I’ve been having quite a lot of fun with animated gifs recently. Mariana Funes @mdvfunes posted a method developed by Michael B Smith for making gifs from fast cut bit of video.
Mariana’s post: The Altered State Gif Technique gives the details.
I’ve been doing some experimenting around this. First I just googled fast cut examples to get a couple of pointers, Requiem for a Dream fitted the bill. I’ve not seen the movie, but:
Aronofsky uses montages of extremely short shots throughout the film (sometimes termed a hip hop montage). While an average 100-minute film has 600 to 700 cuts, Requiem features more than 2,000.
Whenever the characters use street drugs, a rapid succession of images illustrates their transition from sobriety to intoxication. In this scene, Harry and Tyrone deal drugs and Marion uses cocaine while she designs clothes. The speed of the footage and the cuts alternates as the characters become intoxicated and sober.
Made this a good choice.
I was particularly interested in Michael’s idea of using a very few colours, without dithering, this both reduces the file size and helped ensure
the results were surprising and visually interesting
Rather than giving high fidelity.
Using the Requiem trailer from youtube, I sliced out a quick gif. I then experimented with the number of colours when exporting: requiem gif tests. By the time I had hit 16 colours the give was quite dull, brown being the main colour:
At that point I recalled editing the colours on the Firework, optimise palette by hand before, and gave it a go, this resulted in the gif at the top. I think that reflects some of the movies concerns, drugs, and hallucinations quite nicely. I’ve also styled the gif to be a bit wider than it is here which give even more of a pixalated effect which does no harm.
A nice contrast to the ds106 Assignments: Say It Like the Peanut Butter perhaps where:
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 guess I should submit it.
Finally I made a few psycho gifs using a variation of the idea, slightly tinting and changing the speed for a few gifs, this happened to be the 106th post on my gif tumblr!