DS106 Explodes Chicken

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.

Comments

3 responses to “DS106 Explodes Chicken”

  1. Haley Avatar

    Brilliant! I’ll have to check out the tutorial when I have more time, but I love the idea of recycling, preserving and reflecting on “where the web was then,” if you will. We don’t treat the internet like we do the rest of our history, and the thought of making records of how it used to be is generally only framed through nostalgia, kind of like what you’re doing here. That said, it’s a concept I’ve only delved into really recently–if you want more info on it, talk to Prof. Whalen (@zachwhalen) or probably even our very own Prof. Levine.

    Now I’ve gotta find some gifs of the original Lemmings game. That thing was AWESOME.

    1. mbransons Avatar

      You should build off of the Lemmings walk. I’m sure there are many more. Also you might like a riff on old video games in this animated GIF built into an old copy of Electronic Games magazine.

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