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

 

 

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.

DS106 Radio Bumper Dub Number two

I love audio, but am fairly scared of music making. I am a bit of a klutz musically, can’t clap in time or keep a tune.
I’ve already created a couple of bumpers for ds106: Jim Says, Listen to the LoDown and DS106 Confusion. both relied on music from someone else, one a GarageBand loop the other a steal.

This time I though I might step up and make a noise. Given the lack of musical talent I decided to try a Magic Garageband production.
This allows you to make some ‘music’ by choosing a genre and playing with the variables (instrument styles). I did this for a while and then passed it on to the ‘real’ garageband interface. There I chopped it down to a very short segment and added my voice. Some effects added to the vocals. Then I dropped out a few bit to give it a dubish feel.
I ended up with this:

I quite like the announcement feeling from the brass. I made a quick edit of the ds106 skul and crossbones to make a skull and trumpets.
My GarageBand screen looked like this:
Screen Shot 2013-09-19 at 21.48.56
The number two in the tile comes from the fact I ‘saved as…’ at one point where I did’t want to lose something that sounded better than nothing.
The text plays on the idea of ds106 being open, I am more of a ‘romantic socialist’ than a business man. I am also thinking of ds106 being play rather than work.

Flicking a Five Card Story


Five Card Story: leaving

a Five Card Flickr story created by johnjohnston


flickr photo by dwtno


flickr photo by Serenae


flickr photo by bionicteaching


flickr photo by katerha


flickr photo by shareski

 

Thro the fence,

A mossy climb,

Deeper.

Leaving the city:

Into a cleaner space.


This week it is suggested that we try a Five Card Flickr story, I took a run at it yesterday.

As I clicked trough the activity, I kept getting ideas that would turn away as I loaded another set of cards, instead of going with the flow I restarted a few times. Better perhaps to just pick up the cards as they are dealt? I didn’t end up with much of a story.

Today I though I’d post it and my mind turned to styling the code provided a little, it then wandered onto maybe making a slideshow, the result is above.
I started off by adding a wee bit of css to add a frame/border round the photo.
You need to use the text/html editor in WordPress (similar in other systems too) to paste in the code from Five Card Flickr, I edited a bit in a text editor first as this is easier than using the blog editor.

First I wrapped the paragraphs containing the images in a div, putting:
<div id=”5cards”>
Before the first p tag and:
</div> after the last.

I then added a style block:
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
#fivecards{height:320px;width:500px;} #fivecards p{text-align:center;; }
#fivecards img{max-width:500px;max-height:300px;border:solid 1px;padding:10px;box-shadow: 5px 5px 2px #888888;margin:5px} #fivecards a{color:#000}
</style>
This gave the images a border and a shadow.

U
I then needed some JavaScript to sort out the slideshow.

First I need to hide all but one of the images:
div4search=document.getElementById('5cards');
var someas = div4search.getElementsByTagName('p');
for (var i=1; i < someas.length; i++) {
someas[i].style.display ="none";
};

Next I need a timer to hide the current image and show the next one.

I found a nice timer class: Object Oriented Programming with JavaScript : Timer Class – Daily Coding which looked as if it would do the trick.
So added the code for the class to the post inside the script tag.
I then added a timer_tick function which will be fired every time the timer ticked:

function timer_tick(){
	document.getElementById("div1").innerHTML =index;
	var someas = div4search.getElementsByTagName('p');
	for (var i=0; i < someas.length; i++) {
		if (someas[i].offsetWidth>0){
			someas[i].style.display ="none";
			if (i==someas.length-1){j=0;}else{j=i+1;}
			someas[j].style.display ="block"
			break;
		};
 	};
}

This is not very elegant, instead of remembering which photo is showing I just run through them all and the one that is visible is the current one. If it is the last I show the first, else I show the next.
I added this to the script block.
The other thing I did was to take the javascript and run it through Minify Javascript Online this put it all one one line. I think you need to do this in wordpress or the editor messes up by adding p tags in the middle of the script.

Not a particularly good way to approach this in a general way, but a nice wee problem for pushing my babysteps javascript a bit. I often wonder if there show be a wee bit of htlm/css/javascript in ds106 and I frequently use messing about in this way to avoid the main question;-)

A beautiful face

Part of week 2 in the headless ds106 is to Say It Like the Peanut Butter.

Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.

I’ve done a few of these and made a wee tutorial last week for doing it with Fireworks. At first I had another dig through blade runner and La Belle et la Bête, but wasn’t delighted with the results.
Then last night I went to the movies to see The Great Beauty, which was a beautiful movie in all sorts of ways. I was a fan of Toni Servillo from The Consequences of Love and Il Divo and this increased my admiration. So here is his beautiful face, ripped from the trailer on youtube.
I duplicated the very short segment and reversed it to hide the seems. The gif started out a over 2mb and I crushed it as much as I could, eventually resizing down to 360 pixels. I am going to scale it up in the html here.

beautifulface-360