GIF – Assignment Bank

WTF is a GIF? Annie wants to show you!

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I had no clue what a GIF was before this assignment. At first I found this assignment extremely intimidating, but once reading Jim Groom’s tutorial on how to make a GIF a few times I felt like I was ready to give it a try. The first thing I did was download all the software I needed. I used YTD video downloader to download the clip from youtube. Then I used MPEG Streamclip to trim down the clip and provide a sequence of images. Finally I used GIMP to create my GIF by layering all of the images together.

“I’m not drunk!’

This week’s digital storytelling assignment was to create a GIF from our favorite movie. At the moment, my favorite movie is Bridesmaids. The GIF above is the scene where Annie gets pulled over and does a little dance for the cop to prove she is not drunk. I thought it was kind of funny that instead of just doing his sobriety test she choose to dance for him and it actually worked.

The process of creating GIFs is pretty easy once you get the hang of it especially when you have a handy dandy tutorial to help you out along the way. After I made one I went straight back to make more!

Like this one!

“I’m ready to party!”

This is the scene on the airplane on the way to Las Vegas. The evil Helen gives scared to death of flying, Annie an “anxiety pill” that gives Annie a ton of energy and she obnoxiously announces that she is ready to party. Annie outburst gets them kicked off the plane.

Annie is ready to party and now that I have made my GIFs, so am I!!

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LLAMA FACE

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Our assignment this week was to create an animated gif image that showcased part of a favorite (or least favorite) movie. If this works, I’m going to build MYSELF a summer home on top of an ancient Peruvian village.

HOLY LLAMA FACE BATMAN, IT LIVES! IT LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES!

And now I know how to make animated gifs. Aahaha. AAHAHAHA. AHAHAHAAHAHAH!!!

Beware, ds106. You have unleashed a monster.

I chose this particular scene from “The Emperor’s New Groove” because it perfectly sums up Kuzco’s character–self-absorbed, a little bit ridiculous and convinced he’s the coolest thing out there. Doot-doot-doodle-doodle-doot-doot-doo-doo, KUZCOTOPIA!

Below the gif I wanted to make originally. I used Jim Groom’s excellent gif-making tutorial for both of these. I had to cut this one down a bit because, for whatever reason, MPEG Streamclip gets all ornery if you try to export a clip that pushes the 1MG mark, at least on my laptop. Laaaaame. Still, I managed to create this wonderful gif from the iconic movie “The Iron Giant.” Meet Dean McCoppin, sexiest and most long-suffering animated character of the late 90′s:

Again, it sums up his character pretty nicely. Chill, down-to-earth, and completely unprepared for the barrage of insanity that’s about to overtake his life. If you grew up in the 90′s didn’t see “The Iron Giant” as a kid you had a deprived childhood. Deprived! Do yourself a favor and go see it. Just make sure you bring tissues for the last part of the film–it’s one of those “Oh God, where did these FEELINGS come from?!” movies.

This assignment was both more difficult and significantly easier than I’d at first assumed. The process itself was way simpler than I thought it would be, but again, I had some serious technical difficulties. Like I said earlier, MPEGStreamClip decided to get annoying on me and crashed a couple of times, and then outright refused to export the entire set of images I needed for the whole gif I wanted to create. I did really enjoy the fiddly bits though–finding the perfect moments to start and stop my gif, getting the timing right, fixing the size of the first one in GIMP. Those little details are things I could spend hours on–and did, actually! But it’s incredibly frustrating when the tools you’re working with aren’t reliable, which is proving to be the biggest issue with my ds106 work so far.

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Creating my First GIF

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I’m just going to say it right now that creating a Gif was the hardest thing I did this week. I did a lot of research on how to do this and downloaded a ton of different software to figure it out. First thing I saw before I even started thinking about how to make my own gif was Martha’s twitter post about first UMW student (I believe the student’s name was Alex Spangler). So I clicked on the link to the blog and read a little about how his made his gif. I also found the tutorial on the DS106 website that I found very helpful: http://ds106.us/handbook/tools/creating-animated-gifs-open-source-software/ The software I downloaded that I actually used was Fastest Youtube downloader, and MPEG Streamclip. What I found most difficult at first was figuring out how to download youtube videos. That’s when I read about Fastest Youtube downloader on the tutorial site. After that it was really easy for me to search for a youtube video to download. After the video downloaded and I saved it I opened up the MPEG Streamclip. I followed the directions on the tutorial to shorten the clip to the part I wanted. I had trouble at first figuring out how to trim, and select in and out of the movie clip, but I finally got it. I then followed the directions on the tutorial on changing it to other formats. I changed the format to different screen shots and then I uploaded them to the website http://makeagif.com/ and then it created my gif for me. It felt really good to me that I figured it out.

So after saying all about the process of how I made my gif and frustrations I had I’m now going to talk about why I chose it. This scene is from the movie The Hunger Games. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/ In a short summary there are 12 districts that every year they offer up one boy and one girl from each district to fight to the death. I won’t tell too much for those of you who have not seen the movie. I chose it because it was one of my favorite parts of the movie. It is when Katniss is saluting district 11, and it is one of the main turning points in the movie that will start a rebellion in the future. I am very happy about how this gif turned out.

make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif

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Creating my First GIF

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make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif

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Handy Set of Guns

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Nicolas Winding Refn’s avant garde movie Bronson is a semi-biographical account of Britain’s self proclaimed “most violent inmate.” This movie was a real step forward in the now renown movie star Tom Hardy (Bane). The flick has TONS of fighting, mumbling British accents, and great ’80s music. The gif below is a loop of Bronson showing of his “skills” that made him famous, something that he very much desired.

