Inglourious Basterds

Inglorious Basterds

This clip is from the amazing movie, Inglourious Basterds. Although not entirely historically correct (;)), I still love it! I created this GIF from a video I downloaded from YouTube. I then used MPEG Streamclip to trim the scene I wanted to use and exported it. After downloading GIMP, I opened the layers and adjusted the settings. I decided I wanted to add text to my GIF, so I googled how, and after a really, really, REALLY long time, I finally figured it out. It took several tries, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I had to make certain layers invisible, then add the text, and merge the layers back together. Sounds easy right? Well, now it is! I finally exported the final GIF to my computer and it works! Luckily I didn’t have any problems with adjusting the size this time!

The Django Stare

django

This was a clip from the trailer of the movie “Django Unchained.” (LOVED this movie!) I created this GIF by downloading the trailer from Youtube and singling out this section by trimming it in Quicktime. I then went to Photoshop, imported the clip into layers, and adjusted the amount of time it took between layers (0.05 seconds). Finally I saved it as a .gif by going to File–>Save for Web and Devices–>Save.

The challenge that sometimes occurs is getting the file size down to a certain number of MB; if the number is too high, it wont upload anywhere! Mine was originally 3.4 MB, but I turned it down to 1.5MB by changing the size and reducing the amount of colors. (You can adjust all these settings after you go to “Save for Web and Devices”)

GIF Dog GIF

run-dog-run2

Today’s Daily Create may have been the hardest one to date- “Use camera panning to blur the background behind a moving subject” – the idea is to use a relatively slow shutter speed to take a photo of a moving subject. If you pan the camera at about the same speed as the subject, you can achieve a great effect of it being in focus, but everything else is blurred.

I don’t think I’ve ever really pulled this one off before, and my streak continued today.

But I tried.

And that’s the point.

I shot about 25 exposures of Gunner, the dog I am watching. He loves to chase tennis balls, so I tried all kinds of vantage points of tossing the ball and trying to get him to run by my field of view. The first challenge is throwing a ball with my left hand and holding the camera with the right. This was about the best I got:


cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

But the other ones, blurred and all, were interesting because they had a real texture that looked more painting then photo, perhaps because of the background texture of the granite gravel in my yard. I had two of them in sequence, and flipping between them in Aperture like a flip book, I heard that whisper… “make it a GIF. Do a GIF”.

So what you see above is just a two framer. it was kind of jerky with the darker background and the top, so in the second frame, I turned on the lower layer (which was the first frame), and started erasing out the background top of the second image, so more or less, the background stays fixed. It still feels herky jerky, but in two frames it does capture the motion of a dog chasing a ball, all in som abstract land of fuzzy details.

I could not really find an animatedGIF assignment that fit, so I am sort of turning Hurry Up and Wait inside out to be Hurry Up and Run