Tag: VisualAssignments

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.

Past DS106 O’Clock

Past ds106 0clock

Ad DS106 get underway I’ve found my Daily Create rate has dropped right off. I was doing ok before the course got underway and then it went a bit pear-shaped. I managed 10 DS106 photos and a few dailycreate sounds. I managed to do the odd full assignment but was quite pleased that I already had a blog. This week I’ve really dropped out of the game. I don’t feel bad about not doing any creates but I feel a bit guilty for not paying much attention to other folks work/play. Only managed one comment his week.

Anyway according to Week 4: Photography and Visual Assignments the next bit is to try and do some Visual Assignments so this is my first the Comic Book Effect.

Method:

  1. iSight Photo at lunchtime in the office.
  2. Added clock and watchstrap in Fireworks, saved as jpg.
  3. Cut trace round in photoshop with magnetic lasso and delete office.
  4. Add background from Mr. Blue Sky – bevevans22’s posterous.
  5. Save jpg to dropbox
  6. on iPad move to photo library via dropbox app
  7. Use Halftone to make halftone effect.

I was hoping something of the rabbit from Alice would come through.

I would like to be make a much better watch, (need a bit of time;-)) and be able to do the halftone in photoshop.

I did manage a couple of photoshop tutorials this week, nice short ones from Matt Gemmell,
Etched effects and Subtle UI texture which I found useful. I found another tip here: Splash The Color from a DS106r.

Jim’s Excellent Ted Adventure

Jim at ted

After I saw Yamily Feud | Ben Harwood – DS106 – Spring 2012 I was thinking of the yams dancing at TED, as I already had Jim dancing I did this. It uses Ben Rimes’ ted template and Andrew Allingham’s ds106 radio poster/design.

I’ve also posted this in the ds106 category here but not the default, hopefully this will get picked up by ds106 but not go into my main feed. This will give folk who read ScotEduBlogs a break as DS106 hots up (If I manage to keep up the current activity rate).