animated GIF

All MOOCs and No Play Makes University Dull

Mar 22, 2013 By mbransons in Teaching and Learning 9 Comments Tags: animated GIF, Audrey Watters, ds106, MOOC, Pulp Fiction, The Shining

A few days ago Audrey Watters tweeted a Say What Again Meme about MOOCs.

I pictured this particular Jules as a faculty member or instructional technologist finally freaking out on the administrator that is pressing him and the college to hurry up and join the future of higher education. Yes the MOOC craze could lead to gun violence. Believe it.

Here’s another kind of MOOC crazy that I thought I’d share. This one comes from the Overlook Hotel where a number of higher-ed administrators went on a retreat to discuss MOOCs and plan for the future. A curious faculty member stumbled upon a draft of their white paper. To her horror this is what she discovered.

Three Wheeling After Bambi

Feb 26, 2013 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, ds106 2 Comments Tags: animated GIF, Bambi, ds106, graphic gift, three wheeler, Visualassignments, VisualAssignments953

This animated GIF is built using another graphic gift I made from a 1983 Montgomery Ward Catalog of the boy on a three wheeler. Once I cleaned up the PNG, I was trying to think of how I might race this three wheeler. But before I decided to run down Bambi, I first set out how to animate the wheels, as it would look silly if they stayed static. This GIF of a wheel was a good resource as it basically illustrated that some motion blur and a couple of different versions would likely do the trick.

I think the front wheel did alright, but the back wheel looks a little static. The funny thing was once I chose the clip from Bambi, I didn’t need to worry about the wheels anymore. They ended up getting covered by the snow.

I love the old animation techniques where there are clear background, character, and foreground. Typically the background and foregrounds are static paintings and only the character is animated. But in the case of the snow scene there are these beautiful painterly splashes of snow in the foreground animated.

Fortunately these splashes of snow were fairly easy to select with the magic wand. These became new foreground mattes over the three wheeler as it trucked across the frame.

These mashups end up taking a lot longer than I expect, but I’ve really enjoyed pushing myself to get better and better with animation. Hope you dig it.

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Beastie Boys When I First Saw Them

Feb 20, 2013 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, ds106 3 Comments Tags: animated GIF, Beastie Boys, ds106, graphic GIF, graphic gift

I recently came across via BoingBoing this graphic designer that hosts a site Phil are Go! where he occasionally posts ‘graphic gifts.’ These are pieces of clip art that he’s created by lovingly extracting a particular graphic from a vintage advertisement.

This exercise would be a great ds106 assignment for a couple reasons *UPDATE now a ds106 assignment. One it’s a great for working on digital imaging skills. A good graphic gift would require a student to work with selections, the eraser tool, image touch ups (via contrast, sharpening, and possibly the clone stamp to remove scratches), and image resizing to create different versions. Also to maintain transparency and post to the web the image should likely be a PNG file.

The second benefit is that students would be creating interesting clip art that could be used by other students (or anyone on the web actually) for design and remix.

As for discovering good resources to work from, I like Phil are Go’s approach which is to look for vintage ads as a resource. I had actually downloaded a number of images of ads from Flickr a number of months ago, intending to use some elements for remix projects. It’s important to start with an image that’s fairly high resolution like this old ad for televisions that I found.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Wishbook

I decided to work on the top television with the feet. The two versions of the TV below are both PNG files where the screen is transparent. The idea is that some one could put anything in the tv (even a GIF) and use it as an old fashioned TV. At the top of the post I used the TV to put the Beastie Boys on a TV the way I originally saw music videos in the 80s.

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Keep It Sealed – Keep It Clean

Feb 7, 2013 By mbransons in ds106 5 Comments Tags: animated GIF, ds106, informercial, Visualassignments, VisualAssignments806

The #ETMOOC animated GIF conversation hosted by Jim Groom last night ended with a brief discussion of the potential the GIF to be cooped by the advertising industry. Seeking to capture the eyeballs of the ever shorter and shorter attention spans of the browsers of the internet the GIF seems perfect.

*UPDATE – This is actually a ds106 assignment too! Where did the Soda Go?

I thought I might give the corporates a look at what a proper GIF advertising campaign’s assets might look like. Your lovely video has me wondering how I might spray your lovely solution over every surface of my home to keep it free from dirt, marks, and/or stains. But these little GIF nuggets are the real viral bits to slather all over the internet.

Isn’t That Just Like a Rabbit?

Feb 6, 2013 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, ds106, Teaching and Learning 2 Comments Tags: animated GIF, Bugs Bunny, ds106, Mickey Mouse, portfolio

Brings a knife to a gun fight.

I’ve been really enjoying the week long creative challenge that my commtech juniors and seniors have been undertaking as part of our portfolio class. They’ve shown me new sides of their work including a lot of drawing, mashups, and a particular meme in which someone has me throw a student out the window for asking the wrong question. I promptly let him know how serious I am about lazy students. But as soon as I saw DarkLordDre’s cartoon of Bugs Bunny vs. Mickey Mouse I was ready to try out a little remix based on the GI Joe Explodes GIFs by General Howe. The GIF is also a consideration of the scene from the Untouchables in which Sean Connery’s character is setup by a knife wheeling hood, only to be gunned down on his fire escape. Connery’s famous quote, “Isn’t that just like a wop? Brings a knife to a gun fight,” has been part of a regular trope in fiction:

A character comes into the scene armed with what he thinks is sufficient, only to find out he is severely outclassed weapon-wise, because he brought the entirely wrong type of weapon (usually the superior weapon is revealed after the first person has committed to a fight).

