Original DS 106 Assignment: Get Off My Porch (3 stars)
Using my platform to talk about things that sometimes we want to avoid. It took me some time to even be able to read articles, thinking about the constant fear we leave in. Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022 shook the world 10 years after the Sandy Hook shooting, more elementary aged kids and teachers lost their lives.
Hey everyone, for my final assignment this week, I chose to do one that covered editing a GIF. I thought this would be a relatively easy assignment, but oh no, user beware… I started this assignment by looking up how to edit animations in Gimp, which has been a helpful tool this week, but it is not very user intuitive. After some time, I decided to look up a guide. This one here was helpful, and even more, I tried to install an additional plug-in from this recommendation. But alas, these were fruitless. My next attempt was searching for online gif editors. As a side note, the pronunciation of GIF is hotly debated; even Merriam-Webster wants to stay neutral. But back to the online editors, I found one very helpful but still limiting way to edit the background after several attempts. Thank you, Canva! So if you are still here after this silly little rant, below is my work for your enjoyment!
This GIF is how I think my animals feel about me when I spend all day on the computer doing school work and programming. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing at the moment.
Some other helpful tips that I can give anyone working on editing GIF’s are:
This week, we were assigned to pick 3 projects from the DS106 assignment bank. I chose to do a video assignment, gif assignment, and a design assignment. At first I was overwhelmed with all of the choices. It was difficult to decide what I wanted to do based on its difficulty and how much time it would take. I tried to pick ones that I would enjoy, but also wouldn’t take too much time since I had a lot of work in my other classes as well. Overall, I had a lot of fun creating these projects. It helped me find more free online editors that I can now use for future assignments or just for fun. My favorite project was the design assignment. They ended up taking a bit more time than expected, mostly because of technical difficulties, but I got them done. Let’s get started.
The first assignment I did was to create a GIF. You had to use the GIF of Clint Eastwood looking behind him and add your own GIF for him to look at. It’s kind of hard to explain in words, but there’s an example inserted below. This is rated at 3 stars and I would agree. Although if I had Photoshop, I might even rate it at 2 stars instead. The hardest part of this assignment was actually finding free software that I could use to edit the GIF’s. Other than that, it was fairly easy and didn’t take long once I found an online editor. The example has My Little Pony in the background. I switched it to a GIF of Tina, from Bob’s Burgers, dancing.
To create it, I used an online editor called Kapwing. It was easy to use, but the downside is that it puts a watermark on the GIF. In this case, it would be easy to crop out, but in others it might be more of a challenge. I would have preferred to just use Photoshop for something like this. I don’t have Photoshop though and I didn’t have time to go to my school’s computer lab, so I just found an editor myself. Either way, the site was easy to use and I would use it again if I don’t have better software.
The next assignment I picked is an every hour vlog of my day. I chose this from the video assignment because I already pretend to be a Youtuber anyways so why not do it for real? I mean everyone has pretended to do a tutorial right? Without the camera it’s funny to act like you have an audience. Because of that, this was pretty easy for me. I take videos of myself to send to friends all the time on Snapchat. Oddly enough, when I had to do the same thing for class, I found that it was hard at first to be in front of the camera. I got over it pretty quickly though and had fun filming my day.
I used Snapchat to record my videos every hour because you’re limited to 1 minute videos. I didn’t want my videos to be too long since it was a vlog of my whole day. I also used Snapchat because I wasn’t sure that my phone would have enough storage for all of the footage. After recording everything, I spliced the videos together on my phone using iMovie. I think it would have been easier to edit the video on a computer, but I thought it would be too time consuming to send each separate clip to myself. After editing them in iMovie, I uploaded the whole video to my laptop then uploaded it to Youtube. The worst part about this assignment is that although I liked doing it, it was annoying that I couldn’t finish it in a couple of hours. I know that’s the point, but nevertheless I just wanted it to be done. It was also frustrating that it took so long to upload to Youtube. I’ve never posted a video so I don’t know if that’s normal or if I just had a bad connection. Eventually, it got posted and now it’s live for the world to see.
The last assignment I did was designing a house. The example design was a build in Minecraft. I don’t play Minecraft, so I built a house in the Sims 4. The prompt was to build either a cottage, tiny home, or a mansion. I chose to build a tiny home because a mansion would take too long and I just didn’t want to build a cottage period. In the Sims 4 you can actually specify if you’re building a tiny home and it sets specific parameters for how bid your house can be. I already play Sims way too much and I’m very familiar with it so this was an easy choice. Playing the game itself, of course, was very enjoyable, but everything else was kind of a disaster.
The disaster actually started after I had already been building for a while. I screen recorded the whole thing, so you’ll be able to see where everything messed up. I started my build by taking a house from the Gallery. The Gallery is basically a community in the game where you can share your creations. I used a house that someone else built as a template to get started with my build. Once I figured out the dimensions I began building the different rooms and inserting furniture. It’s pretty typical for my game to go kind of slow at times and skip around. This time instead of just pausing for a second and coming back on, it completely shut down. So I lost everything and had to start my build completely over. At this point, I was pretty frustrated because I had already spent a lot of time finding the house I wanted to use and opening the game takes a while itself. Alas, I still had to get the assignment done. I started everything over. I took more precautions this time by saving more often and making sure I didn’t have too many programs open on my computer. Everything was going fine until I realized my screen recording has stopped. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but I didn’t notice I stopped recording until I was already done building. Even though that was super frustrating, at least I didn’t have to start over again. Losing some footage isn’t the worst thing in the world for this project.
