VisualAssignments – Page 2

Who Loves Ya, Cory?

So I am looking at Headless Weeks 13 & 14: ximeR and M@$#up, there is a lot of stuff to watch, read and think about. There is also Alan’s Triple Dog Dare for one is:

Remix a photo of Cory Doctorow

Which I’ve done before.

So I end up on my usual ds106 pattern, browsing through the assignment bank until I circle back to the first one (Cory). By this time I’ve forgotten some of the details, but I am busy dreaming and googling.
I start with Yul Brynner, and veer to Kojak. I’ve now forgotten all of the details and heading for a Troll Quotes. The idea in my head is a wonder, perfect photocopying, I’ve forgotten I don’t know photoshop and a searching flickr for a background.

Lower Manhattan Skyline, New York, NY, USA | Flickr – Photo Sharing! by Flickr: MD111’s Photostream
used under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

My imagined assignment is now better than perfect. Then it is all cloud filters, saturation for the brown ‘kojak feel’, a bit of a mask on Cory to try and get a drawn feel.
By bedtime I am delighted, in the morning I realise I am probably missing the target on a few levels, driving to work I decide to post anyway, maybe I could get a story out of the making?

The quote: Quote by Yul Brynner: We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone….

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

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

One Way to Photo it Like Peanut Butter

A quick screen cast showing how to make an animated gif for the photo it like peanut butter assignment:

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 minmal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff. See a bunch of examples at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/02/10/photo-gif-peanut-butter/

from: ds106 Assignments: Photo It Like Peanut Butter

Same procedure for the ds106 Assignments: 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.

So this is a double tutorial;-)

I like Fireworks for giffing as it clearly separates layers and frames in different palettes. I’ve not used multilayer frames in this video, but it is handy for other gifs.

The video does not really show how to opne the different palettes, I didn’t plan it that well. I added text to explain a couple. Basically I used the Frames.
, layerers and optomise palettes. All open from the Windows menu.

Unfortunately Adobe is discontinuing Fireworks. I am still using the one that comes with CS3. It works fine on mac 10.8.

Although I’ve done a fair number of these to assignments I have no idea why peanut butter is involved.

Wiggle

Today August 2013 GIF Challenge #11: Get Your Wiggle on based on ds106 Assignments: Wiggle Stereoscopy

There was a bit of chat on twitter today about using a mobile for the upcoming ds106 headless course. I’ve used an iPhone and iPad for a few assignments and a fair number of daily creates so though this might be one t otry. I started with my new fav giffer app, 5SecondsApp, but didn’t get far. It hade worked well for a couple of seamless gifs recently but I could not get a good wiggle. The then turned to giffer pro which did a better job for me.
The whole wiggle process is describe well by Rockylou today.
Photo 12-08-2013 20 17 25

Here is one with iphone photos edited in Fireworks on my mac.

jug

PS 1, there is a nice site: NYPL Labs : Stereogranimator for playing with this stuff with old 3D images from the stereograph collections of The New York Public Library.