Well, I am now beginning to wonder about John. He does not seek escape. He gives little information and certainly not INFORMATION. Yet he responded to a cry for help from me yesterday in the G+ side of the village. 

Curiouser and curiouser!’ Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).

Somehow I think viewing my giant gif with the hypnotic village font led to John volunteering more information than he intended. 

I downloaded, resized to 400px wide, exported adaptive pallete 128 colours, loss 20% and got 2.9mb. Still quite a hefty gif but the one I d/led was 28 MB! (a sneaky move in wordpress is to put in a small dimension gif and stretch it a bit with css or the width parameter…

And in places he was speaking in code!

A request for information from the resident artist Kathy O led to both of us spilling yet more information. John,

It used to be tumblr liked < 500px width, < 30 frames &  < 1MB size. I think you just got to remember that a gif loads with a webpage, a movie will either wait till click or just load the first bit and play if autoplay. Too many big gifs makes your blog a sluggish boy. 

… and, having spent the evening watching the awesome giant gif (it bears watching for a long time – watch it now, or will you?) I could not help but join in.

And there is an unwritten game gif makers play! Least number of frames preserving aesthetic detail and smoothness 😉 hence play with colours and size as well as frame number. Michael has a rule of thumb for selecting frame per second depending on length. Will find.

Who is Michael? What is this rule of thumb? Will it help our prisoners residents give us more information? What made us blab? Is Kathy O on our side? Why did she resign?

John worked with my giant gif and produced a 2.9MB version that Tumblr rejected as it had been doing with all my previous versions of my giant gifs. He kept viewing it and working with it in his dream lab…

image

…and would you credit it? Here it is at just over 1MB comfy 400×257 and there is more information on his post about his secret recipes to extract information:

Any zooming was due to carelessness;-)
Downloaded your file
Reduced to 2.9MB as per notes
Used a gifsicle script to kill every second frame x 2
Back in Fireworks made frames a bit longer 30/100 sec I’d like to do that in script but can’t figure it out.

He managed to delete almost all the information on my original giant gif and cut to ‘1.1 MB I guess losing too much detail… frames cut to 29.” What did he mean? Losing too much detail? I thought that was precisely the point. Lose detail so they do not get the full information. 

I felt that it was right to make this into a Gif-Collab with jjgifs. I suggested this straight after expressing my amazement at the amount of information he had gotten out of my original gif. I did not think this through. 

Happy to share your credits, we can have a non-alcholic whisky in the Village bar! Sounds like poison:-)

We can share credit units alright, after all we have both been working hard enough to keep our lights on at the village. But the rest of the message? He speaks as if he does not know about ‘the cave’ with real whisky? The village bar? Sounds like poison? Does he mean to poison me? Is he worried I might poison him? Has he been to ‘The Cat and Mouse’?

image

And then resident Ron joined us. He seemed relaxed and cheery enough. He had overheard our conversation. 

He suggested he would join us at The Cat and Mouse game Bar. Or did he meant ‘the cave’ with real alcohol? We all know what happens there and what that alcohol really does to you, don’t we?

I’ll toast virtually on your collaborative success!

Hmmmm….virtually? May be he is not real, Ron I mean. You can’t trust anyone’s information here. Or can you? Then  the village librarian, Mel, also viewed the giant gif and…

@mdvfunes That is awesome. And now I want to etch ALL the pint glasses!

All the pint glasses? Where? Why? Does she have information we need? Does Mel know we can buy those glasses and use them at the bar when we visit? Question is will we just use the glasses or will the glasses be a warning for something more sinister?

I then go to John’s blog and he has clearly been affected by the hypnotic village font signs. He has given out more information. He keeps repeating the same information. Have they got to him? Here is an excerpt.

  1. Open video in MPEGStreamclip
  2. Select in and out points
  3. Trim (command T on a mac)
  4. Export to Other Formats…
  5. Choose Image Sequence
  6. I usually click options and choose Jpeg and 12 frames /second
  7. Export
  8. Right Click on First File in export list
  9. Open in Fireworks
  10. Select all the other images in series & Drag to FW window
  11. Cmd-A Select All
  12. Open FW Frames window, Choose Distribute To Frames from the Window
  13. This creates a series of frames.
  14. Further editing and setting the Export Options in the Optimise Window
  15. Export to Gif

Once again some of it is in code and it requires Fireworks. Only the Committee has access to Fireworks. Too much information.