I happily resume my role in ds106 as an open participant. With the new season starting in September at UMW being based on The Wire, I finally have the right reason to watch the whole series again (one of only two I’ve ever watched start to end; not only am I a MOOC dropout, I bail on TV too).
Paul Bond is off an running with perhaps one of the most perfect GIF loops of Stringer Bell counting money, I felt driven to dust off the GIF from movie clip chops. The Wire of course is so many strong clashing characters; a scene I remember the most was the conversation between Bunk and Omar on some train platform- here just trying to capture some of the intensity
It’s a bit “fat” at 1.2 Mb, and I dropped the GIF to 64-colors, which gives it kind of a posterized look. But that was after a lot of frame chopping already, and there is so much in the contortions of Bunk’s rant, and the eye dropping stone listening of Omar. Like much of The Wire, more is communicated w/o words than with, as that last exclamation by Omar as Bunk walks away.
It’s all about the looks between them.
I have much of seasons 2-6 on a hard drive; I was into it the year I moved to Strawberry, and lacking TV signal, I was hooked enough to buy the episodes on iTunes. But before cracking those open, I did some YouTube searching, and with some irony found the scene, but dubbed in Spanish as Bunk se enfrenta a Omar
I actually found it more informing to just watch the scene w/o knowing the dialogue; this is like a video activity I did when I teach where I have students study a scene w/o sound to focus on the camera work, and then without the visual to focus on the audio. There are at least 6 different camera shots here switching, and some with unusual framing..
There is a slow dolly to have Omar emerge in the opening
The front view with Omar and Bunk obscured behind a wall and the foreground grass:
The profile of both men on the bench, again with a pole prominent in the left:
And not to mention the back and forth of an upward angle on Bunk as he stands up to lecture Omar, and Omar’s minimal responses.
To make this I downloaded from youtube using the Best Tool For the Now, SaveFrom.net — as a browser extension it puts download links right into the YouTube page, or an embed, or a link. I tried to use MPEG StreamClip to get my smaller segments, but the controls are pretty much useless in Mac OSX 10.9. Instead, I loaded the clip into QuickTime Player, and used the Edit --> Trim feature to save a clip (this is pretty much doing with MPEG Stream Clip does, as it saves a copy).
From there I imported into PhotoShop using File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers. I did it at limit to every 10 frames, and started deleting frames to reduce it down. The “spit” at the end was quick, so I ended up importing again, just that segment, at limit every 2 frames, and still ended up with about 6 frames to work with.
From there, it’s a matter of playing with the interframe timing, some are 0.2s and some 0.5s to change the pace.
There are few things finer than ds106 GIFfing.
Do you feel what I’m sayin’? (I was always sure Omar said that line, but can never seem to find it, oh well, I love it)
PS If I have mangled any Spanish it’s because of my reliance on Google Translate
