mbransons – Assignment Bank

The Good and The Friendly

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“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?)

Making the GIF File Size Smaller

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:

to take out a bunch of the frames
to use the same frames moving away from me as I used in looking towards me
to make it into a black and white one
to make the dimensions of it smaller (to 600 pixels wide, which is good for my WordPress, plus that Tumblr).
to fiddle with the GIF settings on the way out of Photoshop (type of, dimensions, dithering percentage, number of colours)

Some things that I did that made the GIF a bit bigger again (but better)

to add in the double take, which meant more frames in the GIF but also more story.

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.

Clean Up On The Porch

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 (!!)

Click on the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers palate with the Command (Ctrl on PC) key down to make the dancing ants around Clint’s existing self
Use Select >> Modify >> Contract (3 pixels) to make the ants dance in a slightly smaller perimeter
Use Select >> Inverse to select everything OUTSIDE of that slightly decreased perimeter, which is basically the white outline stuff that you don’t want.
Use the eraser over the dancing ants to basically remove all of the pixels outside of the slightly reduced dancing ants perimeter.
Deselect everything and maybe tidy up any little white bits that might still remain, but there weren’t any.
Repeat for each frame that you need to get rid of the outline for (all of the ones that you want to use).

ENJOY!

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Slow Motion Spill on the Party

For Week Two: Audio Week of the Prisoner106 digital storytelling course, I poked around in the Audio Assignment Bank looking for some new tasks that I’ve not attempted before. Rather than just looking for some generic tasks, I set myself the goal of finding assignments that I could apply specifically to the context of The Village.

The first such task that appealed to me was Audio Assignment 1423: Make it 800% Slower, submitted by Michael Branson Smith (@mbransons). His example of a Bieber song slowed way down (but without a change in pitch) produces a bizarre and surreal result. It seemed to me that taking something from The Prisoner and changing it up might be a fun challenge.

Wanting to ensure a radical difference between the original and the transformed sound, I have selected the “Party Dress” song that appears in Arrival, as it has a very upbeat and cheery melody. You can give the original a listen here:

Looking to keep the audio work simple, I launched Audacity and imported the original file.

First Attempt:
My first attempt (not reading the complete instructions for the assignment) had me attempting to apply a Change Tempo effect of -99%. That promptly caused Audacity to hang. Arg. Clearly increasing the length of the audio file that significantly would take a lot of processing time. (The file would have gone from 137 seconds (just over 2 minutes) to 13795 seconds (230 minutes). Yeah. A bit long.)

Second Attempt:
For my second attempt, I took only the first 30 seconds of the song, and paid closer attention to the stated length of the resulting transformed file, selecting a Change Tempo factor of -90. This caused the original 29.86 seconds of extracted audio to expand to 298.61 seconds. This processed just fine, and resulted in this interesting audio.

The Change Tempo effect at this magnitude clearly introduced an interesting “chop” to the music.

Third Attempt:
For my third attempt, I applied only a Change Tempo factor of -50%, which effectivly doubled the clip to 59.72 seconds. The theme was noticeably slowed, but still easily recognized.

Fourth Attempt:
For the fourth attempt, I again applied a -50% to the third attempt, and around that time looked back at the instructions and saw reference to the “Paulstretch” effect. I applied that on top and suddenly had something quite different, and without the “chop” of the Change Tempo attempts.

Fifth Attempt:
For the fifth attempt I took the original 30 second file and applied the Paulstretch effect directly, with the default stretch factor of 10.

Sixth Attempt:
To see what might happen with a second application of the Paulstretch effect, I again applied it on top of the previous attempt, and obtained this as a result.

Comments:
Each of these attempts is unique. The results from the second attempt (Change Tempo -90%) and PaulStretchxPaulstretch (at factor 10) produce two remarkably different results. It would be interesting to continue to play around to see how other effects in Audacity can result in significantly different sounds. There is documentation here about the Audacity Effects Menu and the Effects, Generators, and Analyzers. Clearly, there are a lot of different products that can be made from one initial audio file. This assignment is an open invitation to continue to explore the wide range of transformations hiding in the Effects menu. That could make up a whole course alone on Audio.

Which of the 5 results do you like the most?

GIFfight Trek Transporter

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Well, everybody was doing sparkle clothes for this GIFfight, so I decided to do sparkle heads.

“GIFfight Trek Transporter” animatedGIF by @iamTalkyTina

If you know Star Trek, then you know who the sparkle-heads are.

Plus, as one of my 2014 Non-Resolutions, I am not wasting time making GIFs work for Tumblr. MBS probably knows how he can post this to the GIFfight tumblr in a nice big size without me making it a small one.

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Riff-a-GIF: A Kind of Stopwatch

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So Brian Bennett (@bennettscience) sought out what Star Pulse ranks as the best episode of all The Twilight Zone series, A Kind of Stopwatch and proceeded to select a great moment from the episode to use as the basis for a GIF.

And as I looked at it, and studied it, in my mind’s eye it suddenly appeared as a two-panel GIF, and the challenge to RIFF-a-GIF was suddenly upon me.

I know that MBS has done some eloquent multi-panel GIF work with coordinated inter-panel timings — but before today, I’d not yet really risen to that challenge. The closest I’d come, I think, was the instance when I took two consecutive camera shots from This Island Earth, and put them together to create a synchronous GIF. Did I ever post it? (Looks like I didn’t. Along with most of my other GIFs from that movie. There’s another project I have to finish.)

As I got into this one, the nuances became more and more important. Like limiting the movement of the chopper body. Like having the appearance of the passing of time while the chopper blades weren’t moving. And then having the appearance of the same passage of time while they were moving. So pacing and rhythm became important. And then the clouds were moving with the rotors, so I worked to sort them out. And then making it look like Patrick McNulty was having a manic kind of fun messing with time. When all was said and done, I was happy.

Therefore, I submit for your consideration:

“Drive the Chopper Pilot Nuts,” synchronized two-panel animated GIF, by aforgrave, from “A Kind of Stopwatch.”

I think this fits into the @cogdog‘s Animated GIF Assignment 859: Riff-a-GIF assignment as well as @iamTalkyTina‘s Animated GIF Assignment 920: From the Twilight Zone, and Beyond …”

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Dear Professor Oliver. . . Do we need grades? (VIDEO-Commercial)

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SamsonsBlog Webdate: 11112.1

As some of you may recall, Professor Oliver made a bold claim that struck our fearless leader, Michael Branson Smith, with a case of baldheadedness: As MBS noted, “He seems a bit radical but apparently he believes students are able to learn on their own, without the professors’ lecture and without assessment. Is he saying students don’t need to go to college? Shouldn’t receive grades?”

I decided to give an answer- I think its pretty obvious after you WATCH THIS VIDEO.