Sometimes You Just Have to GIF Yourself Out of a Jam

I’m thinking of Jerry’s note this morning (happy to see him signed up for Camp Magic Macguffin)

“@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project.

— Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012

With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting slip the time spent creating for class, itself the self-renewal I need as much as oxygen. Seeing Scottlo Warhol his Second Life self in a followup to Leelzebub’s own effort had me eager to try the tutorial.

But alas I am photoshopless until the new order comes in, and that was way more than I wanted to bite off and try in GIMP.

So I went for the next best thing, doing an animated GIF. When I visited the National Cryptologic Museum on Saturday I enjoyed watching the machine that had a computer controlled arm for loading data form a giant circular library system (I cannot recall the name of it), the robot arm seemed to have some good potential.

I shot some video on my iPhone and then loaded it into MPEG StreamClip to do some frame grabs (using the low res 320×240 size). I then used the web based Gifninja site to create the GIF above. It’s basic, and one frame moves a bit more, but I like it, especially the shadowy figure who passes behind.

It’s interesting to note that Gigninja has a new tool (at least since a year more or more ago) for splitting GIFs, might be some fun things to do with mashing up sequences of existing animated GIFS.

This takes me back to my first animated GIF, from December 14, 2011, when I used scenes from Frankenstein to declare ds106 IS ALIVE

It’s almost nostalgic to think of the birth of ds106– I wrote then

So it’s not even place, it’s three weeks out, why are all my colleagues, friends madly in their labs, and doing of all things, retro 1990s techno things like animated gifs?

And so it is with this wild ride that starts next month. It really is under the hand of Dr. Bava, but he is being humble and not wanting to be a mad dictator, but he does have a vision. I was lucky to spend an hour on Skype with Jim, Tom and Martha, just bouncing ideas.

What should unfold will be unlike many of the other MOOC efforts in that it is not hinged on the weekly drum beat drive of the syllabus and synchronous lecture like sessions in Elluminate. There wont be discussion forums (likely). it will be blog based, and very much individually driven. It will be what ever you want it to be- you will be able to follow the structure jim and Martha are doing at UMW as a “regular” class, or you can cherry pick the bits you want to do.

It’s all about a continuous pulse of creativity. Jim is reeally hooked into the notion of The Dailyshoot and Martha has a nifty duct tape and RSS system for crowdsourcing assignments.

My own idea, also influenced my dailyshoot (which you know I love) is that there could be small daily creative assignments available each day. One does not need to do them all, maybe for a class, it would be 2 or three per week. But they would all be small things one could do each do to create something new, maybe a graphic, a fake movie poster, a story played out in Amazon reviews. The thing about Dailyshoot is that it drives you to try new, and challenging, things.

All of these would be things people can do or not, but might feed the larger, conceptual assignments that are the frame of Jim’s previous ds106 courses at UMW.