Let’s make a #western106 GIF today.

Inspiration

A Western that I do really like is True Grit. I like the 1969 film and the 2010 version.

There is a scene where Mattie and LeBoeuf watch from a cliff as “Rooster” Cogburn takes on Ned Pepper and gang (watch the scene dubbed “Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man” from 1969 and 2010). I wouldn’t say this is my favorite or least favorite scene. But a brief shot in the 1969 version, where Rooster rides through a wide shot, firing his rifle, that always reminds me of Eadweard Muybridge‘s often-giffed study of motion of a horse and rider.

Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, 1878

The sequence is set to motion using these frames, originally taken from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion series, (plate 626, thoroughbred bay mare “Annie G.” galloping) published 1887 by the University of Pennsylvania

Result

So I decided to make an animated GIF of that scene, which doesn’t work as well as the Muybridge photographs because of all the timber. I think the horse’s motion works quite well though, and even the shooting.

Process

The GIF was easy and quick to make using the new-to-me giphy.com. All I needed to do was paste in the URL of the movie clip on YouTube. There was a little bit of trial and error with the start and endpoint sliders. Eventually I found it easier to enter 00:38 as the start point after pausing on that spot on the YouTube video, rather than try to hit a specific point using the giphy slider. For duration, I made guesses, starting with entering .3 seconds and eventually settling on .5. I captioned the GIF using the “Subtitle” choice on the text tool. Then I used giphy’s Advanced tab to download the GIF to my computer. From there, I uploaded it to my blog post so that it’s mine-all-mine.

But I also tagged it #western106 on giphy and assume it will remain available there for at least awhile: http://giphy.com/gifs/western106-10HUe8Wvn5VuO4