This Say it Like Peanut the Butter assignment post will have a few iterations because now that I have gotten this far….. I WANT TO BE ABLE TO CREATE A REALLY COOL ONE WITH A MESSAGE!

As part of Unit 2 in ds106, the challenge assignment is to create an animated gif from a favorite or unfavorite movie. The bigger challenge is to find resources to help you learn how to create one. The assignment was created 4 years ago and it seems things have gotten a whole lot easier to pull out a clip and make a short animated gif. So easy in fact that I am not sure I learned too much on the first attempt other than I can cut down on a lot of time by using some of the tools available.

The movie I selected was “It’s a Wonderful Life”. This scene is where George realizes he does exist because his mouth is bleeding. Other scenes considered were him running up the stairs and the finial coming off, and the end where the bell rings for Clarence.

I have to admit – it took me a while to start to do this part of the unit because all I could think of was the early days of web page design and how blinking pages were the rage and then everyone settled down and they became the “what not to do” for good design. I think the animated gifs can be appropriate and useful  communication in digital stories if done with purpose and intent. So as with most creation and art – if it has purpose and meaning it will be good and of value. That being said – the exploratory gifs that come out of this assignment within the viewpoint of seeing if you can find resource, help, and the new ideas for your own learning and then share with others on the same journey is right on target and wonderful to see.

I have seen some pretty killer animated gifs in the ds106 Google+ community and some other places linked from ds106 so this first attempt is more the proof of looking for resources and trying them out to see if something can be created and to research and read about what animated gifs are and why to use them.

I found Jim Groom’s tutorial page and started to download the tools. In doing so the gif creator just showed up and made a gif for me when I thought I was downloading the video. ! I wasn’t able to eliminate frames. I would have liked to have taken about the first 7 out so that the hand motion was just the animation. When putzing with some duplicates – the gif would run once but not loop, I have my version 1.0 done so far.

This gif is the “cheater”, easy way out. but it really did spark the creative juices and desire to master the finer details. Using other tools to make it smoother, make it my own iteration so it doesn’t have a tool watermark, and some content of meaning to me. I want to get to Gimp and to Photoshop to try the creation. So I will continue to work on this assignment and create another more extensive gif. Stay tuned!

For this gif I used Makeagif.com and basically just had to put in a start time and choose 1-5 seconds and click a button. I came across this from downloading the Fastest youTube Downloader app. The movie didn’t download -but the make a gif button showed up – from there it was all dumb luck. It also has a Chrome plugin so that you can make a gif on the fly.

This is actually my first attempt (or warm up attempt) before finding a movie. If using my own photos, I would improve by using a tripod so that the background and perspective stayed aligned. He was a good sport! This was a user end tool as well – Gif Maker – upload your pics, rearrange and click the button. It doesn’t allow for tweaking or details – more wysiwyg. These tools are great for the fast and dirty kinds of things in everyday work or in creating concept drafts. Learning the finer skills is desirable for a more complete end product or combing several media together.