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My assignment was to make a gif from my favorite movie. My favorite movie of all time is Uptown Girls… I need to watch it again soon actually.
Uptown girls is a movie about a woman that needs to grow up and a kid that needs to learn how to have fun, and how they help each other understand the world. This gif is a few clips from the ending, a dance recital where Ray (Dakota Fanning, who I feel like grew up really quickly between this movie and twilight) does a dance dedicated to Molly (Brittany Murphy).
Some back story: Molly’s dad was a rock star that died in a plane crash. She had her inheritance stolen from her by a financial advisor and had to find a job, which was babysitting for Ray. Molly and Ray struggled to understand eachother from the start and Ray (the grown up little girl that she was) fired Molly. Molly then had to auction off all her fathers famous guitars, but with a change of heart Ray has Molly’s ex-Boyfriend buy the guitars to use in an “I’m sorry” performance done to a song Molly’s dad wrote for her. This is obviously the super short version of the story, but the part I like most is that Ray looks like she is having so much fun, finally! I love happy endings.
I made this gif by:
Voila! This is my GIF from the lovely movie “Mean Girls”. It is when Regina George gets hit by the bus. I choose this movie because it is honestly one of those movies that you can just quote and everyone would know where that quote came from (“You go, Glen Coco!”) I choose this scene specifically because the first time you watch it, it shocks you. To get this scene I went to Youtube and searched “Mean Girls”. I found a clip labeled “The Best of Regina George” and knew this would be in there. I downloaded it using MPEG Streamclip, as the tutorial on the DS106 page says to do, and clipped it using “select in” and “select out”. Then I saved it and took it to GIMP to edit it (I actually added a motion blur to this GIF). Honestly, the toughest part was downloading the software and figuring out how to make it “move” in my blog! For the I googled how to embed images in WordPress blogs and found the answer (you have to keep it full sized). And there it is!
Link to clip:
Link to tutorial:
http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_Animated_GIFs_with_MPEG_Streamclip_and_GIMP
Link to WordPress on how to embed GIFs:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/images/
Scene: Dumbledore falling after Snape Kills him.
Movie: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
First off, I’d like to thank Jim Groom for his awesome tutorial which made the process of making a GIF go ever so smoothly. It was step-by-step with screenshots and links to all the cool software(Fastest Youtube Downloader, MPEG Streamclip, GIMP) to use. I would recommend everyone to check it out, whether you’re in DS106 or just making GIFs for fun!
As for my clip, not only is this one of my favorite movies, but it is from my favorite SERIES of movies. Harry Potter has been a part of my life since 1999 when The Prisoner of Azkaban book was released. As a young kid, I was drawn to the cool looking covers on J.K. Rowling’s novels and decided I should read the first book of the series, The Sorcerer’s Stone, before starting the third book! Well, who knew that 13 years later I would have read all 7 books in the series and watched the 8 movies hundreds of times? If you’re reading this, chances are, you are a part of the generation that has grown up with Harry Potter. If you haven’t read or seen the movies(like my parents), go ask a friend or go to your local library and check them out!
A short summary of the clip: Dumbledore is the Headmaster at Hogwarts(Principal of a magical school) and is the only thing standing in the way of Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters (the antagonist in the series and his followers) from killing off all non-magical beings in the World. Voldemort is weak(literally and figuratively) and assigns one of his followers, Draco Malfoy, to kill Dumbledore. When he chickens out, Professor Snape follows through with Voldemort’s orders and kills Dumbledore.
You’ll notice, I didn’t mention Harry Potter once in that summary. Want to know why the series has his name in the title? Go find out for yourself like I did! It will hopefully take you on an exciting adventure and encourage you to read/watch the whole series over and over again!
Making a gif proved to be one of the most frustrating things for me. For some reason or another I cannot grasp how to make one. I tried many online sources and all proved to fail me. I tried to find photoshop, but wasn’t willing to spend the money on it. I finally came across the tutorial (HERE) to make one. It took a few tries and after hours of work I thought I had finally gotten it down. Turns out, I can’t figure out how to make it move on this post, but if you click on the picture it will take you to my gif. I can’t seem to get it down perfectly, but I can say it definitely is not due to lack of effort on this project. If I can figure out how to make the perfect gif definitely expect an update!
On a happier note, I love the content of my gif!! Finding Neemo is possibly one of my favorite movies. It never gets old to me! I love the under-the-sea content of it. I feel every time I watch this movie I see something new! It’s such a colorful movie. The sea turtles are all time favorite characters. And it could be due to the fact that sea turtles are some of my favorite creatures or they make me laugh every time. Whatever it is I think they make a great gif! 
The Avengers! If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s amazing. I loved it and laughed so hard when I saw this scene.
So, we were given this assignment. I’ve never created a .gif before and had to do a little bit of digging before I finally figured out how to make one. I don’t have photoshop, so I had to resort to a website called MakeAGIF which is actually REALLY handy. I hope that we are aloud to use this site to create our work? I had the video file that I wanted, and I took screenshots with VLC and then uploaded them and then it created this gif!
