CogBlogged Tagged ‘VisualAssignments2’

What could be more key and symbolic of the magic of Oz than the red slippers that Dorothy snagged from the Wicked Witch who got mushed by her flying house? The fact that Dorothy always had the magic but did not know it until sparkly Good Witch clued her in. This GIF is done for the classic ds106 Say it Like Peanut Putter assignment 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 knew an animated GIF of the shoes would be part of my new story. So I used PwnYouTube to download the video for the “No Place Like Home” clip as an mp4 I opened this in MPEG StreamClip to snag just the 2 second segment of the shoes flopping. I opened it in QuickTime player to then save it as a [...]

Ok, Jim asked me to up the game, so I am going to get more particular about frame selection for my animated GIFs. We are working on the ds106 kickstarter awards for people who requested an animated GIF in their honor. I’ve got the task to do the one for Boone Gorges, who requested something “bad ass”. My first neuron went to maybe something from Mad Max, which I might still do, or maybe Tyler Durden who was the baddest because he wasn’t…. never mind. I went to Samuel J as Jules Winfield, those mutton chop sideburns quoting Ezekiel… I’m really happy with this one! Jules just keeps ranting, but the little hand/head motion of the scared kid in the foreground make it complete (IMHO). Plus, by doing these by hand, working with your fingers in the mud and not just using some fricking iPhone app, it comes in at [...]

I cannot shake it, there is something magical about experimenting with animated GIFs. There’s a lot to be said about isolating the motion of the eyes- I’d previously played with using video frames in doing the one on Ayn Rand’s eyes, because her eye motion was so mesmerizing in the film. You might have to look at the image above to catch the movement. Less obvious is better in doing this stuff. I’ve also been interested in wqrking to make the animated gif less herky jerky, more subtle, even with the way the one of Edward Norton’s character in Fight CLub sits there almost motionless, and then jerks awake. Hence the experiment above, but done with only 2 photos. I’m enjoying finding ways to capture the raw material for an animated GIF with my own camera. I keep the camera in the mode that shoots continuously when the shutter is [...]

Lastly, and I really ought to just finally go to sleep– today’s photo adventure presented three scenes that turned into animated GIFs. I am finding that keeping my T1i in the mode the shoots successive shots, I can get a series of photos suitable for GIFing. First up, while waiting for the bored barista to make our coffee, I spotted this lonely accordion player, and the scene was made funny when a woman popped out of a door next to him. it is only 3 frames, and maybe it would be better to isolate the central motion, but the jerking of the guys in front makes it comical to me.

Day four of the Fort Myers (FL) to Strawberry (AZ) CogDog Express. It’s been drive, drive, drive. Today was the stretch of Texas from Dallas to Amarillo, and the dry southwest land I know and feel just slowly, every slowly merged – the big sky, the sparse plants, the space- big wide space. With a population density approaching zero I cannot help buy wonder about the creatures that tirelessly pound away at the land, over and over again. Like giant metal dog monsters, they just cried to be animated GIF-like. What do they say to each other? You know what Freud said, sometimes an oil well is just an oil well… These are done in the same manner as my other photo animated GIFS- Taking a series on multiple shots on the DSLR, bringing into PhotoShop with the file menu script “import into stack”. spread out on time line, crop [...]

The animated GIF still motivates me. I made two more today from photos that just cried out “GIF me! GIF me!). This first represents the loneliness of the road, it just goes on and on and on and on… I’d notice a large number of these log trucks heading north on US 19, and spotted one coming my way when I was stopped for a photo of a decrepit hotel. I snapped 3 photos, mainly hoping one might work to be interesting. Looking at them in aperture, the repetition cried “GIF” to me. The method I used was more or less same as I did for the window water reflection project I fund something was missing, that I really needed the last shot of the truck way down the road… or not at all! I took the first and last ones and mode copies of both layers. I then started [...]

Flags make for great animated GIFs- I spotted this set of flags in Cookesville Tennessee, a US flag at half mast and a MIA flag. The first one is only 2 frames, the second 4. I was not even planning to GIF these, but the camera was in the mode of rapid fire shooting. And the light was good in the morning. These were done in same fashion as my other photo gifs- import as stack into Photoshop, use its alignment option, and then monkey around in animation window.

While in Nashville, I noticed these interesting series of reflections from the Cumberland River in an office building, literally twinkling in the windows. I wondered if I could take a series of these to create an animated GIF. I used the camera in multiple shot mode, but still felt like the camera moved slightly (it did). In Photoshop (CS5), I used the option Files -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack.. This places each image in its own layer. I chose the option to “Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images” From here I crop to take care of the off alignment of edges, and resize to 500 pixels wide (the size of my main blog column). I can then use the Animation window to set up the timing, and preview the effect. I then Save for Web & Devices using the GIF option, and here we go: I like the [...]

This was purely an academic exercuse (that typo is intentional) in learning how to import video into Photoshop and use animation and masks to create animated GIFs. I just used a random video I had laying around in the Storybox… First turn on the music… dance music Get up out of your chair and dance along: FYI for those WordPress bloggers uploading your animated GIFs, be sure your original file size is the one you intend for your blog- if you end up with one of the other files WordPress makes when it resizes images for different options, you will lose the animated features in the GIF.

He got there first. Todd Conaway was onto the combination of the MacGuffin Alternative movie ending combined with last year’s craze activity of animmated GIFs. I decided to take an animated GIF I did last time around from the classic card game between Harry Gondorf (Paul Newman) first out hustles Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) in a poker game on the train. Given I had my originals in a photoshop file with layers, I simply made a text layer of the final line, duplicated it seven times, and then did a progressive removal of text and merged to the original layers to overlay the MacGuffin line. Anyone can churn out a pile of MacGuffins in a few hours, but who can out dog the Animated MacGIFin?