The color is back in my life. I am not sure why are how. Perhaps it will always be a mystery…
I could not remember how to make a gif when I started my work on the Muppet GIFs assignment and was struggling when I decided to take a look at the post I made about gifs earlier in the semester. I used that as a guide, downloading this video with KeepVid, trimming it with MPG Streamclip and creating the gif in Adobe Image Ready, choosing roughly 12 frames and setting them to display at a rate of 0.1 seconds per frame.
I forgot that I needed to adjust the timing and just saved the gif using the default speed in Image Ready of 0.03 seconds per frame, which is much too fast for this assignment.
After doing Color Splashearlier in the semester, I really wanted to revisit it for this assignment.To do this, I opened up Gimp and imported my photo. I then created a new layer which was a copy of my photo and changed the saturation on that layer to 0%. This made my top layer grayscale. I then took my eraser tool, made it as small as I could and carefully erased around the inside edge of what I wanted in color. Once I was satisfied, I finished erasing the inside edge of my top layer so that the only part of my photos in color were one object in each photo.
I also modified the instagram page of the original photo with Hackasarus for fun even though it was not part of the assignment since I wanted to give the photo some context.
I went to the doctor to try to figure out what was wrong with me. Was it my mind or had all color drained from the world? Was I going crazy? Was I going blind? Was it my Trouser Weasel playing tricks on me?
I started by using KeepVid to download the clip as well as Dama May by Kevin MacLeod as my music for the clip and title cards from Michael Branson Smith to use in the piece.
I imported the clip into iMovie, where I muted the sound track and changed the saturation of the clip to zero to make it black and white. I then made title cards and inserted them throughout the film at appropriate points, which was honestly the hardest part of the process. As I was working on it, I decided that the end of the film would be the first signs of Neil’s recovery and chose to make the last bit of film after the dream partially in color by changing the original clip’s saturation to 51%.
I wanted the white rabbit to be travelling and following people in order to find the right Alice. So, to create this part of the story, I went to Google and searched “the white rabbit.” I found a few decent images of the white rabbit (which you can find at the very end of this post) then I began looking for backgrounds to put him in.
This was a bit more challenging because I wasn’t sure the significance of the photos yet. Should they be of Alice’s family? Since he’s trying to find Alice? Should it be more like Where’s Waldo and how he just shows up in random places?
I found a bunch of photos that I thought looked “historical” and that would also be easy to include the white rabbit. Easy meaning color, graininess, etc.
I took each of the photos and tried my best to adjust the the color of the rabbit photo to match. It as so much harder than I thought! I almost got desperate at one point and wanted to load them into Instagram…
But, I couldn’t stoop that low. I had to do this with filters on Corel Paintshop Pro. It just had to happen.
Below is a screen capture of what the page looked like pre-X-Ray Goggles:
Once I got my hands on it with the X-Ray Goggles, I changed a few things to create the story for Alice.
I edited the page to be Alice’s post looking for the white rabbit. She had taken a photo of the white rabbit, which she tried to link on the site.
I had originally chosen a r/AskReddit page that had over 2000 comments on it, and then I realized that it would probably be better to find a page that allowed me to change all of the comments to make it more realistic… so, obviously, I decided the best option would be to find a new post that had only one or two comments. I figured, also, that Alice’s post probably wouldn’t have been very popular on the subreddit.
There are only two or three slight hints as to the identities of the people who are in the post. I didn’t want to be all obvious because most people on reddit are anonymous.
I went to bed last night and everything was ok. The world was at peace, the twins were happy and sleeping well and David was at my side. This morning I woke up to gray…
The first part of NPH and the Search for Color is a Six Word Memoir, stating “My life was once in Technicolor”
I chose the Equalize color function, feeling that it gave me the most Technicolor look stylistically, before going on to add text.
I used the Handwriting- Dakota font since I thought it looked most like a Doctor’s handwriting and chose to move the word “once” to the right side of the image to emphasize the fact that Neil woke up to an awful surprise.
I saved the image as a gif in Gimp as I find that it leads to the least skewing of the graphics and uploaded it to Flickr.
Nine and a half years ago I was adopted by an adorable, loving yet sometimes aloof puppy, Harper, Mr. Friendly, Harper-Harper-Bo-Barper, my Handsome Boy. Yesterday he died. With him, a piece of my heart and soul feel like they died too.
When I walked into the home of the family that had been fostering Harper, I met a few really nice dogs, but one was so sweet, calm, and confident, even at 12 weeks old, that I knew he was the dog I had been looking for.
Let me tell you something only a few people know. I got a dog (actually 2, but that’s a story for another day) to use as a tool. Yes, a tool.
I was depressed, pretty severely, in counseling, but refusing medication. If I wasn’t working I would stay in bed all day and all night, or just mope around the house; I was a terror for my roommate, making her life a living hell. I didn’t care about anything, my friends, my house, myself. I just wanted it all to end. I wanted to NOT FEEL LIKE CRAP every day. I could see no way out.
I decided that instead of self-medicating, I should figure out a way to change things. After thinking about it, I thought to myself, “What is going to make me get out of bed?” The one and only thing that came to my mind was a dog. A dog? Well this is going to sound strange, but I knew I wouldn’t want a dog peeing on me, my bed or the floors and to combat that, I. WOULD. HAVE. TO. GET. OUT. OF. BED. I got a dog so that I could mentally/emotionally/physically get out of bed. Actually, I brought home two.
The boys (what everyone who knows them, calls them), Harper and his brother, made it okay for me to walk around the neighborhood again, smile at strangers again, make new friends, hold my head high, and laugh again.
I have been lucky to be surrounded by a loving family and have married a wonderfully supportive husband, but sometimes, just sometimes, I can tick them off; that’s expected, we’re all human. What Harper gave me was permission to be me again, nothing I ever did or said could make him upset with me, angry at me, or even cold towards me. While we had dogs growing up, and they were fun, I never experienced that special unconditional love for a dog and from a dog, until Harper.
So, yesterday morning, after a tough surgery the day before, a good nights rest, and fighting the good fight, his body said enough is enough.
Enough will never be enough for me, but I realize that if this life we live is a delicate balance between black and white, yin and yang, birth and death, summer and winter, wanting and needing; the proof of the immense pleasure he and I shared can be found in the heartache I am feeling because of his passing.
I thought it would be pretty comical if President Abraham Lincoln posted a Craigslist ad for help on how to work modern technologies, so I went for it. The process was pretty simple. First, I set up the craigslist to be for New York City, as that’s were ol’ Abe is located in the story. I then went to the “technical support jobs” section and found this ad:
I then opened up this html file with textwrangler and started messing around with the page. I started the page off with a play on the Gettysburg Address, and went from there. Here is the link to the final product: LincolnAd.
For the fourth piece of the story, I chose to do the Say it Like Peanut Butter {***} visual assignment. For this assignment, you had to take a clip from a movie or show and turn it into an animated GIF. This assignment is going to show Sabrina’s revenge on Libby. In the fourth assignment, you saw that Sabrina planned and plotted her revenge but now, you can actually see what happened.
I used MPEG Streamclip to trim the clip and get exactly the section that I wanted to use and GIMP for actually creating the GIF. I remember doing these GIFs wayy back in Boot Camp but I still had to refer back to the handbook page on creating GIFs. I forgot exactly how big and how to export the file as a GIF. I kept on clicking “save as” and you need to click “export” to correctly save the file.
Even though this is the end of the semester, I still had to watch this video because I needed help with embedding my GIF into WordPress. That tutorial video is super helpful and simple.