Finally, after I was done building, I edited the video on Clipchamp. This online video editor was actually way easier to use than I had expected and it’s free….well for the first video at least. I didn’t really look into the cost of subscribing. Since it is free, I expected to not be able to do as many edits as I wanted, but I ended being able to do everything. I sped the video up 16x, otherwise it would’ve been like a 3 hour video, added text, and final photos. I then uploaded it to Youtube. As I’m writing this, I’m just now realizing I forgot to add background music. So the whole video is silent….. At this point I really don’t have the time to go back and re-upload it. Hopefully you can still enjoy the video though, even if you have to listen to your own music.
For one of my animated gif assignments I chose to do the three star assignment, where you combine a gif of Clint Eastwood with another to make something funny. I combined the Eastwood gif with a gif of Ryan Haywood from Achievement Hunter. The gif of Ryan always makes me laugh. It’s apparently making fun of some movie but I’ve never seen it, and kind of don’t want to cause it’d ruin it. Anyways here’s Clint being disappointed with Ryan.
Making this gif took quite a bit longer than I think it should have. The setup was easy. First find a gif to combine it with.
Easy. Next was to combine the two. Sounds simple enough but I had trouble finding out how I was suppose to layer one gif on top of another. So, I ended up going frame by frame merging the two layers with GIMP. Took a little while but It worked.
Found this assignment in the DS106 Animated GIF Assignment page. The example given made me chuckle a bit as well. Here’s my work using the provided GIF and a video from the developer of Yandere Simulator showing an interesting bug. As … Continue reading
“Get Offa My Porch, Clint!” animatedGIF by @iamTalkyTina
Well, it was the True Friend who at one time thought that I was the nemesis of him and made mean words at me all the time, but I sorted him out in The Rumble, my True Friend Ben (@techsavvyed) who made an MBS (@mbransons) Animated GIF Assignment #1896 called Get Off My Porch with my good buddy called Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name earlier this evening for #western106 and it caught my attention so I did it too. Because that is how we ride on the range in #ds106.
The assignment as written by Michael provides the source GIF of Clint Eastwood with a nice transparent background. The process to complete the assignment requires that you open the GIF in your photo editor (GIMP or Photoshop), and add your chosen background image below all of the existing GIF layers so that it shows behind each frame. Save the GIF back out as a revised file and you should be done! An easy 3 stars! (Or are they bullets, in #western106?)
The transparent GIF provided for this assignment has 105 frames (one is missing!) and weighs in at a paltry 18.9 MB. Actually, that’s huge for a GIF. We need it to be smaller!
Getting your GIF file size down but still looking good is a holdover from before the days of broadband Internet. Back in the original days of 1986/87 when peoples only had like a 2400 baud modem, it took forever to download graphics so CompuServe invented the GIF and you had to make them small. So it’s still a thing.
Some things that I did to make the GIF a bit smaller in file size were:
Some things that I did that made the GIF a bit bigger again (but better)
In the end, I compromised with a file size of 1.7 MB for a black and white GIF at 600 x 337 pixels with 30 frames.
Because I used my favourite personal iconic photo of me called “Midnight Scrapbooking“ as the background, I noticed that there was a white outline around Clint in all of the frames that made it look more fake than it should have. So I used a special Photoshop trick that got rid of a lot of the pixel borders that were white right around the Clint cutouts.
In this GIF you can see how I fixed it to make it look better and not fake. It shows the process as applied to ONE frame in the original Get-Off-My-Porch source GIF.
Removing Outline GIF by @iamTalkyTina
FOR EACH FRAME (!!)
ENJOY!
I’m supposed to be an educational technology cheerleader for my school district. I’m supposed to champion the unrestrained exploration and adaptation of technology in all areas of K-12 learning. I’m supposed to network with individuals that have an insatiable curiosity and enthusiasm for educational technology in all of its many forms. And yet, the older I become (or perhaps the farther I get from the classroom), the more restrained I find myself when it comes to pursuing new technology.
I feel like the stoic Samurai in Yojimbo, or Clint Eastwood’s character in “Fistful of Dollars” (minus the penchant for violence and gunplay). I feel reserved compared to more fresh-eyed techies that make Kermit’s signature arm flail celebration look tame when they gather at large ed tech conferences. I’m not sure if this is a natural evolution of thought, practice, or just a result of where my professional path has taken me (farther from pure tech, and more towards curriculum and facilitation of groups).
I can’t help but feel like the “man with no name” when it comes to educational technology at times.
I’m quite comfortable with this development, but it makes me wonder if a healthy dose of stoicism is appropriate for those managing and driving the use of instructional technology. I’ve found myself drifting towards celebrating and uplifting transformative teaching and learning practice, regardless of whether it utilizes technology or not. At the same time, I don’t see many educators that have become “edu-famous” for their contributions to the realm of instructional technology transitioning to a more openly thoughtful reflection on instruction and learning in general. It makes me beg the question if perhaps I’ve drifted too far away from my old enthusiasm for instructional technology to truly be effective with it anymore.
I’m excited about where I’m headed, and still confident that I can edu-craft my way to successful use and implementation of instructional technology; I just don’t see it as the end all, be all means of education transformation that I was thought it to be. I hope I’m not alone in these thoughts, as it would make me more than a bit forlorn to be drifting away from so many educational technology enthusiasts that I call friends.
At the very least, I still have ds106, and excellent digital storytelling friends like Michael Branson Smith, to prompt me to write reflections like this with the help of some clever animated GIF challenges.
Eastwood ain’t interested in your strange behavior. What’s got’em so upset? Use this transparent GIF and add your own atrocity.
