This next phase of GIFfest 2012 returns to the movies, and the westerns, with some slices of Hang ‘em High, the 1968 western notable because it was the first one of Clint Eastwood’s westerns that was not filmed in Italy.

I’ve already noted GIFfed some of the continuity problems in the opening credits, now let’s get to the action. Right in the opening sceme, Captain Wilson, the leader of the mob that wrongly accuses Clintwood’s character Cooper of murder, issues the “Hang “em” command that puts the plot in motion.

Yes, that is Alan Hale Jr pitching in with the bad guys – how can the Skipper do that? What will Gilligan think?

Brought in to Fort Grant, Cooper is released by Judge Fenton, who makes the offer for him to become a Marshall. The Judge lectures Cooper not to take revenge but to let justice play out (which translates here to hanging by the law)

This GIF had a lot of frames! I was trying to keep a lot of the back and forth of the conversation, so I dropped the GIF down to 8 colors to give it more of a cartoony look.

Of course Cooper turns out to be a more than capable Marshall, he eventually runs into a situation where 3 dudes have stolen cattle, and one of them, Miller, turns out to be one of the crew that hung Muller in the beginning. the crime’s victims want to exact revenge the old way, but Cooper insists on bringing them in, which means, marching them 3 days across the wilderness (including scenes ar White Sands, new Mexico).

I liked this back and forth between Cooper and the guy who wants revenge and Miller, played with a sneer by Bruce Dern. A lot of back and forth glances here.

Remarkable Cooper heroically brings in the 3 prisoners alive to Fort Grant, but becomes disgusted at the spectacle that the hangings have become, especially since he feels the 2 younger rustlers do nto deserve death.

In this scene near the end, Judge Fenton again goes back and forth, and utters the phrase “hang ‘em high”

Because if the law didn’t hang them, the next posse that goes out will say, “Hang ‘em and hang ‘em high, there’s no justice in Fort Grant.” And if there’s no justice in Fort Grant, Cooper, there will be no statehood for this territory.

So we have a juxtaposition of what hanging means here in the western frontier, what is the difference between the group think that hung Cooper in the opening from a tree, and the more massive public event in the end, except that it is sanctioned by the court? Hanging is hanging, right? And is there one justice more just than another?

I went a bit more extravagant in these GIFs,m aiming for multiple clip segments, and thus ended up with some bigger files (.5 Mb+). It’s still fascinating to me to isolate the scenes and action to a series of frames. I will slip this one in the Multi-Frame GIF Story assignment.

“GIF ‘em and GIF ‘em high”

What to GIF tonight? I was recalling a few photos I took of something in West Texas I spotted on my trip home in December. Then the lightning bolts flew, so thanks to Rowan Peter for the idea on my Who GIFs to include some Pete Townsend Windmill Powered GIFness

I had a series of 10 sequential shots of these windmills in motion:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

At the same spot I had done a Cinegram one, playing with freezing the rightmost tower and making the others move in a fun but not so useful for generating electricity fashion

From my series of photos, I imported them all into Photoshop as a Stack. In the animation palette, I converted the layers to frames. By examining the rotation, I was able to find 6 frames that did a smooth repetition, and deleted the rest,

I used this clips of Pete Townsend’s windmill guitar work from Youtube

I believe this was the footage of the Who’s last live concert performance at Shepperton Studios that was used in the film The Kids are Alright, the windmilling happening at the end of Won’t Get Fooled Again. (I am hoping a proper Who scholar will set me right).

After converted the downloaded video to a.mov file, I imported this into Photoshop via File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers at maybe every 4th frame. In the animation palette I searched for 6 frames that would work well as a cycle (it might be two). I then selected all frames from the Pete file, used the Copy Frames command from the animation palette window. Over in my Texas Windmills, I selected all frames, and used the Paste Frames command from the animation palette window and the option to “Paste Over Frames” which superimposes Pete on the Texas windmills.

By linking all of the pete frames, I aligned his chest with the hub of the front most windmills, resized him to fill the frame more, and then dropped the layer opacity to 55%. It was still a bit square and I felt like the background windmills were a bit hidden, so I applied a feather edge layer mask to Pete’s action.

Shazam! Another Rock ‘n Roll GIFtar hero.

Sure, the Oxford American Dictionary made the verb “to GIF” a word of the year, but they fell short– it should be noun, adjective, adverb, maybe even present past participle of the year, too.

Yes, it’s the peak of ds106 GIFfest.

And I did not even get close to sending out real holiday cards this year. So here is my GIFfy GIF greeting I GIFfed as a way to reflect on the travels an connections in 2012.

See it in almost full sized animated glory (2.5 Mb)

This monster GIF includes 100 photos I chose from my flickr stream, with special people and places from 2012 (and if somewhere I likely left you put, sorry!). And I count this for the ds106 GIffest GIFMas Card.

It actually works great as a repeating recycling of 2012. In perpetuity.

I managed to just about cover North America with people and places I got to see this year, and even this is just a smal snapshot of the year. Just paging through the archives (can you do this on those other shabby photo sharing sites?) was a neat way to scroll through time and distance.

It was pushing the limits of Photoshop to process the full sized GIF, and the colors are a bit off with the 128color palette (the source PSD is 23 Mb). It took a bit of hand processing to make them sequentially appear. I had fun doing it, which to me, is my own Starfleet Prime Directive.

As the year of 2012 rolls to a close, its last month full of numerical palindromes the world did not end in a Mayan prophecy (but our own crazed society gave it a good effort), let’s do it again!

A lucky year awaits. See you there.

LATERS: I got the silly idea to send a personal email note to the people in the photos here. I now have a list of 55 people to contact, some of them pictured 3,4,5 times, one special one 16 times!

Time for a little bit of Rock and Roll GIF-action (“I can’t get no…”) for the ds106 GIFfest, this in response to the Rock ‘n Roll ‘n GIF call… actually a few different music action sequences from the BBC documentary on the Who’s Quadrophenia, Can You See the Real Me?.

Besides the retrospective perspectives fro those who were there, te film has some short performance segments from both their Mod days in the 1960s and the early- mid 1970s when the band was performing Quadrophenia in concert.

First, we have some windmilling Young Pete Townsend, powering the chords to “Can’t Explain”

Much of the old performance portions in this film have a lot of zooming and uneven camera handling, so I ended up working with rather short bits.

Next we have some old and young John Entwhistle, him recalling with horror when the band got their “mod” hair cuts:

And who could be more GIF-able than the wild flailing drumming of Keith Moon? This is a double segment from the 1973 performances, with the second one Moonie showing his dramatic intonation while singing “Bell Boy” (Townsend’s remarks on how he dealt with Moon were priceless):

And last we have… “Who are you?” “Roger”. “And Roger where are you from…”

This one is my favorite, for the overlaying of 1973, Big Hair, Look at my Chest Daltry over his mod-dressed 12960 version, The alignment of their body language was perfect!

GIF ‘n Roll with Never Die!