GIF a Badge – #Burgeron106

The summer of 2015 brings several groups in #ds106 coming together to make art.

Two of the groups are open groups: Prisoner106 and Bugeron106. there is also cross participation between the two groups (Villages).

Prisoner106 has set up as a more structured format after the #ds106 format and a calendar.

Bugeron106  is a revisit of the summer of 2014 and continues the story of the Burgeron Family of Bovine County who are now leading the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival.

The two villages in addition to cross participation has also created some friendly challenges. Prisoner106 created a badge for blogs and has specific design elements. To meet the challenge, I worked on a badge for those in the Burgeron106 group. And of course since it is #ds106 it had to be GIF.

As the Bovine Fairy Tale Festival started to get off the ground, @RockyLou22 and @NanaLou had created a series of Puffins for the festival. Nanalou also organized the family by providing some focus points thru a Around the World of Workshops for each week of the summer so that members can align more easily in work together.

I decided since these images were an organizing part of the group that I would use them and not introduce new visuals. We are all involved in many things, and asynchronous collaboration can bring about confusion if too many things are circulating at once.

My first attempts were individual pics that would be used in frame animation in photo shop.

I was happy with the concepts and was really glad to have been able to create the puffin animation of it moving through the frame. The result was too spastic and more like a fast slide show than a GIF to me. It had about 60 frames and used frame animation in photoshop. There was futzing and putzing with each image by capturing it, scaling and cropping. The standards are high in the Burgeron106 and ds106  families so sloppy work was not acceptable by the PR department. More work was needed.

I have friend who shares access to her Lynda.com account for help when needed. Looking at Photoshop is overwhelming. So many available  courses and screen casts. They really show how complex PS can be. I hopped around and saw a few things to explore – but my brain was not in a place to go through the tutorials. I opted for some exploration, but maximizing features that I have found already.  I know there must be a way to do what I did, faster, smoother, and with good results.

I spent a day working with the images. The frame animation was a lot of duplicating and minor changes. I also had to do a lot of merging of layers as I added things.

The result was less than satisfactory – but a little better.  A shower and some lunch to clear the head, move the muscles, and fuel up and I went back again. This time I went back to some of the first GIFs I made as part of the open course a few months back. At that @cogdog – Alan Levine was facilitating the You Show in Canada and thru his blog I found a tutorial which used video in PhotoShop. I decided to try video editing to GIF instead of frame animation. This allowed for a smoother transition and motion.

I saved the ground work of the basic images of each section. I went to timeline and created a video. I set a work length so that I stayed within a certain time sequence so that the GIF didn’t become an actual movie in length.

Adding transition, changing opacity and putting in motion. All of this was done with pure abandonment and free will – no logic or system. Lots of do it and try to then undo it. Lots of saving versions to have something to go back to if steps did not work.

Once I thought I was close – I changed the video to frame animation so that I could tweak some parts and to try to cut frames that are not really needed as a GIF to cut back on file size. Doing that worked well – but I lost some layers and changing things after the switch caused more issues to correct – like losing the Holland graphic and key frames that didn’t translate smoothly. It did however get me to pare down even more which was good for design.

I went back to a saved version and this time did more timing within video. This was a little cumbersome at first – but actually made more sense to me than working with the frame animation with such a large number of frames. I was able to get some images resized and placed without losing or chain reactions. I am still not able to explain how – but my mouse hand found the rhythm and pattern to repeat.

This time I went to save for web right from the video. I found by paring down and making sure that layers that were not used deleted instead of just turned off helped make the file smaller. Saving as video did not create a larger file than animation – so it worked.

The last step was getting a font installed so that I had one that I liked more from a design point. I started on my laptop which has different fonts than my desktop. This was a risk as I had a good result and changing the font meant re-establishing a base layer composed of 5 merged layers. I made sure things stayed named the same and that the one layer remained as the foundation. The digital fairies were watching over me – and I got through it without an issue. Once I got those changed and put in – it was a save as for web and done. Whew!

For use by others I saved 4 different sizes and put them in a Google Drive for access.

and….to meet part of my Prisoner106 tasks – the bike is in the GIF to represent the Artists infiltrating the Village. 🙂

I think I will be seeing Dr. M at her tree house soon!

GIF It! = Stress Relief -a ds106 remedy

One of the lessons learned with#ds106 is creating art is good for heart, soul and mind! When you don’t know what  else to do, when you feel like you can’t carry out anything, when things are just AHHHHHHH!! Create a GIF! Instant relief.

I followed the suggested process (thanks @jimgroom)- no frills, no deep or complicated tricks, just fast and dirty good GIFs.  Good for heart, soul, and tension! TRY IT!

Probably a few more to made tonight…… 🙂

Cheers!

