“Turn to the right.”

Behold, my first animated gif!  This is from the opening scene of Raising Arizona when H.I. is getting booked by Ed.  I love the Cohen brothers’ films, and this is one of their best.  This is my entry in the DS106 visual assignment “Say It Like Peanut Butter.”  Click the image to see a slightly larger version.

I followed various tutorials to get to this done.  Jim Groom wrote a good one that gave me the overall process:  http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_Animated_GIFs_with_MPEG_Streamclip_and_GIMP

The first steps were to capture the video from a DVD – I used Handbrake version 0.9.6 to grab the section of the movie I wanted.  Then I followed Jim’s instructions for using MPEG Streamclip to trim and export the image sequence that you then import into GIMP.

Since I have version 2.8 of the GIMP for the Mac I needed to look at another tutorial to get some of the finer details down – mainly, that when exporting the file to create the gif, you need to manually enter the .gif extension for the file name to get to the animated gif settings boxes to open.  This tutorial on YouTube helped:  http://youtu.be/HYrzt4hJNJs

TIP! – I found that if I optimize for .gif before I export, the file size shrunk by about half.  It is good practice to conserve the bandwidth necessary for others to download or view your images if you can.  To do this yourself in GIMP, once you are done and ready to export, click the Filters menu, then Animation/Optimize for GIF.  Then go through the regular export process with the optimized images that open in a new window.

Maybe I need to create another now that I know how – just to reinforce the process.  Or, a hundred more, to really reinforce the process?