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.
Note this is a classic and historic DS106 assignment, the second one ever created. It has been resurrected from the tomb of lost assignments.
I’m not really good enough at making GIFs to be a snob, but for the last four years I’ve pushed the process of making GIFs with a combination of a lightweight video editing tool like MPEG Streamclip to edit and export the video clip as stills and an image editing program like GIMP, Photoshop, etc. to actually make it. What’s more, this process assumes you’ve already ripped or downloaded the video from a DVD or YouTube. I’ve been so sold on this method I wrote a tutorial a number of years ago that somewhat codified the process for ds106 (at least with free and open tools like GIMP). Wanna make a GIF? Embrace it…fear it!
Amy Fanghella’s latest GIF implores you to embrace and fear the difficulty :)
Don’t get me wrong, I am still a fan of GIMP and Streamclip for GIFs, although noir106er Amy Fangella’s brilliant tutorial for making GIFs for #ds106 she published today illustrates there are many ways to skin the GIF cat. [As an aside, Amy’s post is as much a way of understanding her ds106 experience through the GIF, as it is a tutorial—and it’s reflections on how we learn through these forms that are the true gold of that course.] But when Michael Branson Smith came to UMW a couple of weeks ago to lay down some GIF magic (more on that Special Presentation in a blog post coming soon), he turned Zach Whalen and I on to IMGUR’s Video to GIF—a SPLOT-like feature of this image service. And let me tell you, it is very, very slick.
It allows you to copy and paste the URL of a video hosted online (although the video has to be less than 1 GB), and provides a dead simple way to grab the scene and make a GIF using YouTube, Vimeo, your own uploaded video, etc. No downloading, no GIMP, no Photoshop, no nothing!
As you can see from the screenshot above, you just drag the editor to the in and out points of that video, and it will automatically create an animated image of the selection. It obviously can’t do the finer GIF work that requires timing, masking, etc. But for quick and dirty, it’s quite impressive.
What’s more, it gives you the GIF in a number of ways: HTML, Markdown, GIF link, GIF video, etc. While I think getting into a more robust image editor and understanding the art of the GIF can be valuable on many levels, it’s hard to argue with the fast, free, and out of control possibilities of IMGUR’s Video to GIF tool when you are trying to turn people on to the art of the GIF.
A quick screen cast showing how to make an animated gif for the photo it like peanut butter assignment:
Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minmal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff. See a bunch of examples at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/02/10/photo-gif-peanut-butter/
from: ds106 Assignments: Photo It Like Peanut Butter
Same procedure for the ds106 Assignments: Say It Like the Peanut Butter
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.
So this is a double tutorial;-)
I like Fireworks for giffing as it clearly separates layers and frames in different palettes. I’ve not used multilayer frames in this video, but it is handy for other gifs.
The video does not really show how to opne the different palettes, I didn’t plan it that well. I added text to explain a couple. Basically I used the Frames.
, layerers and optomise palettes. All open from the Windows menu.
Unfortunately Adobe is discontinuing Fireworks. I am still using the one that comes with CS3. It works fine on mac 10.8.
Although I’ve done a fair number of these to assignments I have no idea why peanut butter is involved.
jim groom posted a GIF of Henry Winkler’s infamous/iconic shark jump this morning.
I can’t imagine a world where media-saturated Bava had missed the origins of this trope. And if that’s really the case, then maybe he missed the Arrested Development sequel as well.
I’ve really been enjoying this process. Alan suggested that I detail the Photoshop steps for GIFing (simple, but often hard to find), so I tried to live record a tutorial video as I made this one.
The other voice Annika. She waved at the computer a lot.
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.