I really enjoy this particular clip because it is funny but at the same time makes me think of how I felt when I was first told to create an animated gif. My brain felt like Loki’s body at first. These sorts of things are a bit daunting to me when I have to do some research and figure out how to do something that I’ve never done before and then create it. I’m really glad that I got it done though because I thought it was a fun process! I’m sure I’ll find an easier and more efficient way to produce a gif as the semester progresses.
So far, every assignment that I have done for this course has been one that I enjoyed in the end. I can definitely see though how people say that it takes time and to not procrastinate. I’m trying to get everything done as early as I can so I can go back and edit it later on in the week if I need to before I actually submit the assignment.
One of the current ds106 video assignments challenges us to return to the silent era:
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form of the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track.
To complete this, I looked at several clips that could be used. I started by looking at trailers, as suggested in the assignment. I considered Jaws, Forrest Gump and Pirates of the Caribbean but I found that the trailers either contained too much talking and not enough action or jumped from one scene to the next too quickly to provide enough context. So, I decided to look for a purely action sequence. Since my previous assignment featured Quentin Tarantino, I figured that I might as well return to his work. I found a clip from Kill Bill Vol. 1 that someone posted to YouTube that already contained two fight scenes. I liked the idea of combining this modern, dark, samurai-type of film with some dixieland music. This incongruous combination appealed to me!
I have worked with iMovie quite frequently to document school events but rarely played with many of the features. I was able to easily convert the clip to black and white and sped up the film to produce what I hoped would look like a silent movie but the image still felt too crisp. I decided to Google some advice and found iCreatemagazine.com which I immediately added to my Flipboard! It offered easy to follow tips for making a silent movie look and, I’m hoping, will have a decent feed to follow. One tip that I found there suggested that I should not accept the default of 30 frames per second but instead reduce that to 24 to achieve a jerkier motion. It also explained that the Aged Film effect would add those vertical lines one sees on old films. However, since I had sped the film up, these lines were not visible. I decided that I should speed up the film and make it black and white and then export it. I could then re-import it and add the Aged Film effect. Worked like a charm!
My original clip was 10 minutes in length. I doubled the speed to seem more like an old movie but, at 5 minutes, it still felt too long. I am hoping that the further two minutes that I edited out are not too obvious. This is where I impressed myself most: I was surprised how seamless the final version appeared! I took out a good chunk of the first fight scene (more obvious) and several sections (mostly amputations) in the second. This allowed me to keep the video to just 3 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised with how the scenes still flowed from one another.
Only the Organic Main template seemed appropriate for a silent movie but the iMovie Titles are a dead give-away to the fact that one has used that software. I wish that there was an easy way to create your own. I suppose that I could have created my own and saved them as jpegs and then inserted them as photos. Maybe next assignment…
Music was a challenge. I really need to do some more audio work. I started to fool around in Garageband but didn’t find the sounds that I wanted to easily create some dixieland music so I opted for the built-in iLife jingles (Gelato, Vino and Tigris). I added these three themes to my movie and left it at that.
I may have taken some liberties with this task but I did learn more about iMovie than I knew before… if nothing else, the quick keys for splitting a clip (shift-command-s) will come in very useful in the future!
I need to remember to take some in-progress screenshots to add to these posts. In the meantime, enjoy Silent Bill.
My last all-nighter project in DS106!! 
I can’t believe it’s over. I will miss it. All of it. The community, the friends I’ve made, my team mates. …and Jim Groom, who taught me so much, but above all, who let me see what I’m capable of if I put my mind to it. The class is over but #4Life goes on.
My last all-nighter project in DS106!! I can’t believe it’s over. I will miss it. All of it. The community, the friends I’ve made, my team mates. …and Jim Groom, who taught me so much, but above all, who let me see what I’m capable of if I put my mind to it. The class is over but #4Life goes on.
Video Assignment 376: Return to the Silent Era
Ever since I worked on this assignment (twice) two weeks ago, I haven’t been happy with it. I had been thinking about how I could make it look more authentic, more like a real silent film.
And then this occurred today, as if someone read my thoughts. Hmm… Anyway, from there, I found this article, and then I was finally led to Ben Rimes’ (aka @techsavvyed) brilliant silent-film -ized Back to the Future video. He was gracious enough to list all of the tools he used to make the video in his comments section on YouTube, and I got inspired.
So… here is my 3rd and final attempt at this assignment:
I think Jim Groom will be happy that Sean Connery is no longer in the video, but that was NOT because I wanted to cut him out. I just ended up cutting all the scenes where people were talking, and he ended up getting cut. Oh well.
I downloaded the “Silent Movie Title Card” from this site as Ben suggested. (THANKS, @techsavvyed!!!!!! for inspiring me!)
I googled and found the font and the music as follows:
You can see my previous attempts here and here, but I’d advise you not to. haha.