To make this gif I had to download two different–but free–types of software. MPEG Streamclip to download youtube videos (its important to get the beta version) and GIMP to compress all the image sequences. There is also a VERY help full video, that walks you through step by step. Here it is:

Hope this helps

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I just happened to be here.

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I mentioned it yesterday and couldn’t sleep last night for thoughts of GIFing Hal Hartley’s Trust. This was easier in Schizopolis in many ways, because Hartleys films are already focused on faces and moments. But, oh… the faces, the moments. In the kitchen this morning, in between coffee and rinsing a quart of hair gel off of Annika, I watched the last 3 minutes of the film and bawled. Schizopolis was our Saturday night party film, the “OMG you have to see this!” film, even though most people passed out or lost interest before the dentist-transmigration.

Trust came on after that, and always ended in tears. My conscious (but always denied) attempt to live in the stilted Hartley language was certainly a contributor to many of friendship disintegrating fights in college. It’s an old film – almost as old now as The Conversation was when I first saw Trust in 1998.

Even as the fashion ages into comedy, there emotional core will shift and grow with you. Here’s my attempt to do some meager justice to this in a handful of frame grabs.

The lines and music under that last GIF add everything.

“Why have you done this?”

“Done what?”

“Put up wth me like this.”

“Somebody had to.”

“But why you?”

“I just happened to be here.”

That’s pop song strength – lines that can grow with you from bleak reflection on relationships into a tear-wrenching reflection on the arbitrary unconditional love of parenthood. They just happened to be there, and I needed them.

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I Believe So Strongly in #ds106

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For a few years, I’ve watched the explosion of amazing film-clip GIFs take over the web. Even as the #ds106 crew churned out fantastic artifacts in class after class, I consistently viewed that as a consumer. Clearly it involves a lot of aestetic judgment and technical skill. It belongs in the “complicated with Photoshop” bucket, aka the “Not for me!” pile.

WRONG! Make art!

So while I know that my craftsmanship is weak, at least I can step it up on a curatorial level. These are all from one of my favorite films, Soderbergh’s cinematic throat clearing excercise Schizopolis!

“I believe so strongly in mayonaise.”

That last GIF is cut from an amazing sequence where Soderbergy runs through a dozen hideous faces in a bathroom mirror, and then snaps back into normalcy in a split second when someone else walks into the restroom.

The other cult gem of my DVD/VHS collection is John Greyson’s Zero Patience. Sadly, most of my immediate thoughts for GIFs involve incidental or pupet nudity. I’m living with a holistic public identity, but I recognize the benefits of keeping the bathouse barbershop trio out of my google results.

Oh, and while I’m at it, have a little Fred Rogers.

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“Turn to the right.” Behold, my first animated gif! …

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“Turn to the right.”

Behold, my first animated gif! This is from the opening scene of Raising Arizona when H.I. is getting booked by Ed. I love the Cohen brothers’ films, and this is one of their best. This is my entry in the DS106 visual assignment “Say It Like Peanut Butter.” Click the image to see a slightly larger version.

I followed various tutorials to get to this done. Jim Groom wrote a good one that gave me the overall process: http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_Animated_GIFs_with_MPEG_Streamclip_and_GIMP

The first steps were to capture the video from a DVD – I used Handbrake version 0.9.6 to grab the section of the movie I wanted. Then I followed Jim’s instructions for using MPEG Streamclip to trim and export the image sequence that you then import into GIMP.

Since I have version 2.8 of the GIMP for the Mac I needed to look at another tutorial to get some of the finer details down – mainly, that when exporting the file to create the gif, you need to manually enter the .gif extension for the file name to get to the animated gif settings boxes to open. This tutorial on YouTube helped: http://youtu.be/HYrzt4hJNJs

TIP! – I found that if I optimize for .gif before I export, the file size shrunk by about half. It is good practice to conserve the bandwidth necessary for others to download or view your images if you can. To do this yourself in GIMP, once you are done and ready to export, click the Filters menu, then Animation/Optimize for GIF. Then go through the regular export process with the optimized images that open in a new window.

Maybe I need to create another now that I know how – just to reinforce the process. Or, a hundred more, to really reinforce the process?

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ds106 Technical Difficulties

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In honor of Jim Groom, who can’t quite seem to keep the H.M.S. DS106 in ship-shape (it’s hard, all of us passengers are always banging on the hull and tossing vital equipment overboard). As the counselor of Bunk House 5 at Camp Magic Macguffin this summer, I thought it be best if I lead by example. For starters, I’ve invented a new camp game, called “ds106 technical difficulty art” and for this week only it’s worth 36 stars! That’s right, 36 stars, which means I’ve topped Mr. Groom’s star count for this week of Visual Assignments. I will gladly add this to the official ds106 assignment repository once it’s back up and running.

UPDATE

I’ve now added this as an official assignment in the ds106 assignment repository, which means I fully expect a whole heap of ds106 technical difficulty warnings/labels/macguffins by the end of the current incarnation of the course. I really wanted to place this assignment in a “free form” sort of category, as you could easily complete it with a wide range of media (especially given ds106radio doesn’t handle images too well last time I checked). In the end I felt a visual assignment would be best because you can create a still, or the illusion of a video with an animated gif (which is what I did above).

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Angry animated GIF

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Is it cheating if my kid helps me with my DS106 homework? He wanted to make a stop motion video with come of his paper cutouts, so we made a test reel this morning, and I thought I’d use the opportunity to sneak in a DS106 assignment as well. The workflow for creating an animated GIF from a series of images is a little different than the tutorials I’ve seen for making a GIF from a movie clip, so I’ll post a tutorial later when I get the chance.