I wanted to speed up my workflowplayflow 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I notice that prezi is one of the 50+Ways – Presentation Tools listed on the wiki. As I started thinking about Web 2.0 I got caught up in browsing through my own short history of using ‘this sort of stuff’. Recently impress.js had caught my notice, it is a prezi like tool that uses javascript. It is new and only works in Safari and Chrome at the moment. I think that Firefox 10 should do the trick too.
I am not overly fond of prezi although I’ve seen it used to very good effect, but I though it might be interesting to try out impress. impress in which you create the ‘slides’ by adding attributes to divs in HTML seemed a bit simpler to use than prezi. I found a great post that explains how it works: How To Use Impress.Js | Cube Websites Blog.
So rather than think deeply about Web 2.0 I played with impress. The results are not tasteful but I had a lot of fun.
There is a requirement to read and watch both carefully but as I am taking this course a a college dropin I didn’t feel the need to take much care
This is one of those videos/podcasts/blogposts that fire off lots of thoughts as you watch as it hits a lot of nails right on the head. I’ll only lazily touch on a couple.
The video is worth watching by anyone interested in Web 2.0 so I am imbedding it here:
Sounds Good
First thing I notices was the rhythm and musicality of Gardner Campbell’s voice. I’ve been listen to Tom Wordward’s remix A Bag of Gold « Bionic Teaching and used on Radio Edutalk a few times (that was a great idea). Gardner Campbell is a powerful, humorous speaker.
I guess the audience is familiar with the argument addressed, the tension between LMSs and the open web in US higher education. I an not but it sounds like the same sort of argument we have had in UK education between NLEs and WEB 2.0/google/open technologies, between systems set up for teaching and learning and more open and general software that can be bent to teaching and learning. Gardner Campbell defends the open with great humour and the marvellous bag of gold metaphor.
A Personal Cyberinfrastructure
In part Campbell is suggesting Students control their own domain, decide what sort of social software to install and manage it from themselves. As someone who has been doing this sort of thing for a while (here on this blog, personal wiki and a bunch of other stuff) I cn see where he is coming from and love the enthusiasm. I do wonder if it is for everybody. I am fairly relaxed about backing up, losing stuff and the like. I also host with someone who I know well and who has dug me out of a hole or two in my time.
If a student sets up, say, wordpress on their on domain they need to make sure they keep wordpress and any plugins up to date to avoid any wee hacking problems (FAQ My site was hacked « WordPress Codex) that can happen. You also might have to worry a bit about being fireballed or slashdotted if you ever write something the rest of the world want to read (More likely you will be hacked).
These are risks I am happy to take, given my host and the fact that I like playing with this stuff and don’t mind the time spent. If you value your time it might be preferable to head over to wordpress.com. (NB I am just using WP as an example, this blog is not a wp one, it runs off pivotx).
This leads into the though that there would need to be a fair bit of understanding by teachers and time for development if this was extended back into primary & secondary education. There is a lot of positivity about blogging in schools at the moment, this recent wave crested by Mr. Mitchell at Heathfield CPS Blogs in England (see the Heathfield in the News section) and a ton of blog work by the Glow Scotland team. I hope there is an understanding of the amount of knowledge and skill that goes into a good school blogging site, the time and energy needed to keep it going (a lot of support by Creative Blogs. in Heathfield’s case along with Mr Mitchell’s obvious energy and dedication). The pile of abandoned one, two and three post blogs out there suggests it might not be.
43 Minutes In
There is a question from the audience suggesting that this could be started earlier, this goes right primary school territory
there is an authentic version of any concept that can be taught to any child who can read and write. You pitch it to the appropriate level of development and then you keep coming back to it spiralling upwards and upwards and until that magic handoff moment… 45:46
The last section is really powerful pushing the need for teachers to help pupils make the decisions and on how using these techs in school could flow into higher education.
narrating curating & sharing
What learners should be doing.
Danger Edupunk
I have to be careful or it is down the youtube rabbit hole of edupunk videos, mostly of Gardner Campbell debating with Jin Groom, beware the related video…
Standard YouTube License
Be nice if this was a creative commons video.
If I had a bit more time & skill I’d like to popcorn this it would be a great one to some twitter video mashup, perhaps a hashtag could add the tweets as timed comments…
While I don’t think the result is particularly creative or interesting I though the workflow was worth recording.
Easiest way to download the mp3s from AudioBoo was to switch to the RSS feed in safari and right click the MP3 link and choose save as.
Open One file in audacity.
Import other file with File -> Import ->Audio…
Fade out the first sound, as the second was so quiet in comparison I just left it in place. Deleted the section of the first track after the fade.
Bonus Image Merge
As Both AudioBoo, the source of the sounds and SoundCloud, where we were to publish the results, allow you to add a photo I thought it might be interesting to create an image fade to go with the audio.
Here is the recipe I used:
Open first AudioBoo page in Safari, view the larger image.
Drag image onto FireWorks on the dock.
Open second image and drag onto the first image in fireWorks
Drag a rect in fireworks over the second image.
Make it white and give it an opacity gradient.
Select the gradient Layer & the Image below.
Modify Menu->Mask -> Group as Mask
Adjust the opacity of the masked image so that the image below shines through.
The whole process was pretty quick which is quite important as I try to keep up with the daily create.
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).
There seems to be two main components in ds106, one is a freeflow imagination and a willingness to follow ideas. Assignments seem to spring for the participants this one from Yamboat – Lisa’s ds106 experiment.
Although some of this stuff seems to be very light hearted, I was struct this morning how another one Fantasy TED Talks — MISSION: DS106 was picked up by Scott and is going to be used in his classroom as part of a project for his students.
Anyway I though I should try this yam assignment as I was completely at sea about how to start. I first I search the The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for movies with am in the title, but found instead A Star Is Born.
Not being sure about copyright of old movie posters U though this would be a good point to start learning photoshop.the other component in ds106 is increasing skills with digital tools.
Photoshop
The early steps were pretty simple, photobooth myself with hands in roughly the right position. cut out hands with the magnetic magic want (this seems like a nice thing). Cut out Yam.
Next I decided to tackle the background, make a gradient, stick on some stars and spotlights, sounded simple enough. So I drew a rect for the background and then sent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to put a gradient on that.
I am afraid at that point I gave up.
Back to Fireworks
Switched to Fireworks 8. It seems to me, and I may be way off here, is one of the big differences between Fireworks 8 and photoshop is that layers in fireworks can have an area, photoshop they seem to cover the whole canvas?
Can’t day I am delighted with the quality of the work above, I quickly realised that getting things looking the way I imagine will take a bit more time & a lot more knowledge. Ended up doing things I could do quickly, masked the yam hands with my photoboothed ones, drew the suit by hand, dropped a few filters on to try and approach the red glow of the original, guessed the font and hit my self imposed time limit.
Next steps, try to get to step 2 in photoshop before switching, maybe read a tutorial.
) and be able to do the halftone in photoshop.
