Maybe it’s the impeding headless ds106 course coming next month, or maybe it’s just the phases of the moon, but I felt the rekindled urge to experimenting once again with making animated GIFs from a sequence of still photos. This happens in two ways: (1) I anticipate an action sequence, and deliberately take a series […]
Something to unclog the CogDogBlog Blog Clog… both of these were made on the long trip back from Hong Kong. I wish I had talked more to the guy who makes the naan at United World College East Campus in Singapore, or at least, gotten his name. Every day, blissfully, he whipped together these luscious […]
It’s not the blinking blue border that makes me chuckle, it’s the double take of “this is not a joke” combined with a smiley face. I would guess the click also gets you to the place to be the prime ocean front real estate in Mohave County, Arizona.
In August I noted the oddity that you could upload animated GIFs to Google Drive but you could not insert them in any documents. A comment on that post had me re-checking, and woah, you can directly upload an animated GIF anyplace you can upload an image, here is a gDoc with two GIFs I […]
Angela, in dire need to get medicine for her dying mother, makes some unwise decision on the streets of Naples on how to get the 20 lire- the opening bit of the 1929 silent film, Street Angel. I’m watching this movie, well at least the first bit, as part of the Coursera open course on The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color.
In the scene above, she is sentenced by judges who don’t seem to care a whole lot about her or her story, she’s just another on a treadmill, and the guard who brought her in escorts her out. It’s a nice full cycle, perfect for beng GIFfed
Given my previous track record of less than one week duration in Coursera classes, I had already let most of the week slip by before showing up for class. I cannot say I am thrilled at the courser design. The first week has 5 “mini-lectures” each about 15 minutes, in which the professor mainly tells me things I could much more efficiently read on my own. Then he reads to us from a book.
Ouch.
And then there was the first quiz. I might have busted the honor code here, but frankly this is a joke, insult, or just plain _______.
Man these MOOC quizzes are tough. pic.twitter.com/Cjj050h2
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 8, 2013
Frankly, I just skipped this question just to screw up their analytics.
But really, the five week course format is:
If this is the best design Coursera has going, I don’t see how higher education, broken or rotten tree or whatever, even has a worry. I would be embarrassed to paint this as the triggering disturbance sending tsunamis of change out.
But I digress.
This week in ds106 I give my students the ultimate bootcamp creative challenge – to figure out how to make an animated GIF. The exact wording is “from a favorite movie” but that’s just to get them thinking about topics.
Since I do the same work, I needed to step up too- I did two quick demos of GIFfing in GIMP in this week’s Open Lab, so for tonight’s masterpiece I wanted to show some techniques I have been using in doing GIFs in Photoshop.
I chose a subject that could reflect what to do when you get into trouble in ds106 – activate the GIF Signal!
This is one where I do some dancing around with Photoshop layers and masking out all but the essential bits. One benefit of doing this is your GIF files get dramatically smaller since they have to store less data. I hope I can reconstruct the steps!
Today’s Daily Create may have been the hardest one to date- “Use camera panning to blur the background behind a moving subject” – the idea is to use a relatively slow shutter speed to take a photo of a moving subject. If you pan the camera at about the same speed as the subject, you […]
Remember this little busy guy? You’ve seen much of him since the late 1990s? I thought I spotted him today in Canada: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But he just would not move. No more digging. No matter how many times I clicked. It just took a little convincing (and […]
I listen, and read, and listen, and try to make sense of what they are talking ’bout. But those cows just go on and on and on about their MOOcing and making cheese. On and on they go. And go. “…placental, emergent, alienating, enveloping, sometimes thriving, sometimes dead, sometimes reborn…” Whatever. Yawn. Anyone want to […]
No one quite charms it like Frank Sinatra, look at him with his Ronald Reaganish slick poofed hair, here GIFfed from a clip from 1944 in Step Lively. I pulled 3 short segments with MPEG StreamClip, converted to .mov, and used the Photoshop import into Layers to make them each an animation sequence. From the […]
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