Playing on the ds106 design assignment “Movie Trading Cards,” which basically asks you to make a trading card for a scene from your favorite movie. With this assignment we are asking you to take it a step further and animate it!
Hello. I am Talky Tina. When I was young, in the early years of television, a lot of my friends worked in televions programs that pushed the boundaries of imagination, sight, sound, perception, identity, belonging. The time was fueled by the paranoias and fears of the fifties, sixties, and the cold war. Oh, it was grand to play with my childhood friends back then!! Spurred on by advances in sciences and technologies brought with the advent of nuclear power and the space race (we had such great toys!), programs like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits provided wonderful experiences, and insights into humanity (and friends!).
Somehow, as a child of that era, I have found that I can only see in black and white. But that’s okay, because a black-and-white sequence makes for a smaller GIF anyway! Can you help me relive my childhood (and perhaps your childhood, or that of your parents?) with some nice, friendly b&w animated GIFs From The Twilight Zone and Beyond? Try to capture all of the really nice childhood moments! You know the really, really best and funnest parts!
I will be watching to see your assignments, so don’t let me down, friend.
Our loveable animated GIF has come a long way, baby, since the obnoxious “under construction” signs so prevalent on web pages back in the 1990. They were SO last century. But let’s bring the idea forward!
Make yourself your own, sophisticated personal animated GIF to show whenever you might be messing around with the gears, or the innards, or the unicorns, or with whatever you’ve got on the treadmill to keep your blog humming behind the scenes. And give yourself an extra bonus point if you find and use someone else’s CC-licenced image. You need to do the attribution and all that good stuff to claim the point. Model appropriate blog maintenance, great design aesthetics, and a conscientious web-citizenship sharing ethic all at once.
Got it? Are you up for it? Are you ready? Go! Be sure to share your result. We aren’t likely to actually see it in use — ’cause we all keep our blogs up and running most of the time, and only poke around in the inner workings in the middle of the night ;-) — so make sure to show it to us when you’ve got it done.
To-do lists can help us get stuff done. An animated gif of your completed to-list is evidence of your awesome ability to get stuff done.
1) Use software on your computer, an app on your phone or an old fashioned pen and paper to create a to-do list of tasks or things you need to complete.
2) Start a task or thing on your list. Complete it. For each completed task or thing, take a screen capture or photo and then continue to work through the list.
3) Once you have completed each task or thing on your list, compile your screen captures or photos and then publish as an animated gif.
4) Share your achievement with the world.
It’s often unpredictable! It frequently changes rapidly. Every once it a while, it’s downright spooky! Yes, it’s the weather, man! Whether you are a weather nut or not, take up the challenge to GIF something interesting with the weather. Maybe it’s a weather map? Maybe it’s a weather storm? Maybe it’s a weather news-caster-person, man! But find something cool, and give us something real to talk about when we talk about the weather!!
Search the murderous world of Alfred Hitchcock and find a particularly horrifying moment to be preserved in an animated GIF
Jim created the excellent Animate 2600 GIF assignment. Now it’s time to riff on it and remix & mashup classic 8-bit video games from the Atari 2600 era. Mashup two or more different games into the same animated GIF.
Explosive action, athleticism, skill, strategy, teamwork, triumph and repetition are some elements that make up sporting activity. Choose a sporting activity and then make an animated gif that represents one or more of these elements.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a GIF must be worth a few thousand words. So a collection of related GIFs must be equivalent to a novel, or a script, or something truly powerful, right??
Tell or relate a story (or link up key ideas or themes from a movie) by assembling a number of animated GIFs into a storyboard or framework. Credit for the idea goes to Jim Groom, who suggested it.
Everyone loves cows. Especially when they are animated as GIFs. They can be your garden variety Jersey milk cows, or the Massively Open Online kind. Just make them moooooooooooove.
