for dropping in on and tumbling by DS106
The bar was set rather high for August 2013 GIF Challenge #3: DS106 Promo Poster by Talky Tina. I ended up making a few attempts, here are two:
I am not happy with the choice of gif or design but I though the idea of poking a wee bit of fun at Learner Styles was ok.
A few more ideas crossed my mind, one was to make a triple troll quote, but I didn’t attribute the quote.
The Body is mine, the fireball from an old Blade Runner Gif I made and the quote is from Van Morrison
Yesterday my friend Tina told me she liked the way I gave Jim some music to dance to. I though I’d show her, and anyone else how to play a sound when a gif (or anything else) is clicked.
I made a quick gif of a scene from Tina’s work that shows what a committed and brave actor she is, I believe she does all her own stunts.
click the image to hear the soundtrack.
Video grabbed from ▶ Talky Tina — Living Doll — Two Minute Twilight Zone Project — Season 5, Episode 6 – YouTube just a screen capture using ScreenFlow.
A few frames extracted with MPEG Steamclip, pullined into fireworks and exported as a gif.
I then searched Freesound for a sound of someone falling down the stairs that was cc licensed: Freesound.org – “Falling Down Wooden Stairs.wav” by Benboncan.
In Safari I viewed the source of the page, searched for .mp3 to find the link to the low quality preview:
www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.mp3 (I took the http:// off here as wordpress embeds if I do not)
I knew that Freeview provides previews in mp3 and ogg so that we can play then with html5 and do not need any plugins (Firefox on mac needs ogg other browsers handle the mp3, this is a moving target). the ogg files have the same url but with the .ogg extension.
I started this blog post, switching to the Text (html) view in the editor and put in an audio tag:
<audio id="tinastairs" preload loop>
<source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
<source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
</audio>
If you are going to do this more than once on a page you need to give the audio a unique id here I used tinastairs.
You could copy the block of code above, replacing the id and the urls.
Update: The way wp adds paragraphs, it is best to take out all the line breaks when you use this.
This addes the audio to the post, it is preloaded, and will loop when played, but it does not show on the page (I’ve left out the controls parameter).
I then added the gif in the normal way. In the text view this gives me:
<img src="http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tina_stairs.gif" alt="tina_stairs" width="420" height="260" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-854" />
I added a snippet of JavaScript to play the sound when the gif is clicked:
onclick="a=document.getElementById('tinastairs');if(a.paused){a.play()}else{a.pause();}"
As a parameter of the image tag like this:
<img onclick="a=document.getElementById('tinastairs');if(a.paused){a.play()}else{a.pause();}" src="http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tina_stairs.gif" alt="tina_stairs" width="420" height="260" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-854" />
You can see I use the id of the audio tag, again you could copy this code and use a different ID.
Hopefully Tina will love this?
I used the same process here, with different IDs but exported mp3 and ogg from Audacity, after recoding the sound from youtube.
After yesterday I can’t get JA out of my head.
click the gif to hear what Jim is dancing to.
I hope I managed to shroud Jim is a couple of wisps of cloud, and knocked dow the brightness and contrast in some sort of effort to match tone.
The Music is not quite JA but it is CC.
Using File:JA Crown-Of-Creation.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and TalkyTina’s improvement of my template which I snagged here: August 2013 GIF Challenge #2: Dancing Jim All Over the World | I am Talky Tina
Audio: Freesound.org – “psy trance.wav” by mechwarreir2 Creative Commons — CC0 1.0 Universal
As the fall DS106 approaches TalkyTina ups cogodg’s challenge to the gif.
So in my head Grace Slick is now singing ‘lose your head’ and of course I lost my head to ds106 a while ago, and there is zen idea of having no head.
Gif put together from spare body parts, the ds106 radio logo (not sure who to credit for that one), a galaxy from the morgue file using Fireworks CS3.
Just some layers fading in and out.
I’ve done a fair number of Multi-Frame GIF Story Assignments and I really like them. One thing I do not like is having to have each animation at the same rate and with the same number of frames. You can work round this by ‘freeze’ framing a particular frame or several frames, but I quite like the idea of the gifs all going at their own rate and not moving in sync.
After I’d giffed a few from Perchance to Dream I though I’d try a slightly different approach. I’ve uploaded all the gifs, but instead of inserting them I created a bit of html to show the gifs.
I’ve put the code into an external page too, if you want to have a look: perchance_grid , where you can easily view the code.
Perchance to Dream has been my favourite episode so far. I’ve not left enough time to write much about it and I’ll be stepping out of the ds106zone for the next week, which means I’ll miss audio week. I might join in the odd daly create, but if not I’ll be back in the zone next weekend.
