So, I made a Gif. I didn’t even know what a Gif was really. But after many hours of frustration and trial and error I made a gif and know what one is. But that seems to be what ds106 is about, learning by trial and error to create something that is interesting as well as a reflection of your unique style.

So this week our assignment was to make a Gif of  a scene from our favorite or least favorite movie. I chose the final scene from Beetlejuice where everyone is happy and getting along and Lydia gets to dance and float. Its my favorite scene from one of my favorite movies, I always wished I could dance and float whenever I got an A on a test. I definitely would’ve gotten more As with an incentive like that. I also thought it would make a pretty nice Gif.

I had originally planned to make a Gif from my favorite movie, Drop Dead Gorgeous, but both the DVD and YouTube methods weren’t working for me. Soo I switched to Beetlejuice, my next favorite movie. Jim Groom’s Creating an Animated Gif tutorial helped me A LOT. I ended up using YTD Video Downloader to get the video off of YouTube because doing it from DVD took much longer than I was wanting to spend. Once the video was downloaded I also used the YTD downloader to convert the file to an MPEG mp 4 file.

Once I had my video converted I opened it with MPEG streamclip and followed Jim’s tutorial at that point. When I got to the point in the video where I wanted to start my GIf I did selectin and then selectout where I wanted my gif to end, clicked trim, and I was almost done. Finally I used Gimp to layer them all together and BAM, I had my gif. 

*One thing to note, if you are using Gimp one thing that kind of threw me was open the first image that you want for your gif first. When it appears in its own Gimp window go to file, open layers and then select the rest of the images you want to use and it will layer them all together for you. 

Although the process was infuriating at times, the final product made up for it. I am pretty proud of my first Gif and may be addicted to making them now. From what I’ve hear its kind of like childbirth, you go through hell to produce it but once its here you forget all the bad stuff because its awesome.