The above are from a Farmer’s Insurance Commercial.

Bride Throwing Cat

tdc1245: Bride Throwing Cats
http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc1245/

@talkytina submitted this daily challenge and it was a hard one to resist.

Bride Throwing Cat

I went for the extra @talkytina points and clipped the #priosoner106 cat. Reminded me of #noir106 cat. Not too cute or fluffy – a mysterious black cat. But in a world where points don’t matter – sometimes it is nice to go the extra and take the challenge.

I used the supplied footage from the directions of TDC – thanks for setting it up in infiniteLooper to the exact spot!
 http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=CbTDZ5buKQE#/400;416

  • Worked with a screen capture of the cat in photoshop and got rid of the background etc. and made it a layer of its own.
  • Duplicated 3x
  • scaled and sized to look like throwing
  • Found photo with CC license of bride throwing bouquet and imported
  • added it to each cat layer
  • Timeline window – create animation
  • played with timings
  • saved for web as GIF
  • added to Google Drive for sharing with “anyone with the link” can view.
  • Open Google image in pop out window
  • Go to more dots and grab iframe embed
  • In wordpress switch editor to text and past code
  • Save as draft
  • Now the image GIF is embedded and resides in Google Drive. You will not see image in editor, only a gray box with a clip icon. Publish to view and see (below)
  • Deleted first and third layer
  • saved layer 2 as a jpeg and uploaded to Flickr (above)

 

Giffing it on down the line

As the #noir106 has wrapped up, it is time to get back on track and figure out this #4life path I have started upon.

One thing I have noticed is that when you are #4life finishing a unit doesn’t mean it is checked off and done. You go back and you go deeper. DS106 is units – not weeks. You do and create in an ongoing state as new inspirations and collaborations come about. So you jump from design to video to audio to design to video and so forth.

Thanks to Rochelle Lockridge, I am embarking on Flipbooks for family stories. I love the ability to join many media and make it a complete story that someone can go through in any way they choose. I was hitting a wall thinking I was going to create videos to music for the last 80 years of family history!!!

This approach also gives me the opportunity to develop and create different media to include. Sound, video, design, photos, and more. It does have the potential for ongoing art creation and getting better at in each media. It also allows one to meet others on the path as they start or continue.

As Spring 2015 UMW has been winding down I have begun to uncover some #ds106 open course people through Mariana Funes #ds106 news. There are a few working on things and the stuff is cosmic! The news feature has helped more than the RSS feed. There are too many spam and other things in the feed that  make it difficult to follow. What I still can’t figure out is why the general open course participants don’t TWEET when they create? All the connections, feedback and connections that are lost. Tweet dammit! Use the hashtag – let the world know you are creating. It’s not going to bring in lots of traffic – but may bring you a person or two that will make a difference in your growth and work.

Now – what I have worked on besides planning my flip book is GIFs. After a few it finally hit me – DOH! these are not slide shows – so now I am on the path of trying to figure out how to make one picture be a story through some short animation. Below are the creations so far and what I am building upon. Still a long way to go especially when I look at John Johnston’s curation of ds106 TV Gifs!  

YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS!      http://johnjohnston.info/ds106giftv/#

I have used Photoshop, MPEG Steamclip and my own photos. A tutorial that was helpful was making smoke on YouTube. http://photoshop-tutorials.wonderhowto.com/how-to/create-smoking-gun-using-adobe-photoshop-cs4-357542/ It helped in making smoke as well as showing me how to use other features in PS.

I also found that using my Google Drive is a good way to share the GIFs and be able to embed them in WordPress…..here are some of my recent attempts.


Still some learning and some polishing to do – as well as making sure they are a picture story. One creation at a time!

Here are previous GIF creations – I decided to create a category for them under ds106 Assignments.

Boys Back in Town with Sound!

I like the animated GIF – but the song kept running through my head!

I converted the frame animation to video and added a short rift from the song “Boys are back in Town”, by Thin Lizzy.

2 Versions – the 9 second clip and then the 9 seconds looped 3 times. There is just something about visual and sound together…..

I ran into issues. Photoshop to video isn’t smooth. I found that out on the Sketchy Groom creation. When I rendered the GIF as video it dropped a layer and swapped a layer. I left it as it was and then imported it into iMovie to trim and transition. PhotoShop probably could do the corrections, but I found it requires going back in versions and redoing some things again. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to want to climb that hill. As rendered video it also changed the ration of the photos cutting off top and bottom. Since it is so short – it still seems to work. Not sure that they will ever be used too closely together that someone would notice the differences without viewing a few times. The brain is a wonderful thing when it comes to filling in the missing pieces. 🙂

Here is the original animated GIF. I still like this better visually.

I guess these 3 are going to have to be put on the character page with bios now that they have shown up so many times!

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