In the episode of The Prisoner called “Hammer into Anvil,” Number 2 pretty much loses it by the end. One part that really intrigued me was when he was shown towards the end stroking the penny farthing. I’ve seen some suggestions online about what the penny farthing is all about in the series, and in an interview McGoohan talks about the problems with progress…it seems to maybe have something to do with an ironic statement about the progress we have achieved (not much, really, despite our advances in technology). Maybe we haven’t progressed very far morally, for example.

So with that in mind, I find it very interesting that when Number 2 loses it he ends up stroking this ironic symbol of progress, as if he thinks it’s going to be his saviour. It’s what he believes in; it comforts him.

It’s also just a creepy sequence, as I tried to capture in this gif.

the process

I made this in GIMP.

1. I used screencast-o-matic to do a screen capture of this part of the episode while it was playing on my computer.

2. I opened it in MPEG streamclip to capture just the frames I wanted, and then used “export other formats” and “as image sequence.” I exported to jpg with 8 frames per sec I think.

3. In GIMP, I had 32 layers, and I had to repeat some of them to get him to close his eyes again after he opens them. I just reversed those layers. So by the time I was done I had many, many layers, and I wanted to reduce the file size.

4. I cut out some of the layers, every other one, for part of the sequence. When I did it for all of it then parts were too choppy.

5. I resized the image to be 400px wide.

6. I tried changing the colour mode to “indexed” before saving, but that made the finished gif even bigger than it was before. Even when I set the max colours on indexed to 100!

So it’s 1.5 MB as is, which isn’t too bad.

And just for fun…

I created two more out of this sequence.

Eyes closed:

Now, just the eyes opening and closing:

What’s he up to?

Well, I just thought another GIF would be good to finish the day. I’ve already commented on the chess puzzle in The Tally Ho, so I thought that puzzle could be animated. All frames taken from the Checkmate episode of The Prisoner.

It turns out that the entire sequence of writing the word ROOK takes 10 seconds. Using MPEGStreamclip, even saving at 8 frames per second gives 80 images. I actually gave up after the program seemed to time out. So I actually had to reset the in and out points a couple of extra times to get the frames I wanted. Anyway, I have some extras to mess around with some other day.

Importing selected images into GIMP as layers made it trivial to export as a GIF. The first try had too much of a blue cast, so I went back and desaturated all layers. Then I needed to adjust the timing, settling on 180ms for all but the final frame, which is 800ms. Since this sequence doesn’t smoothly wrap back to the beginning, I thought it best that the checkmark would have a bit of a lag before repeating the action.

I like the slight movement of the paper as Number Six writes the letters. The shadowing makes the sequence more realistic.

Be seeing you, tomorrow!

Number 2 Great Seal of Office

In the episode “It’s Your Funeral”, Number 2 is honored during ceremonial occasions to wear the golden Great Seal of Office. In the scene in the watchmaker’s shop we see a rare glimpse into the design process. Left laying around for all to see is the original designer’s sketch of this seal!

Original Design Sketch

As is common when analyzing ancient manuscript documents, I found it useful to record my experiments with various lighting conditions from various angles. For simplicity in this presentation, and in presenting the evidence of my conclusions, I show only the results for light from the four cardinal directions, and I do so in rotating images.

First, the sketch in natural light:

Natural lighting

As you see, in natural light, no particular artifacts of creation are evident. One sees the inscription in the normal Village font, and the central icon of the Village pennyfarthing.

Exposed in near-ultraviolet light, we see some additional information developing on the surface. There are areas of differing colors showing variations in the surface texture. The spectrum from red through violet shows increased surface height. One would think that a piece of drafting paper would be smooth, but here there is apparent evidence of unevenness.

In Near-Ultraviolet Light

Finally, I found the need to slow the rotation to better see the square areas that appear from some angles. In slow motion, you can observe this “pixelization” of the surface. Normal paper does not behave in such a manner. Note that you can see the effect better if you click on the image to view it larger in your browser.

Slow Motion to Observe Squares

“What does this mean?” to quote Dr. Martin Luther. Apparently, the technology of The Village included elements more advanced than most of the world knew in the 1960s. This paper is actually synthetic paper made of nano-liquid-crystal. To our knowledge, this nLCD type of display is just now coming to market in advanced technical centers, such as Tokyo and Singapore. To find it in The Village is evidence beyond what we were looking for. The nLCD paper the watchmaker is using to draft the seal of office is nothing less than an artifact from the future!

The next stage of research must now shift from design, to source. Where and when could this nLCD paper originate? And how and by whom was it delivered to The Village? Unfortunately, these questions cannot be answered at the present, but must wait for time to progress.

A quick gif with audio. A warm up watching Hammer into Anvil. An interesting episode, no escape attempts but a moral crusade by Number 6 and a battle of minds with Number 2.

More fist fights and physical action than most of the episodes so far, kosho looks like fun.

Another ds106 Assignments: Animating #Prisoner106 for an early 2 credits.

For week 3 of #prisoner106, we were asked to do the “Animating The Prisoner” assignment.

I struggled with this one a lot for some unknown reason. I love making animated GIFs from video because technically, it’s pretty easy once you get the tools.

What I struggled with was finding sequences to animate from the episodes I’ve seen. I have a couple of ideas, but as this assignment is due in 1.5 hours, I figured I just do one so far and post it here.

In “A, B, and C,” Number 6 is drugged for two nights in a row and taken to a room where his dreams show up as videos on a screen, and they are manipulated from the outside to see if he was going to “sell out” (they wondered if maybe that’s why he retired). I was struck by the fact that there are two very similar sequences where the camera zooms in quickly on his wrist, where there are marks from the injections. In the first sequence, there is just one mark b/c it’s after the first night. After the second night, there are two.

I decided to animate these sequences to make it seem like it was just one mark, then he looks again and now it’s two, then he looks again and now it’s one, etc., etc.

The Process

I’m not sure I could explain it any better than is done in this great tutorial given here. I used MPEG Streamclip and GIMP as suggested in that tutorial, and used the settings given there.

I took a sequence of him sitting on his bed and then suddenly looking at his wrist and just duplicated it so it looks like he is doing the same motion but having different numbers of marks on his wrist every time he lifts it to see.

I keep getting a little frustrated at the pixelated colours on my gifs, but then discovered that the .gif format will only take about 256 colours, so there’s really not a lot you can do about this from what I can tell, when your source files have lots of colours and the gif will only have that many.

Interesting happenings in the village this week, there seem to be a lot of ‘learning’ going on. As I watch number six get into trouble I am thinking my decision to be less confronting was a good idea. However this episode is taking the committee well inside my wheelhouse. Although I’ve not got number six’s skills I think there are other ways to subvert the establishment here, perhaps a bit of digital graffiti…