AnimatedGIFAssignments – DS106 on the couch

Tag: AnimatedGIFAssignments

I promised Christina some ‘footage’ of her last stay at the hospital. Here she is relaxing in the therapy room with other ~~prisoners~~ residents. Her knees got a little tired and so we had to put some bright tape to support the knees and let them recover before she went back to her bungalow. She is much better now and her attitude towards the village as cheery as ever.

July 7, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

This gif has information. No. It has INFORMATION.

Will you click to get this information?

June 20, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Well, I have been told by the committee that once I resigned I need to produce…I spent the afternoon trying to turn this animated gif into my Twitter avatar for the start of DS106 Themed The prisoner. All the workarounds I tried failed. APIs that promised to do it did not, brute force ( just change the extension and upload) did not work. I am swimming like the blazes to get away from the village, production here is hard. Where is the beach? And what does the new Photoshop mean with Save For Web (Legacy)? All the other new options don’t seem to have preview or allow me to play with colours. WE WANT INFORMATION! Update: if this Save for Web glitch matters to you. Complain!

May 19, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

March 14, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Talky Tina laid down the challenge and I have been wanting to try another gif the portrait for a while. So I looked for high resolution portraits of our jimgroom on the google, as Tina suggested. Then got to work as per Ryan Seslow’s excellent tutoring on this lovely way of making gifs last semester in CT101. I think that there is the ghost of another in this gif though….

Experimenting with a new toy by John Johnston:

We are designing a new #DS106 Assignment and wanted to experiment with the tool. Here was the brief we discussed on the twitter:

Play the PechaGif once only and record video
Think of a topic for a presentation
Improvise.
Record and audio track of the ‘presentation’
Use the animated gifs you recorded as your slides to talk from!
Have fun!

The worst part of it is that I have been plagues with techno glitches today. It has taken forever to get the video on YT. I tried to upload to Tumblr and failed. I recorded the voiceover and it did not record. Blah!

All that said it should not take long to do.

I set the delay in PechaGif to 5 seconds. Promised myself I would use the first take – no cheating. Used Quicktime Player to capture video. Imported to iMovie. Created the voiceover as an improvisation exercise – the idea was think of a topic and wing it using the animated gifs that appeared as your slides. Todd Conway made an awesome example. John Johnston kicked us off with this example, where he used the tool to explain the tool! Get him all meta meta 🙂

Awesome tool to engage our creative improvisational brain!

“Wake up! Use Pechagif the best tool there is for a DS106 assignment” says John. Thank you for making it, John. I do not think it is silly at all.

Those of us who understand the psychology of creativity know that the type of exercise this tool forces on us is a desirable difficulty if we want to keep our creative muscles toned. Improvisation is not joke, says CNN.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Our first Boring Gifachrome from a boring video

December 9, 2013 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

I am sleepy and DS106ed out. But when you have to do something you have to do something. I Just saw this tweet:

RT @JaapSoft: http://t.co/2W2V1HO0Tf boring gif drama doggie @ds106 #ds106

— Jaap Bosman (@JaapSoft) December 9, 2013

It contains this wonderful animated gif which combines two different creative ideas we have been playing with in DS106 – boring video and a new photo format Gifachrome.

I woke up this morning, seems a lifetime ago in DS106 time, and came into my room to find my dog really stressed out at the start of his day…not.

I remembered the daily create a few days ago that asked us to create a boring video. I thought this was my chance. I took my Vine app and recorded my dog snoozing…nothing happened in this video bar the news in the background and ever so slight movements as he snoozed. This wonderful man, saw the video and used it to create his (first?) Gifachrome animated gif! Thank you, Colin Dog is very pleased at all this exposure he has been getting. A dog can never have enough good photos.

November 22, 2013 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Cory Doctorow, taken with a GIFAchrome 106 camera

“First, it’s okay to copy! Believe in the process of copying as much as you can; with all your heart is a good place to start – get into it as straight and honestly as possible. Copying is as good as any other way of getting ’there.’ ”

NOTES ON THE AESTHETICS OF ‘copying-an-Image Processor’

Phil Morton (1973)

August 22, 2013 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Killing 3 birds with one stone

So I have been dancing with Jim Groom in every room of my home.

