for dropping in on and tumbling by DS106
I guess this is ds106 Assignments: Say It Like the Peanut Butter.
I am not going to describe my methods, as I’ve done that before.
Tools: Handbrake, MPEGStreamclip, Fireworks.
I’ve not really touched base with others in the village, I am now 4 episodes in, head in a spin:
Wondering if I am going to be left hanging, or is there a chance of escape?
I am caught in a rut, need a new plan
Be Seeing You.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I see another round of DS106 has started, I have too many balls in the air at the moment to do more than watch it flow through my reader. Then I saw Week 2: Bootcamping It:
This week, we’re also going to ask you to do your very first digital storytelling assignment from the ds106 Assignment Repository. The Repository is a Web site filled with new media assignments that we’ll be using extensively this semester. Your first assignment is “Say it Like the Peanut Butter,” in which you’ll be creating an animated gif of a clip from your favorite (or least favorite) movie. You must also follow the instructions on the assignment page to ensure that your contribution shows up on the Assignment Repository site.
So I though I’d do a wee gif just for fun.
This is from Betty Blue, when this movie came out (1986) I just loved it, didn’t like the 2005 directors cut which added far too much nonsense.
I’ve not dared watch the movie again in case my old brain doesn’t like it so much.
In this scene Zorg and a friend are making and drinking tequila slammers, tequila rapido, and laughing like manics. As I remember the movie, this went on for quite a while.
I downloaded the flv from youtube, opened in in Quicktime and copied a wee section. Opened this saved movie in Fireworks 8 and deleted some frames. I also auto levelled the images as it is a fairly dark scene. I am guessing I’ve added something to a plain QuickTime install to allow it to open flv files.
I am fond of animated gifs, but haven’t had time to make any. After seeing Jim Groom’s Master of the Flying Guillotine Animated GIFs I went over to YouTube to see if I could find any kung fu. Kung Fu Hustle – YouTube which I had watched in the cinema. Very much a comedy. I downloaded the movie and grabbed a few gifs:
I didn’t spend much time on these, but there is something fascinating about animated gifs.
More after the jump: