When given the assignment to “Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.” I immediately knew what I wanted to do. I fell in love with Enchanted the first time I saw it, in part because of the many references to older Disney movies and also in part due to the ending, which I absolutely loved. The fact that the movie had a princess named Nancy just added to my love of it since I am now the only person I know who shares both her first and last names with Disney princesses. (Belle is from Beauty and The Beast, which I also love.)

After getting an idea of what to do by looking at Miss Amber May’s post about the Django Unchained gif she made, I did some googling and stumbled upon KeepVid which allows you to download videos from YouTube. I proceeded to download a high quality version of the Enchanted trailer, knowing that I could lower the quality later in the gif making process.

I opened the trailer in Quicktime and trimmed it down to roughly 10 seconds, since at this point, I was not sure which part of Giselle’s journey from Andalasia to New York I would actually use. I then opened it in ImageReady CS and after importing the entire 10 seconds on the first try and realizing I had 200+ frames to deal with, I closed the file then reopened it selecting 3-4 seconds of the clip I wanted to import, deciding to just make a gif of Giselle gazing in awe at Times Square.

I had 50 frames to deal with at this point and was quickly able to delete about half of them which did not actually contain Giselle, but were instead mearly the billboards and advertisements in Times Square. I then continued editing, consolidating to just 11 frames which I liked and cropped my frames down so that Giselle would be centered and take up most of the frame. I decreased the size of the frames, which at this point were about 500×300 pixels until they were what I thought would be a more usable size, and ended up at 268×190 pixels. I then played around with which frames to keep, and knocked it down to 7 before realizing that the Virgin Megastore sign in the background of two of those frames to the right of Giselle’s head was distracting and ended up with 5 frames.

The first time I saved my gif by “saving optimized as” and then choosing gif as the format, I realized that the gif was going a lot faster than I thought. Each frame was only being displayed for 0.04 seconds, making Giselle seam spastic and jerky.

Spastic Giselle with a frame rate of 0.04 seconds per frame.

I then knocked down the animation speed to 0.1 seconds per frame, and while I liked it, I still thought that it was a little too fast.

A little slower at 0.1 seconds per frame but not yet slow enough.

I finally saved it with a frame speed of 0.2 seconds per frame and thought that it looked a smooth and really captured Giselle’s awe of Times Square.

Giselle looking in awe at Times Square