I’m thrilled to learn Jim Groom is offering DS106 as a MOOC this semester. I’ve been following his work since the Mary Wash magazine (I’m an alum) did an article on him and Gardner Campbell a while back. Since he’s been doing some creative things in the area of Educational Technology and I’m also in that field, I’ve followed what he’s doing with some interest and had seen some of the work from last semester’s class. (Wish they’d had this class when I was there, but then again, when I was at MWC you had to go to Trinkle Hall just to get Internet access).  I’m looking forward to participating this semester, and I hope that this virtual change of scenery will shake up my mental processes and rev up my creativity a bit. And I have to say, it looks to be a good class; the posts so far have been very impressive (and class hasn’t even started yet) and I hope as time goes on there will be more dialogue between participants.

I took a stab at my first animated gifs last night- both of them are from the Empire Strikes Back, the best movie of the Star Wars franchise. Both clips are from the scene where Han is being put into carbonite and he is saying goodbye. The typical lightsaber battles and the “I”m your father” bit seemed a bit too cliche to do, and thinking back to why I love the movie, this movie has always been my favorite because it really focuses heavily on the relationships between characters, not just the action. This scene really encapsulates that relational aspect.

My process: I downloaded clips from YouTube, trimmed them in iMovie and uploaded them to GifNinja to make the gif. I’m not terribly happy with either. They are both very small even though the source file was high quality. I may be missing a setting somewhere in GifNinja, I’ll have to monkey around a bit more.

Additionally, the first one I did just doesn’t flow well, with the fog coming in at the end. It’s a bit too abrupt.

The second one is better, but he shifts a bit, making it jerkier than I’d like.

I think for my next effort I will look around for something other than GifNinja and I will also try Photoshop based on the posts from NoiseProfessor and Tom. And I think I will look for a new movie to try, maybe an anime. Or maybe I’ll just accet the experience for the learning moment it was, decide the gif is good enough as is, and move on to the next mashup. Who knows…