***This beautiful piece of artwork was completed thanks to this weeks assignment for ds106 called Say It Like Peanut Butter,This Gif is from the movie “Ex Machina”, an amazing and underrated movie that came out just this year. The Gif is from a scene that is a little bit funny but also a little bit creepy… and the guy reacting to the dancing, who’s name in the movie is Caleb (my name…in real life!), well his reaction seemed eerily similar to my reaction when my friends start dancing at parties. While the dancing might be a bit of an exaggeration of how people dance these days, I don’t know that it’s too far off and regardless it makes me feel about the same level of awkward.

I chose this assignment because it was assigned for this week but I would have probably picked it soon anyway. I really enjoyed making the Gif and I liked that it was pretty simple to make so I got to spend most of the time focusing on what clip I wanted to pick. The story that this Gif tells in the setting of the movie “Ex Machina” is the turning point in the movie when Caleb begins to really think that things aren’t what they seem. It starts off as one of the only funny scenes in the movie but quickly turns and becomes a little bit concerning for Caleb.

Overall I genuinely enjoyed doing this assignment and like anything that lets me research my favorite movies, books, music etc…

“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.”

Story: As you may see, my first Digital Storytelling Assignment, is a Mean Girls GIF. This is a classic movie that I probably know every word to. Anyways, Lindsay Lohan plays the main character, who moves to a new high school all the way from Africa where she was home-schooled her whole life. She plays innocent Cady, who arrives having no idea about high school, weird boys, hard teachers, and of course mean girls.

Process: After reading our first Visual Assignment, I was excited. I always see GIF’s on the internet, they are brief pictures of any video clip or picture that has subtle movement. I was thinking about what movie I wanted to use; and I thought after a long week I could use some humor, so of course I ventured to Mean Girls. This clip is of the “Plastics” (i.e. this is what the mean group of girls call themselves in the movie.) dancing rather provocatively to the famous Christmas song, Jingle Bell Rock. May I add they are at a school talent show?

Work: I did some research and found a helpful site called Make a Gif, which led me to create my masterpiece. First, you can pick which method you want to use. I picked Youtube, but you can select others including pictures, webcam, and video. I uploaded my YouTube URL, and picked which part of the clip I wanted to utilize. From here, it shows you what the GIF will look like so you have some kind of idea, which is really great in my opinion. My GIF length is 5 seconds long, which is a perfect amount of time for these clips. After I was done editing the clip, I was done and my GIF was complete! It was simple and fast and I will probably create more after this.

—-SALTI SKINN

Howdy Folks!

Finally, I have settled on a GIF. This assignment was torturous: let’s dive into the details.

The ASSIGNMENT Say it Like Peanut Butter

First and foremost, the GIF.

The BACKGROUND

This is that amazingly, famous scene from the Titanic where Rose Bukater (played by Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) stand on the “Bow” of the Titanic and enjoy an exhilarating moment together. If, for some strange reason you have not seen the Titanic, the basic story is that of an aristocratic woman (Rose) falling in love with the common man (Jack) and the social obstacles they face. Well, it’s also based on the actual Titanic incident of 1912 (TITANIC). History is fun!

The PROCESS

When I read over the assignment, I immediately turned to YouTube for tutorials. I looked through many and finally found one I thought I liked (iMOVIE GIF) and began working with it without exactly figuring out whether I have the necessary tools. Somehow, I needed to get a clip of the scene into iMovie so I downloaded a program called “Debut” which allows one to screen capture videos and pictures. I searched through YouTube to find a nice HD clip and captured a few seconds of it. Next, the tutorial told me to open it in iMovie and crop it down to about 1-2 seconds. I did that and was feeling confident. Unfortunately, the next step was to “Share” it by using “Export using Quicktime”. Apparently, Mac has decided that the “Export” feature of iMovie is useless and did not include it in the newest version which is what I have on my brand new Mac. My heart sank at this point because I am indecisive and have already spent much longer than I intended on this GIF. I checked out the DS106 handbook but it included installing more programs and I felt that I needed something easier.

I found a website that generates GIFs out of images (GIF MAKER) and proceeded to screen capture a few stills from the clip. All I had to do was upload the images and the GIF was generated. I was not pleased with how choppy it was and in the future I will probably install more programs that would help me just cut parts of a video and transform them, but for now I am happy with the result.

Really glad that’s done and over with!

-Maryna

Assignment 1: “Say it Like Peanut Butter”

Description of Assignment: 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.

