out that Windows 7 has a tool called the Snipping Tool that allows you to capture specific parts of your screen. You simply drag a box over what you would like to grab a picture of and then save it.
I played the movie in VLC Media Player, skipping to the scene I wanted to use. When I found it, I paused the movie and used the snipping tool to grab what I wanted for my GIF.
I went through and paused about every quarter second, snipping a picture every time. I ended up with 11 pictures.
I opened GIMP and started following the instructions I had found online. I opened up the first picture I had snipped and then used the “Open as layers” option to open up the remaining ten pictures. I clicked “Filters” at the top of the screen, selected “Animation,” and chose the “Optimize for GIF” option to reduce the final file size. Under the animation menu, I chose playback to preview what my GIF would look like, and then exported it as a GIF.
For my first digital storytelling assignment we were assigned to create an animated gif of a clip from our favorite, or least favorite movie so I chose to create a gif from the movie Jurassic World.
When I first read that I had to make a gif, I was very worried that it would be a very confusing and tedious process. I started by asking the all-knowing Google how to create an awe inspiring gif such as the one above. Google then lead me to a site called Imageflip.com. When I visited ImageFlip, I was quickly relieved by how easy it made creating a gif. All I had to do was copy and paste a YouTube video URL and the video would pop up on ImageFlip. Then it had me select the time frame(in seconds) I wanted to make my gif from. The third and final step was to just hit the generate gif button and download it.
I chose Jurassic World as my favorite movie because I’ve been a dinosaur dork for almost my entire life. Ever since I saw the first Jurassic Park at age two, I wanted everything dinosaur related I laid my eyes on. After seeing the third Jurassic Park for the first time, I’ve been dreaming for a sequel non stop. I finally got it last summer and I’m not ashamed to say that I saw it three times within the first week it came out. There is very fun site for Jurassic World that is a mock of the park. It has everything from being able to reserve tickets to the park, when the next monorail ride is arriving, and staying the night at their 5-star hotel.
In this scene in Jurassic World, the two nephews of the head of the park, are being chased by the Indominus Rex (which means Fierce or Untamable King). This scene is important because the two nephews become lost in the park so the two main characters Owen and Claire (played by Chris Prat and Bryce Howard), spend a big part of the film tracking them down as the Indominus tracks them as well.
