AnimatedGIFAssignments864 – Assignment Bank

Thanks, Apogee

View Assignment Details

?????

I realised I’d missed an important part of the requirements for the assignments this week:

be sure to choose assignments from 3 different categories

I wasn’t sure what to do for this one, so I decided to get on Steam to take a little break from working. Of course, Apogee decided to be its usual self and die for no reason whatsoever. On the bright side, it gave me some material for my last assignment! The assignment is Hurry Up & Wait.

When Apogee decided to stop working, I quickly grabbed this gif:

Not the best quality, since I had to grab it quickly using Gyazo Gif, but it represents my immense frustration with the internet on campus. It’s been better this year (except the first day, where it took several hours to get the thing working), but it’s been by no means perfect. All I want to do is install an update for a game. Please, Apogee, listen to my prayers.

View Assignment Details

Rainbow Spinny Wheel of Death

View Assignment Details

Hurry Up and Wait

Animate one of those frustrating moments when you know time is moving forward, but it’s just so damn hard to tell.

I think one of the most frustrating things that happen while using a Mac is when the user receives what I like to call the Rainbow Spinny Wheel of Death. Getting the Rainbow Spinny Wheel, especially when your Mac is older, for extended periods of time does not bode well for the likes of the computer. When you are in a time crunch or short on patience it feels like the Rainbow Spinny Wheel could really spin on until your death.

To create the GIF of the Rainbow Spinny Wheel, I googled the internet for a video of the Rainbow Mac Spinny Wheel and found a video on YouTube.

I decided to use makeagif.com again since it worked so well for my GIF of Dave Grohl.

I used the YouTube setting once again.

After I inserted the YouTube video I adjusted the Clip to be the correct length with the slide bars on the left side of the page.

I then downloaded the GIF to my desktop before uploading it into this post.

What makes you forget that time is moving and makes you want to pull your hair out?

View Assignment Details

GIF Dog GIF

View Assignment Details

Today’s Daily Create may have been the hardest one to date- “Use camera panning to blur the background behind a moving subject” – the idea is to use a relatively slow shutter speed to take a photo of a moving subject. If you pan the camera at about the same speed as the subject, you can achieve a great effect of it being in focus, but everything else is blurred.

I don’t think I’ve ever really pulled this one off before, and my streak continued today.

But I tried.

And that’s the point.

I shot about 25 exposures of Gunner, the dog I am watching. He loves to chase tennis balls, so I tried all kinds of vantage points of tossing the ball and trying to get him to run by my field of view. The first challenge is throwing a ball with my left hand and holding the camera with the right. This was about the best I got:

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

But the other ones, blurred and all, were interesting because they had a real texture that looked more painting then photo, perhaps because of the background texture of the granite gravel in my yard. I had two of them in sequence, and flipping between them in Aperture like a flip book, I heard that whisper… “make it a GIF. Do a GIF”.

So what you see above is just a two framer. it was kind of jerky with the darker background and the top, so in the second frame, I turned on the lower layer (which was the first frame), and started erasing out the background top of the second image, so more or less, the background stays fixed. It still feels herky jerky, but in two frames it does capture the motion of a dog chasing a ball, all in som abstract land of fuzzy details.

I could not really find an animatedGIF assignment that fit, so I am sort of turning Hurry Up and Wait inside out to be Hurry Up and Run

View Assignment Details

The Slooooow Wait & The Top 89%

View Assignment Details

Remember dial-up? Remember when your 14.4 modem just screamed in comparison to the earlier one? Remember when you used to watch the status bar as a small file downloaded?

I still remember the magic of the first file arrival, as it came into my computer over the local Datapac dial-up phone connection. Truly amazing at the time.

But I also remember this:

Interlacing is an option to this day. But for a lot of folks today, their connection is fast enough that images load all at once. Boom.

But not everyone has a fast connection. While this little display is contrived via the magic of an animated GIF (137 horizontal while lines, covering the image and removed at the rate of one per frame, with various intervals thrown in for realism and to evoke memories of the olden days, and short-term frustration), the Speedtest badge is real. My buddy Doug used to send these to me regularly, as we both have the same ISP, and would compare our download specs on bad days. Typically Doug’s stats would be similar to the one above. Grade: F, slower than 89% of Canada. Mine typically sits at around Grade C or C+, with roughly 52% of Canada enjoying a faster download.

How would YOU like it if your Internet connection were this slow? Or stopped working for hours on end?

Doug recently moved up to the new 4G service, and he tells me that the speeds are better, and more consistent. But now he has to watch that he doesn’t download too much data within the month and incur fees for going over. I’ve been there. Not fun.

Created for GIFestivus2012, this is my second submission for Ben Rimes’ “Hurry Up and Wait” Animated GIF Assignment 864.

View Assignment Details

Waiting for “Waiting for Groomot”

This post contains a link to my GIFestivus2012 submission for Ben Rimes’ “Hurry Up and Wait” Animated GIF Assignment 864. As soon as I read the description of his assignment, I knew I couldn’t wait to do it.

