gif – Page 2 – DS106 on the couch

Tag: gif (page 2 of 4)

Whose side are you on? Mine.

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…

…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’?

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.

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

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

February 21, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Paul Miller disconnected from the Internet for a year. At the end of that year, this is how he says he felt. Discuss.

Animated Gif by gifadog from original film footage by In Limbo TV. See better version on Gfycat

three seasons. (final story)

long ago, long before any of us were alive or thinking or walking or breathing, when our souls were swirls, and long before the stars and the sun had any idea of what to do with themselves, there w…

This is my first #artonthecouch critique for 2015. I took a break for the holidays and have a renewed enthusiasm for this project. I have, however, made some changes for this year. I am not going to put myself under pressure to do one critique per week, last year it started to turn into a chore and I did not like that. Guilt is not part of the DS106 ethos – and I felt guilty if I missed a week.

The other interesting thing is that people are choosing to not submit any art for me to critique. Just an observation not a judgement. I have to keep choosing the art myself. So I will choose art that speaks to me and that, paraphrasing Jeannette Winterson, I want to spend time with.

Without further ado, let’s spend some time with some awesome web art!

‘Three Seasons’ is a story told in a web page; not a photo or something I can reproduce here. You have to go an read it before what follows can make sense. And trust me, it will be worth every minute you spend with it.

What first struck me when engaging with this piece was the multi-modal nature of it. This may seem a detached and technical observation, but I think that this web page shows some of the possibilities in the future of composition. It uses audio, written words, video, animated gifs in the service of the story and it does so beautifully.

I clicked to read from Twitter one day last year when I was rushing to finish my chores for the year. It made me stop and attend. It made me stop and connect with my emotions even when I did not have time for that. That is powerful.

I am a writer so my attention on second reading was drawn to the written word. I noticed that Kailey (@kaileyck) did not capitalise any of her paragraphs. She does not use paragraphs in the traditional sense either. It is as if she is using space to mark the places where she would like her reader to take a breadth. The effect on me of the lack of traditional markers was to draw me in and make me want to attend to the story that much more…I did not know where to pause so I just focussed. As you read you think you are settling into a story told in the written word and then

and then Kailey starts to work with other media and draws the reader in further. The use of the animated gif was particularly powerful. As those of you who read The DS106 Shrink regularly know, I am obsessed with the animated gif. I have a sense that it is evolving into a medium to ‘carry’ the content of our communication that is carried by body language and gestures when we speak face to face. Humans have such ingenuity when it comes to overcoming limitations. The ‘text mediated self’ that is our digital presence is limited and favours those of us who have ease with the written word. Some people, like Kailey, are creating a new language. We all need to ask ‘do you speak gif?’ and Kailey shows us how. The animated gifs in her piece bring the written word to life. They are done beautifully: smooth precise moments picked meticulously to add to the words.

And just as you start to think that this is it, she adds sound. First in the form of a dramatic video clip, which makes us transition from the visual element to audio and then to audio only. This to me is what lifts this story from the just good to the simply exceptional. I click on the audio file and keep on reading. Just the same attention to detail as in the rest of the story. The sound blends with the words as if Kailey was there telling me the story and playing the sound on a piano. It keeps playing as you read. Foley sounds create images in your mind as you read the words

and your emotions engage with the words in ways that plain text could never do. I read to the end and have tears in my eyes as I finish reading, hearing, seeing Kailey tell me a story.

I think you can say, British understatement coming, that I quite liked the story.

My critique has focussed on form not content because this is what struck me the most and what connected with my own interest in mediated communication. Yet none of this would work without a beautifully crafted story. Do yourself a favour. Switch on clutter cloak and spend a day in Kailey’s company. It will restore your soul.

January 17, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Here is the HD at Gfycat worth a look!

So, I am starting to explore Cine Noir for this run of DS106. At the risk of being burnt at the stake, I am not interested in watching the films! Yet, I love the style of them and the way in which ‘the sets and atmosphere reflect the characters inner turmoil’ or so I read in my overview google dive last night. I also love the typography and how it uses the form to express the emotional tone of the story. It is surprisingly difficult to find out detail about the original types. I have found two fonts that I want to play with: Metropolis and Stroke. It looks like Typewriter can also be used. So how do you get the ‘noir feel’ to an animated gif? Best way to see that was to make one from one of the most famous film Noir I know! Use of light, high contrast and that closed in vignette around the image. I noticed also that everything seems sharp and clean – clothes, posters, people and typography. I like that. How the figure gets closer and closer….scary!

I know nothing about Cine Noir. I now something about Tech Noir as most of my favourite films are about dystopian futures.

There is a lot to learn and, heads up, creative edits of Cine Noir posters will be a pig of a job to do!

The how of this gif will have to wait for now. The joy of being an open participant, no deadlines!

May 27, 2014 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

A gif that highlights the importance of training the mind to be selective and purposeful!

May 25, 2014 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Animated gif by @gifadog source video: Beowulf Animated (1998)

Made to support #HEAmonsters conference presentation by @mdvfunes “Wrestling your Inner MOOC” .

May 4, 2014 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

What do you want to see in the next episode? #tinyhamsterideas

Adding to the Shallows, may the Internet forgive me for behaving like a pancake person. I have fallen in love with the tiny hamsters. I cannot stop laughing at the video and wondering who oh who had the idea to make it?

And I had to capture the tiny moment of the tiny hamster finding that first burrito in a gif. Usual workflow: Download, trim, into Photoshop, play with it until satisfied. Most of the time was spent finding the moment I wanted to trim.

C’mmon! Let’s play. What do you want to see in the next episode?

April 23, 2014 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

creativesomething:

“The best ideas…” (Hint: let it load.)

If in watching this lovely gif, you wonder how to teach your crowded mind to take time to get ideas or just be still then you could do worse than my curated page on Scoop it on Lived time.

March 24, 2014 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

zachwhalen:

“I must attempt a mind meld.” (Star Trek the Motion Picture, 1979)

DS106 on the couch

Tag: gif (page 2 of 4)

Whose side are you on? Mine.

Recent Items

View By Date