Who doesn’t love an animated GIF, right? This is ds106 after all.
Instead of going to bed at a sensible hour, I chose to check out more student work. While reading Ekhlami’s Operation – Annihilate Lost submission as a ds106 Un-scene stories assignment, I clicked the link to see a scene from some Star Trek film featuring Jim Kirk as a lad on a farm washing a Corvette. When the YouTube video finished I saw Mr. Spock’s smiling face on the list of other similar YouTube offerings.
I clicked on one titled Spock Walks in on Kirk kissing. The moment I saw his expression I knew I had to Animate GIF it.
The process was rather straight forward. Since the last time I tried to do this, YouTube has kindly added a download button.
This used to require the use of some third party service. I opened the clip in MPEG StreamClip, selected the short segment, trimmed it, exported the frames a png (using the parameter of 8 frames per second). This gave me 3 frames. MPEG StreamClip is free software available for Mac or Windows. It is loaded on the computers in our lab by the way.
I loaded these frames in to GIFQuickMaker and set the playback for each frame to .4 seconds. This free app is only available for Mac. Had I a bit more time, I’d have done the animated GIF in Gimp but I need some sleep tonight.
So there you have it. When you’ve the ds106 bug, you wind up doing bizarre little projects like this for no reason other than for the sake of doing them.
Which reminds me, I need to finish reading Ekhlani’s story.
This is really too much fun!
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