It’s possible though that I could say to my students, ‘Never bring a JPG to a GIF fight – or I’ll animate the crap out of you.’

History of the GIF

Feb 5, 2013 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, ds106, Teaching and Learning 2 Comments Tags: animated GIF, ds106, history

A Couple of Essays on GIFs

Mashable History of GIFs

The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF)

Early 8Bit GIFs

Screen Captures

If We Don’t, Remember Me. – Walkabout & A Clockwork Orange

RealityTVGIFs – Superbowl Beyonce & Simon Cowell

Three Frames – Valhalla Rising & Muscle Man

Photography

Slingshot Camera GIFs of San Francisco

Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg Cinemagraphs

Design

Kerry Callen – Animated Comic Covers!, More Animated Comic Covers

Mr Whaite – Neon Sign Animated Movie Posters, North By Northwest, The Seven Year Itch

MBS – Hitchcock Film Posters Animated, North By Northwest, The Birds

Rhetoric

#WHATSHOULDWECALLME

WHEN I SUDDENLY REALIZE MY FAVORITE SHOW IS STARTING

WHEN I’M WALKING AND LISTENING TO MY IPOD

TRYING TO DO WORK IN BED

Mashup and Art

General Howe – Animated Murder Maps & GI Joe Redux

Thunderpaw – Animated GIF Comic Book

Flux Machine – Old Photographs Remixed Comidant Eduard & Decoy Howitzer

ZBags – Grotesque Calliopes

lulinternet – Burgers & #1

OZNEO – Flying Saucer Lift-off

Homevideo

Animalygifs

Cinemagr.am – Breakdance, Peter Pan, Jumping Through Hoops

Presentation

Maxgif.com

Uncontrollable Urge to GIF

Jan 8, 2013 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, ds106 No Comments Tags: animated GIF, AnimatedGIFAssignments, AnimatedGIFAssignments851, Devo, ds106, New Wave

If you’re a fan of post punk new wave music I highly recommend watching the 1982 film, Urgh! A Music War. Apparently this film which features the The Go-Go’s, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Dead Kennedys, The Police, of course Devo and many many more awesome acts was regularly broadcast on the USA network during the early days of cable. And I missed it!

Day of the MOOC now Animated!

Dec 19, 2012 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, ds106, Teaching and Learning 9 Comments Tags: animated GIF, AnimatedGIFAssignments, AnimatedGIFAssignments859, David Kernohan, Horror, MOOC, poster

Some MOOCs are wicked scary, but even more horrifying when turned into an animated movie poster. This is a Riff a GIF of David Kernohan’s Day of the MOOC poster for the Horror of the MOOCs assignment. Remixing other people’s work in ds106 is one of the best things to do to show your love.

Salivating Over Animated GIFs

Sep 13, 2012 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 2 Comments Tags: animated GIF, ds106, woody woodpecker

This is probably my favorite way to make animated GIFs. Find that little loop in a moment of video and try to make it seemlessly play infinitely. This bit of animated juiciness comes from the 1941 Woody Woodpecker cartoon Pantry Panic. In this six minute short, there’s a cold front coming so all the birds but Woody quickly head south for the winter. The impish woodpecker is soon snowed in without anything to eat. Thankfully he’s visited by an equally starving kitty so they might spend the next three minutes trying to catch and cook one another.

Then a moose shows up, so Woody and Kitty switch their attentions to catching, cooking, and eating it – leaving only a pile of bones. Classic cartoon violence, amazing I didn’t turn out to be an axe murderer watching so many of these as a kid.

Here’s a tutorial that shows how make little loops in Photoshop using a video downloaded from Youtube using pwnyoutube.

DS106 Explodes Chicken

Sep 11, 2012 By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Teaching and Learning 3 Comments Tags: animated GIF, chicken, ds106, KB, kbps, rooster, Visualassignments, VisualAssignments649, VisualTutorials649

I know it’s a rooster, but the original animated GIF was titled ‘chickenexplode.’ I love the old school animated GIFs which packed a lot of action in very, very little data – often just a few Kilobytes. That was necessary back when the web was delivered to you at 56 kbps.

I thought it would be interesting to play with these older GIFs and give them a Web 2.0 makeover. First you can make them a lot larger now. The rooster above was originally 89 x 79 pixels, and had the the letters ‘TNT.’ With the help of Photoshop, it’s pretty easy to enlarge existing GIFs (now it’s 600 pixels wide) and also make some basic edits. Changing the text was pretty straight forward, but I think it would be fun to enlarge and combine a few of this old GIFs to create a story. Which leads to making this a ds106 visual assignment – Exploding Classic Animated GIFs.

I made this tutorial to show how I made it and shared a few favorite classic GIFs as well.

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