However, completing the GIF turned out to be an exercise in waiting.

Getting the GIF out of Photoshop turned out to be a bit of a pain. All told, the .psd file had 298 frames, made up of 39 layers — although a lot of most of the layers are primarily transparent. Photoshop kept giving me this bothersome (and very OLD looking!) error message whenever I tried to make the GIF via the Save for Web menu item.

I also saw some familiar, old-fashioned Mac wait-icons and behaviours during the failed export, making me think that Adobe STILL hasn’t got all of their code fully up to date. While the export continued to fail, it DID give me some new material that I decided to capture and add to my GIF. So there was that.

A bit of web research led to some web Q/A discussions where others ran into the same kind of GIF export limitations in Photoshop, likely due to the number of frames. The suggested solution was to split the photoshop file into two (or more) pieces — deleting the second half of the frames from the first file copy, say, and then deleting the first half of the frames from the second copy), do the partial Save for Web from each piece, and then reassemble them using an actual GIF editor. Seems simple enough.

All I needed was an actual GIF editor.

The ancient yet reigning Mac GIF editor GIF Builder only runs on Power PC or Rosetta-supporting Macs, and I’ve long since said goodbye to those old ways. I guess I could have downloaded it and booted up an older PPC Mac into an earlier version of Max OS X to run it, but that seemed like a lot of extra work, and wouldn’t give me a solution I could take forward into the future. Like if I run into it again tomorrow.

I remember GIF Builder from the mid-to-late nineties, when I was coding web pages using Macromedia’s Cold Fusion and tastefully added simple GIF animations to highlight important points. Ah, the old memories of OS 7, and 8, and 9 come flooding back…

Continuing the search, Ulead GIF Animator seemed to top the results on the web charts. However, Ulead has been purchased by Corel, and their GIF Animator software seems to have been absorbed invisibly into the collective. Nuts. A PC version was available, but for that I’d have to get a Parallels disk image set up. In the Age of the Cloud, I’ve stopped running PC software. I then downloaded something called ImageOptim from another location, as it showed up in my search — but, as the name would suggest, it simply optimizes images — including GIFs, – but doesn’t let you edit them.

Then, I lucked out and came across giftedmotion-1.20 – actually a Java executable, distributed as a .jar file – and it loaded up the two halves of my intended GIF and then spat them back out as one. It took a while (and gave me yet another version of a wait icon!) but finally my GIF was done. GiftedMotion provides a simple interface for ordering images, setting timings, and exporting to a GIF file. It nicely recognizes the frames in a previously existing imported GIF.

As I started to compose this post, I finally needed to confront the reality that the GIF was over 900 pixels wide. Fine, if I post without sidebars, etc — but the simple theme that I’ve been using for this blog includes wide margins/sidebars on both sides. Rather than continuing to live within this originally temporary (and plain, yes?) theme, I’ve decided to switch de•tri•tus over to the Gantry Framework/Theme from RocketTheme that I tend to use for other sites that I administer. It’s nicely customizable, and will provide all the flexibility that I’m likely to need for this blog. It’s about time that I put a little effort into the design of this space, anyway.

~~So I’ll sort that out now.~~

Actually, it appears that I can display the full GIF on it’s own page if I link to the Attachment Page. Not sure if this is something newer in this theme or in WordPress 3.5, perhaps easier to navigate to? At any rate, without changing the theme, I can let you see “Waiting for Groomot” now.

~~View “Waiting for Groomot.”~~ EVEN BETTER, just view the GIF directly at full resolution.

Be sure to watch until the end. You’ll know when it arrives.

Hurry Up & Wait! #GIFFest

View Assignment Details

It’s official, the ds106 GIF Fest is upon us! Just in time for the coming Mayan apocalypse no less, huzzah! I thought I’d set the bar really low, to see if I can anger the GIF gods to come and make something better. That, and I thought it might be nice to create a GIF that many of my educational technology brothers and sisters could use in a pinch to illustrate the frustrating nature that is the 21st century work place; we seem like we’re all in a hurry to get somewhere (usually collaboratively, reflectively, and in a standards-based fashion), but we just can’t seem to get there.

It’s like we’re all in a hurry to wait for the next thing, which of course how I felt when I saw that pulsating blue progress bar today as I copied over a bunch of videos from around campus to turn into some teacher introductions. Our teachers and school board members don’t often get a chance to meet with one another (typically our principals present to the school board about what’s happening in their buildings), so last year I helped craft a few videos to present some of our “tech leaders” to the school board. It’s been awhile since I’ve done any, and I thought it might be time to pick it back up as we have some new school board members after the election last Fall.

View Assignment Details

Hurry Up & Wait!

View Assignment Details

So far 6 people have completed this assignment.
It has 2780 views.

Submitted by: Ben Rimes

Animate one of those frustrating moments when you know time is moving forward, but it’s just so damn hard to tell.