Author: John

Get Carter Animated Movie Poster #DS106

Get Carter 480

Another DS106 assignment

Animated Movie Posters Pick a movie poster and animate it.

I am still trying to play along with the spring DS106 course. for the first couple of weeks I was keeping up this week I’ve let it slip, I don’t think I posted a Daily Create once. It seems much easier to do them all than to pick and choose, once you miss a couple it is easy to keep on missing them. The previous week I had managed to do a wee bit of commenting but this week I’ve only made a couple. Lots of other things kept getting in the way. The fact I am involved in Ed Tech Creative Collective and trying to keep up with Code Year(only 2 or 3 weeks behind) is a fair excuse.

The other thing is that this poster took a lot longer than I expected. If I had figured out the layer logic first it would have been a lot quicker.

I’ve also noticed that my feed, as this is not a wordpress blog, has not being playing nicely with ds106, the posts show up on the home page but assignments and tutorials are not being pulled to the assignment pages. @mburtisis going to try my feedburner feed instead, so hopefully this post will show up in the right place.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit of about the similarities and differences of ds106 edtechcc & codeyear but I think I’ll podcast those later this week.

Movie2Gif

Sherlock gun

I am reusing an old post as I though it might do for a DS106 Tutorial.

I’ve used this application for both creating gifs from short sections of movies and form video footage shot on my phone.

Last year I was following some of the DS106 fun and playing with animation gifs. Instead of using photoshop or the like I fell upon the command line application
Gifsicle which works very well indeed on OSX (and is available for lots of other platforms) Gifsicle is © Eddie Kohler.

I wanted to speed up my workflow playflow for messing about in this way and though of SuperCard, my favourite mac application. I’ve used SuperCard to create a simple application (mac only) that will, load a Quicktime compatible movie, grab a short selection of frames, and create an animated gif with a few mouse clicks. The SuperCard bit grabs the frames and then used the gifsicle app (which it contains) to create animated gifs.

I’ve tested the application only briefly on a few different macs (10.4, 10.5 & 10.6 or tiger, Leopard and mostly Snow Leopard) and it seem to work. On the old G4 10.4 machine there is a wee bit of lag grabbing the frames, but it works out ok. Update I’ve made a new build that works on Lion (2012-02-14).

There are very few features, the application will grab 10 frames and you can choose to grab them every 1-20 frames. It will export a selection of these 10 frames and allows you to do some simple colour reduction.

Here is a screencast:

You can download Movie2Gif from my dropbox, it is a rainy afternoon project miles away from a polished bit of software but might be useful/fun for someone.

I’ve found the odd .mov file that will not play in my application, opening it in QuickTime and exporting to iphone format seems to fix these.

If you Movie2Gif and give it a try, let me know how you get on, if it gets any positive feedback I’ll do a bit to improve it. Please send any suggestions, bugs etc to me.

Colour Splash

Another quick DS106

Color splash is a technique to emphasize details- you remove all color from a photo, and then restore original color to a single object, e.g. a green apple on a table. Think of the Girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List.

After watching Video Tutorial: Splash the Color : neverthesameriver I had another wee play with photoshop. A little of which is beginning to make sense.

Color Splash

The DS106 Tunnel of Gif

Photo It Like Peanut Butter — MISSION: DS106

Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minimal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff.

Yesterday I saw My Animated GIF Day by Ben and thought a wee bit about his driving gif. His method seemed a wee bit dangerous so I decided to you the iPhone iTimeLapse app to grab my journey home last night. I could then get stills to make an animated gif. I’ve made a few but was not delighted with them. Today I took some more footage including some going through the clyde tunnel. This was hampered by the fact my phone holder dropped off the windscreen so I only got a wee bit. It makes quite a nice gif.

tunnel gif

I created the gif using the wee app I made as a front end to the Gifsicle commandline tool, Movie2Gif while watching a previous episode of DS106. I found that it did not properly play the movies from iTimeLapse so I had to re save then using QuickTime first.