GIF – Assignment Bank

Wiggle Stereogram

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I mentioned last night that I’m going to work along with UMW’s summer DS106 section beginning next Monday. In order to get ready, I’m cracking my GIF knuckles and getting my workflow down so I can spend more brain power on problem solving rather than just doing the work.

I went through the DS106 Assignment Bank, looking for something that would catch my eye. I came across the Wiggle Setereoscopy assignment. Mostly because it had a hilarious name, I took a look at it and tried it out.

I didn’t want to use an app to make the stereogram, because I felt like that would be cheating somehow. I wanted to take my own pictures and then use GIMP to make it dance. My first two attempts were terrible because my photos were too far apart. I learned after trying twice that the camera difference needs to be very small. Much smaller than you would assume…and that was the hardest part of the assignment.

I took a two photos of my AT2020 USB mic sitting on my bookshelf and then opened them as layers in GIMP.

The first thing I did was crop the photo down to a manageable size. With the original at over 3000px wide, it was a little overwhelming. The final version is 700px wide.

I really wanted to do something like Alan’s, where the object was nearly stationary in the middle. I dropped the opacity on the top layer and tried to line it up as best I could, but because of the way I moved the camera when I took the photo, there’s still a little wiggle.

Then, it was just a matter of bringing the opacity back up, tweaking the frame rate (I ended up with 75ms per frame), optimizing for a GIF, and exporting the file. All in all, it took me about 20 minutes to do (minus all the photography trial and error from throughout the day) and I’m pretty happy with the result.

Dance away, AT.

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Media Metamorphoses

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Click the audio for the story.

For this assignment “Storytelling with Recycled Media” you were obliged to take media from a page on minus.com, where ds106 students earlyer have uploaded media, for which they themselves have no use. Unfortunately there’s a lack of videos and I’ve missed the videos I’ve upoaded. I presume somthing went wrong during the uploading process.

Still, the media are interesting and because I wanted something move I chose pictures to make animated gifs from them. I used a filter in Gimp to blend two images over a background. You can find it in the menu Filters -> Animation -> Blend. Here you can choose how many steps you need for the blending. After the filter has applied you can playback the animation (menu Filters -> Animation -> Playback.) I saved the file as an animatied gif.

I also chose 3 sounds and mixed them to one file which tells the story requested for the assignment.

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My Animated GIF Birthday!

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It’s April 12th! It’s my Birthday! What better way to celebrate than a special edition of “My Animated GIF Day“! Come back throughout the day for updates with new GIFs…if you’re into that sort of thing

5:56 am
I’ve been up for about 30 minutes or so. I woke up before my alarm went off, putting me in a slightly off mood. Sometimes I welcome an early start, and sometimes I feel as though I’ve been cheated out of a few minutes sleep when my body decides it’s time to wake up before the alarm. Regardless, toast helps right any early morning grumpiness, especially toast with butter and jam. Yes, my toaster is a bit grubby. It’s my birthday today, I’ll clean it tomorrow.

6:24 am
In the last year I’ve taken up running 3-4 days a week with 50-60 crunches, 20-30 push ups, and a few other exercises on most days. I’ve lost nearly 25 pounds, so while I’m not terribly fit, I’m getting there. Yes, I know I have terrible form. Yes, I know my bedroom looks cluttered. No, I will not show you my pathetic attempts at push ups.

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At least it’s an ethos

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I had an idea for a new ds106 animated GIF assignment titled “At least its an ethos.” It might be much better in my mind than in reality, but here it goes anyway. Take the line from The Big Lebowski “Say what you will about National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” and change National Socialism to a different -ism, like, for example, Veganism. Here is the GIF for you to use as a template to change National Socialism to a different -ism. Now here’s the trick, after that you need a GIF to setup the punchline. So Walter Sobchack is referring to Nihilism in the scene we are quoting when defining National Socialism as an ethos, my idea for this (now convoluted) assignment came from Tom Woodward’s unsettling animated GIF of me eating Roy Rogers chicken back in 2009, which could only lead me to the following punchline:

The veganism is an inside joke because my house is currently being visited by this -ism and things are very tough for me right now

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Assault on Precinct 13 Trading Cards: The Ice Cream Truck

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Here is another addition to the “Movie Trading Cards—now with more animation!” assignment. Sorry for the dark subject matter of this one, but John Carpenter’s vision of urban gangs and thug life in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) was even scarier for me then his vision of the lunatic slasher in Halloween (1978). Interested in doing this assignment for ds106? —check out the tutorial.