The Story Behind the Story: This is my first post from the Assignment Bank for ds106. I didn’t necessarily choose it being that the first one was required by Dr. Polack. Nonetheless, I was still excited to learn how to make a GIF from one of my favorite movies. I chose this scene in particular because it is essential to the overall plot of this movie. This scene is from the movie Minions, a spin-off from the Despicable Me movies. Even though I’m a 21-year-old college student, I still enjoy cartoons and the humor companies like Disney and Pixar bring to theaters. In this particular scene, the minions are talking to the evil villain, Scarlett. She has just told them that she wants them to steal Queen Elizabeth’s crown and they respond, classically, with “whaaaa?!”.  Check this YouTube video out if you aren’t sure what I mean! This is a key scene behind the whole movie as the minions main goal is to please and do the work of the “evilest” villain in the world.

The Process: For this assignment, I began by following the link to the actual assignment page. I read through what was expected, and then proceeded to research the best way to create a GIF from a movie clip. I began by searching through the ds106 Handbook. I found two separate sections on creating a GIF, “Creating Animated GIFs the Modern Way” and “Creating Animated GIFs with (free) Open Source Softare.” As informative and helpful as these two sections were, I soon realized that they would be of no help to me. Unfortunately, I have a Chromebook which is not compatible with the programs (e.g. GIMP) designed for Windows and MAC systems. I was frustrated at first, but decided to search around the ds106 site for other tutorials. I happened to come across the first tutorial listed on the assignment page, Making GIFS with IMUGR. According to this article by “Reverend,” a website called IMUGR allows one to paste a URL of an online video (less than 1GB) and edit it down to a GIF. This was so helpful! I no longer had the issue of having to download a software to my computer. From here on I can delineate the process in a series of steps:

1. I went to YouTube and searched “Minions movie clip.” I then selected one of the first few options.
2. Copy the URL of the YouTube video.
3. Go to IMUGR. Paste the URL of the YouTube video into the specified bar.
4. When the video clip has loaded in the program, use the editor to create the GIF.
   1. Drag the editor bar to the start and end points you would like to use for the GIF. (I chose this section as it captures a key scene from the movie.)
   2. Click the green button “Create GIF.”
   3. The next page lists a number of ways to export the GIF. (For this assignment I used HTML, because I assumed it would be best for a blog post given that it specified website/blog.)
   4. Copy the HTML and embed the media within the blog post.

Personally, I think GIFs are a fun and unique way to capture key moments in movies, tv shows, commercials, etc. and present them to an audience. I appreciate that this assignment gave me the opportunity to experiment with this type of media and publish my own original creation!

–Amanda

This week’s assignment was to create a GIF from my favorite (or least favorite) movie, and let me start out by saying that what I thought was going to be a pretty quick process turned into a marathon event. Before we get into that, though, I’ll explain my choice of GIF. I decided to go with a clip from my favorite movie, which came out this summer. “Inside Out” instantly made it onto my favorites list. Like I said in my intro post, I enjoy the study of psychology, so anything psych related is good with me.

The movie does an awesome job at explaining the way human emotion works in a way that even young children can understand. The moral of the story is that it’s okay to feel the emotions that you’re feeling; sadness is essential for us to ever feel happy. It destigmatizes feelings that everyone goes through at some point and helps to normalize that process. I think this particular scene, where Joy and the other emotions are celebrating, really captures that message and the overall essence of the entire movie.

With that said, I’ll jump back to the GIF making process. I actually made a GIF for the first time in the fall of 2013 when I took Chinese History through Film, so I was pretty familiar with the process. Just to refresh my memory, though, I dug up the tutorial we used when going through the process in that class, which I’ve linked for you here. I replaced my computer in December of 2014, so I needed to re-download the software that the tutorial uses. And this is where the trouble started.

At some point, I installed a nasty malware virus called DNSunlocker. When the normal three step process of removing these didn’t yield any results, I was thrown into a 5 hour process of searching for the easiest (and least expensive) way of manually removing it. At about 10:30 Monday night, I finally hit the right combination of adware removal software and three hours worth of scans later my computer was set free.

From there, I went about the task of installing Quicktime, which you need in order to run the MPEG streamclip software. I downloaded MPEG and GIMP, found a clip on youtube, and made my GIF following the instructions outlined in the tutorial I linked above. I hope everyone enjoyed making their GIFs and was able to complete the process with much less pain than I went through!

Happy Storytelling!

I guess you could say that this film was a…slam dunk.