Castles, dorm rooms, they all are the same! Well that being said, you guessed it, perfect for those drafty dorm rooms means SNUGGIES! Yes, I admit that I am an owner of the As Seen on TV phenomenon, I’ll even do you one better and tell you that mine has my name embroidered on it. What can I say? I don’t want someone stealing my Snuggie! Immediately when I saw the 2 star  visual assignment which called for making a GIF showing how tacky infomercials are the clouds parted and a ray of sunshine entered my life. I love watching these infomercials on YouTube and I probably could watch them all day. So I immediately went to the OfficialSnuggie YouTube channel and searched for my favorite part of the commercials, the Snuggie wave as I like to call it. Yes that is right, they are advertising wearing Snuggies at sporting events so that you can do the wave while watching. But my favorite part of this is the one person in the front row not wearing a Snuggie who is shivering and clearly not having a good time. I also enjoy the kid in the front row who is way too early (I may have watched this a bit too much).

So here was my final product, and you can read the long winded way of outsmarting my computer to get the final result below! (This way I don’t bore you with the details)

So here is the story. When I made my first ever GIF I had difficulties downloading the MPEG Streamclip because of something having to do with my Internet Explorer hating my computer. So the ds106 handbook entry on how to make a GIF was useless at the beginning. So I didn’t want to use a website because I enjoy doing things like this on my own, so my mission was to get pictures from the video clip so that I could put them in GIMP. Last time I used iLivid to do this part, however it gave my computer a virus so I shunned it from my kingdom completely and spat on it (figuratively). So I did what any normal princess would do, and just took tons and tons of screenshots of the video while watching it in YouTube (don’t believe me, look at the bottom of the “whole” and you’ll see the video cursor!). Anyway, so I took a screenshot then would paste it as a new layer in GIMP and ended up having 23 layers. Not sure about the ordering of how it would work, I started with the last frame and worked my way forward. So I had to get rid of the rest of my computer screen from the print screen image and simply used the Selection Crop tool which only keeps what is in the selected area and it worked on all the layers which was awesome. So I simply hit the filters, animation, playback and noticed that I had the layers in the wrong order. Lucky for me, GIMP is awesome (sorta), and I simply hit layers, stack, reverse layer order and all was fine and dandy!

Long story short, life making GIFs is so much easier with MPEG Steamclip.

Stay warm, or get a Snuggie!

Princess Karissa