A Transformation

So I’ve not giffed much recently. Last week I decided to join in with the ds106 offshoot, Giffi.us A Collaborative Story with He had to run for his life, this then helped with the design assignment from two posts ago.

Collabogiffing – Community – Google+

Given a bit of free lunch time time today I was musing on the idea and wanted to make a couple of illustrative gifs. A quick search on youtube for transformation struck black and white gold: The Transformation – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), what was great about this movie was the lack of a moving camera.
The_Transformation_Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde_1941
First I grabbed the transformation itself, then another couple of gifs. All very straightforward, crop to short selection in MPEG Streamclip (i an o keys are your friend), export to stills and pull into Fireworks.
In Fireworks, select all layers and distribute to frames.
run_hyde

The second two gifs I wanted to make look so I faded the figure in over the first couple of frames. To do this I copied a segment from the last frame where the figure was on the first. Pasted that over the first frame to hie the figure there. Duplicated the first frame a couple of times, making the ‘patch’ less opaque each time. Minimum work for quite I nice effect I think.

bridge

fade-in

 

 

Every Story Tell a Picture

For the Headless Group Radio Show I’ve been working with Rochelle and Seth.
I think I originally proposed this:

Thinking of stories with little narrative, without conclusions, that put a picture in your mind. Perhaps stories from your family, your people with little detail… Perhaps some other idea…

But our discussions roamed far and wide. We worked out the story on a google doc and a couple of skype calls. It turned out the stories and ideas we had in mind chimed in all sort of interesting ways, family, cross generational stories, memory which you can hear about after we put the audio up. We will be playing it live at 8:30pm UK time, 24th August, round about lunch time across the USA. I’ll leave any discussion of the content and concepts till then.
The last time I did this task, we worked in a very different manner, all on a google doc, no skype, then members of the group recorded segments and Mike put them together within a overarching narrative with voice links as if we were all elements of a radio show, ( Impending Zombie Apocalypse).
This time we all produced voice fragments, but it was left to Rochelle to put these together, when you hear the show I think you will understand why, we rely on a wonderful piece of music by Rochelle and her daughter and Rochelle’s musicality.
The way the audio came together we felt breaking it up with a commercial in the middle would not be a great idea, so decided to create separate ‘commercial’ for the piece. Here is mine.


commercial-jj
I put this together with GarageBand from short snippets of the audio from our show. Like the show it relies on Rochelle’s rendition of “Comes a Time”, it also uses an idea Seth introduced on skype of voices emerging from a crowd, the crowd created by layering our voices, this appealed to my liking for dub.
garageband-comercial

Trading Paradis

Again I’ve not been keeping up with ds106, over the last couple of weeks the only thing I’ve managed to do is collaborate on the radio story. I’ve not even been reading other folks posts I am afraid. I did notice Giffi.us a Collaborative Story that is an offshoot of ds106 with folk taking some gifs for a walk and creating a story. Today I joined in with a quick gif from Les enfants du paradis.

As I had some time in my hands, I went back to design week and had a quick troll through the assignment bank, finding Movie Trading Cards

Design trading cards for your favorite movie. Grab a screenshot from a film of your choice to create a trading card in the spirit of the classic Star Wars movie trading cards.

astonishing-beauty

And an animated gif one:
master-of-mime

So I guess more than one assignment, but I am not counting stars.
Les enfants du paradis is a wonderful movie, I’ve not watched for a few years, I’ll have to make time for that soon.