So I went a bit overboard on the gif ship.

For Week #2′s assignment, I had to create a gif that captured the essence of a key scene from my favorite movie.

AHH FAVORITE MOVIE?!

That’s such a monumental decision I’d have to make. What if I pick the WRONG ONE?!

After that moment of crisis, I decided on Wreck-It Ralph (2012). Since his movie is the theme of my building right now (I’m a Resident Assistant), I figured he’d be perfect.
So this is my first gif I’ve ever created and it’s from this trailer here. I used Fastest YouTube Downloader to download the video, MPEG Streamclip 1.2 to cut the video and create an image sequence, and finally GIMP to put it all together and create a gif.

SO PROUD! Not only is it my first gif, but it also has a seamless repeating pattern!

I wanted to do more, though.

While I like this one, it’s animated/based on a video game which uses far fewer frames than a real-life movie.

So I challenged myself to go one step further. The next few gifs are what I came up with using the same programs. These are all from Watchmen (2009) and this trailer in particular. As you can tell, I started to play with the scale and size of each file.

I loved the subtlety of this one. You barely notice it’s even moving. 

This scene is just asking to become a gif. 

I originally picked this scene hoping that it would be one of those endless/seamless ones, but I still liked the way it turned out.

But then I wanted to add words…

So I researched how to do it and found that Adobe Photoshop CS6 was the way to go.

I then used the Fastest YouTube Downloader again to fetch this trailer for The Hobbit (2012).

This was by far the hardest thing yet.

I couldn’t figure out how to make the text flash between layers. After many failures and a little break from the computer, I found that by clicking on a certain frame in the Timeline panel, I could then change the visibility of the text layer and it would only affect that particular layer. If you are unfamiliar with layering in CS6, the text layer must be above the layer for it to show up on the particular frame/layer you want it to.

But then I ran into another problem. The text layer would show up, but it wouldn’t have the blending effects (the white outline). I’m not sure if I fixed this in the “right” way, but I just duplicated the text layer so it would go above each layer. Very time consuming. Later, I will look up on how to do this without wasting 5 minutes just duplicating layers, and I’ll post how I figured it out.

I’m not sure I like static text as much, but since I’ve seen this gif so many times on various sites, I wanted to try to recreate it. I’ll always take a challenge!

And as a disclaimer, I think all scenes capture the essence of a scene. But if I must select one for THIS particular assignment since it also said for the movement to be minimal, I would pick this subtle Watchmen one.