Steady on. Strictly speaking I have been watching him dance on my laptop in every room in my house. As a new recruit to the DS106 community and trying to limber up for Headless Ds106 about to start August 26, 2013. I have been splendidly failing at keeping up with the July challenge to do a daily create every day and with the August challenge to do an animated gif every day. Why? because I am learning to use new tools and they are hard!

So I had an idea for this post that should catch me up a little. This post will take care of 3 daily creates with one post!

For Daily create 585 we have to ‘share a recipe and a story of why it’s so special to you’.

So the recipe ingredients are included here.

What I do with the ingredients is put them all in a bowl and then wait till it forms into a lump which I throw in the oven for 45 minutes. That is it.

Why is it so special, then? It was the first thing I learnt to make when I was told by doctors that diabetes was around the corner. I was angry at first, I like to eat when I want and what I want. But as a result of the diagnosis a few years ago, I learnt to cook. I now make time to buy the right food, cook the right food, and love doing it. Over the last few weeks I have been worried about my dog’s health and so had been neglecting the kitchen and my own health. He is now full of beans (healthy) again and so when this daily create came out my bread was coming out of the oven smelling gorgeous.

I then had the idea to get Jim dancing in the photo I took of my bread coming out of the oven. I could make my first animated gif and take care of another of Talky Tina’s daily creates: Dancing Jim all over the world.

Easier said than done. I made several attempts over a number of days with different photo editors. Hours and hours watching Jim dancing and trying to get him inside the baking trays, over the bread, wishing I could make him explode like John Johnston’s Headless poster, all to now avail. I ended up feeling like my little animation above.

But then my true friends came to my rescue on Google Plus DS106 space I posted my failing gif, a couple of tutorials that had not helped me but made me feel stupid as they made it seem so easy!

I gave up and then started again. As Piers Ibbotson, the theatre director, said to me last week: I am utterly uninterested in the fact that my actors get it wrong, i just need them to do it again and again until it works. So I kept doing it again and again until (drum roll) it kind of worked,

And so we come the third daily create this post is covering: ‘Create an animated gif that Sandy Brown Jensen will respect’

I posted my Greedy Jim on Flickr and here is my comment to explain why I felt this gif counted for this Daily Create:

Sandy,

I hope you will respect this one as it has taken my over 10 days and several photo editors to get to a (reasonable) shape. I love gifs, but I never knew what it took to make them. Now I do I can only say: RESPECT to all who make them. And greedy Jim dancing around my kitchen is just funny, or isn’t it?

I know it is not great, the size is not quite right, and I had to remove one of the frames because I could not get it to line up. Sometimes it is not about the quality of the output but about what you learn getting there. I tried Fireworks, Photoshop and Gimp. I have settled on Gimp for the upcoming DS106 Headless 13 run.

I bought PIxelmator before I knew it was not good for animated gifs, it looks like a great editor. I wanted to find an editor that would give me a large view of each frame rather than have me squint into a small side window to see which frame I am working on, failed on that. Fireworks seems intuitive, but has to be paid for monthly now.

Along the way: I cracked the Gimp, found a tutorial that makes it seem like it should take me under 2 minutes to add an animated gif to a background and a screencast that taught me about frames

And at the end of it all I felt like the minions in the gif above.

So what have I learnt? I can kill 3 birds with one stone and (drum roll again) check out the use of the clone tool in gimp in my last photo above! There were only two birds in the original.

Off to bed…have I signed up for no sleep during DS106? Having so much fun, but Tumblr is a bit sucky.

Update: I am leaving this post as is as an example of what the technology affords. It does not make it easy to create post with media place where you would want it. I have found a workaround for this – but it should not be about workarounds.

DS106 on the couch

Tag: AnimatedGIFAssignments

Our first Boring Gifachrome from a boring video

Recent Items

View By Date