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The Dead Zone Trading Cards: The Hockey Game Vision

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Just finished up my Animated Movie Trading Cards tutorial, and I figured I’d share my most recent creation that was made alongside documenting the tutorial. It’s inspired by the mad genius of David Cronenberg’s early films. This is one of the most disturbing visions Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) has in the film wherein he sees a potential future wherein the kid he is tutoring (along with his friends) falls through the ice while playing hockey. I can see a whole series of these for several more scenes from The Dead Zone (not to mention Rabid, Scanners, Shivers, The Brood, and I’ll throw in Videodrome for good measure) in my future. It’s hard to compete with early Cronenberg, and this image I came across on Tumblr today says it all!

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Animated Movie Trading Card Tutorial

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As promised, I’ve created a tutorial for the “Movie Trading Cards—Now With More Animation!” assignment I did earlier today. The tutorial was written in the spirit of the Animated GIF tutorial I wrote a while back which seems to have proven useful to more than a few people. Man, I’ve been doing assignments and tutorials for #ds106 this weekend, what has gotten into me

You can find the tutorial titled “Creating Animated Movie Trading Cards Using GIMP” on the ds106 wiki.

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Movie Trading Cards—now with animation!

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Inspired by the Sno-Cat movie trading card for The Shining, I started messing around with how I could do this in GIMP. While playing I started to think, why can’t we animate the movie scenes? A few hours later I figured it out and I’m currently working on a tutorial—I already submitted a new assignment for this in the Animated GIF category. There are a few things I need to clean up, like adding the trademark information below the Flamethrower title and making the card look a bit worn. Above is my first experiment with one of my all-time favorite films The Thing (1982)—and if you know the film you know how important the flamethrower truly is!

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Perfect for those Drafty Castles!**

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Castles, dorm rooms, they all are the same! Well that being said, you guessed it, perfect for those drafty dorm rooms means SNUGGIES! Yes, I admit that I am an owner of the As Seen on TV phenomenon, I’ll even do you one better and tell you that mine has my name embroidered on it. What can I say? I don’t want someone stealing my Snuggie! Immediately when I saw the 2 star visual assignment which called for making a GIF showing how tacky infomercials are the clouds parted and a ray of sunshine entered my life. I love watching these infomercials on YouTube and I probably could watch them all day. So I immediately went to the OfficialSnuggie YouTube channel and searched for my favorite part of the commercials, the Snuggie wave as I like to call it. Yes that is right, they are advertising wearing Snuggies at sporting events so that you can do the wave while watching. But my favorite part of this is the one person in the front row not wearing a Snuggie who is shivering and clearly not having a good time. I also enjoy the kid in the front row who is way too early (I may have watched this a bit too much).

So here was my final product, and you can read the long winded way of outsmarting my computer to get the final result below! (This way I don’t bore you with the details)

So here is the story. When I made my first ever GIF I had difficulties downloading the MPEG Streamclip because of something having to do with my Internet Explorer hating my computer. So the ds106 handbook entry on how to make a GIF was useless at the beginning. So I didn’t want to use a website because I enjoy doing things like this on my own, so my mission was to get pictures from the video clip so that I could put them in GIMP. Last time I used iLivid to do this part, however it gave my computer a virus so I shunned it from my kingdom completely and spat on it (figuratively). So I did what any normal princess would do, and just took tons and tons of screenshots of the video while watching it in YouTube (don’t believe me, look at the bottom of the “whole” and you’ll see the video cursor!). Anyway, so I took a screenshot then would paste it as a new layer in GIMP and ended up having 23 layers. Not sure about the ordering of how it would work, I started with the last frame and worked my way forward. So I had to get rid of the rest of my computer screen from the print screen image and simply used the Selection Crop tool which only keeps what is in the selected area and it worked on all the layers which was awesome. So I simply hit the filters, animation, playback and noticed that I had the layers in the wrong order. Lucky for me, GIMP is awesome (sorta), and I simply hit layers, stack, reverse layer order and all was fine and dandy!

Long story short, life making GIFs is so much easier with MPEG Steamclip.

Stay warm, or get a Snuggie!

Princess Karissa

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Bobbin’ and weavin’ (and let the good get even)

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Bobbin’ and weavin’ (and let the good get even), originally uploaded by Rowan Peter.

Bob takes cover behind a car in a Heat themed Gun Crazy GIF celebrating DS106 GIFfest. There’s a lot of crazy gun action in Heat that I’m sure can be sampled for an animated gif. This animated gif sampled a shot from the gun battle in the street scene. I particularly like how the camera mirrors Bob’s movement from behind the car.