I love taking home videos of my friends and family. When I decided I wanted to do this assignment I started to look through all of my videos.

I choose this video of me and my friend Bridget. This was taken the last day of the summer of 2019 before she went off to college in Ohio. Her family was moving to Wyoming the next week.

I have not seen Bridget in person in 3 years but our friendship is just as strong as it was in was all throughout high school. I do miss her a lot and if it weren’t for the pandemic we definitely would have visited each other by now. Bridget is definitely one of my friends that I will be keep in touch with my whole life and I am blessed to have her.

Over the weekend I attended the Smoky Hill River Festival with my family. The literal highlight of the evening had to be seeing Martika the One Woman Stunt Show (or the Death Defying). Martika put on a thrilling fire show for her audience and I couldn’t help but record the most exciting pieces of her act.

For my animated GIF ds106 assignment I knew I had to use footage of Martika to create the above GIF. I chose a mobile app called GIF Maker-Editor.

The app was perfect and allowed me to clip the portion of the video I wanted to use, crop it down to a smaller size, and add one of the included image effects. I chose an effect called Levels, which I felt helped make the flames stand out even more than the original image.

Making GIFs is fun. For the two activities from the assignment bank I chose to GIF my sassy animal, and a home video.

Fun fact: I’m full of ideas, I just lack the motivation to make them real.

If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve probably gathered that while I enjoy being creative, I never push myself to do anything about it unless I’m in school. I’ve been riding the train to and from my internship since January and I have been dying to create some cool train GIFs. I thought the Home Video Gif assignment would be a great challenge to 1) refresh my knowledge on the GIF-making process and 2) finally make one of my ideas a reality.

Luckily, getting the frames was not an issue because I’m a creepy passenger. I take pictures of the train all the time, so my camera roll is fully stocked with arrivals and departures. However, making the GIF itself was difficult because it had been a while since I’d done it. The only method I’ve learned is through Photoshop. Most of my problems came from importing frames and setting the duration of each. It took a bit of trial and error to remember how to do these things in bulk.

Once my frames were set, I began to edit colors and lighting. I intended to make slight alterations but had way too much fun testing different extremes. I decided to roll with it. Here’s my GIF!

Well hello again. It’s Friday.

Oh yes. Animated gifs…my worst nightmare. Once again, I had so much trouble with this crap. I downloaded VLC to help me obtain the frames from the video and it wasn’t working because (J’m assuming) I didn’t give it admin…but like heck I will because I don’t know if this program is corrupted and what not. So I literally spent an hour weighing my options and figured I’ll just do that same exact thing I did last time.

Anyways, the gif assignment I went with today is called “home video gif” and since I don’t have a lot of home videos…I used a video I took back in 2016 when I went to New York to see our favorite virtual diva in concert…kind of wished I had something silly instead, but I figured this would make do.

Ah, yes. I remember this concert so vividly…so many fellow nerds at a sold out concert for a Japanese hologram. #NoRegrets But honestly, this was probably one of the best concerts I have ever been to and every time I go, I try to get VIP tickets because I want to be up close to that glass screen and the band members. The song that was playing in the gif is called ??????or “Secret Police” and it is legit so hype I can’t even.

Anyone got any tips for animating gifs? (? ?????)? ?

Taylor

I have seen gif’s all over tumblr and always thought they were so cool. Never have I ever even attempted to make one up until now. For my first gif, I went with the home video design assignment. I am ALWAYS taking pictures or recording videos of event that I go to, so I knew that I was bound to have a home video to work with.

This gif was made from a home made video of my first time at Disney World in Orlando, Fl. It was my neices 7th birthday and instead of a party she wanted to visit Disney. As we all may be aware of, Disney is not cheap… AT ALL! Luckily I was still in the military at the time, so I was able to purchase tickets on base for my sister, her husband, my niece and of course myself (I couldn’t miss out on the fun). This video was taken on our very first day (we had a 4-day pass for all of the parks). We had eaten breakfast that morning with all of the Disney characters, including Minnie, Daisy, Mickey, Donald etc. It was a great time and most importantly my niece loved it !

The first park we visited was Magic Kingdom. This is where the gif sprouts from. I HATE rides that go in circles because they instantly make me nauseous. Somehow I was talked into getting on the little tea pot ride, which went in circles… I agreed to go on based on one condition, that we don’t spin the tea pot more than it does on its own. Of course that wasn’t going to work for my brother in law haha He spun and spun and spun as fast as he could resulting in all the screams and laughs from the original video. This gif brings back so many great memories !

The process of making this gif was much easier than I assumed. Find out exactly how simple it was by taking a look at my tutorial.

[3 STARS]

Favorite Musician Gif.

Although I have been a self-proclaimed feminist for years, I hadn’t listened the a lot of lady’s performing rock music in my life. When my boyfriend introduced me to Sleater-Kinney a few weeks back, I immediately changed my ways. These girls rock so hard and they do it entirely effortlessly. There were a band through the mid 1990’s, and didn’t break up until 2005, so there is quite a lot of material out there to choose for a gif. However, they got back together and released a new album earlier this year, and performed a show for NPR. The concert is amazing, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Anyhow, here’s the gif, and a link to the performance if you’re into ladies who shred.

Home Video Gif.

My puppy turns two next month! I guess technically that means she’s probably not a puppy anymore, but I am not quite ready to accept that fact. I have endless footage of my little pup, named Cricket, on my phone, and when I saw this as option for a gif, my mind was made up. She’s typically quite energetic, but more than anything Cricket is a goof. She plays dead, rolls over, leaps around, and all sorts of strange dog behavior. This gif is an example of the playing dead. We were in the middle of a game of fetch (which I admit is more her watching me throw the ball and fetching it for myself while she follows me around, but that’s beside the point). She just flopped over on the ground and refused to budge.