I find it very funny what I get really into and what I don’t, especially when it comes to school. It’s not secret that I really enjoy this class, but when I first saw Design week I was a little intimidated by what was to come. I wasn’t sure exactly what it entailed, so I went through the design assignment bank searching for a project that would inspire me. I had no idea what was just about to happen. I came across a one star challenge that involved creating a what do people think I do meme. Immediately I knew that I wanted to do Princesses (I mean afterall I am a princess). It seemed so easy, they even gave you a website to complete what had to, but easy is not in my vocabulary. While looking for pictures I came across a GIF that I really wanted to use of Jasmine saying “I’m not a prize to be won” (one of my favorite lines that I say probably way too much, and seemed perfect for the rebellion aspect of princesses that parents seem to see). I knew that this point that I wasn’t going to have an easy time. I found amazing GIFs for every caption that I had and tried putting it in the website, but the picture then saved as a jpeg. So it was official, I was hopping on the overachiever carriage and I was on my somewhat merry way.

I now had a new goal, make a What People Think I Do meme using GIFs instead of just simple pictures, and that was a whole new challenge in itself.  I tried to insert the GIFs into GIMP and see where that would take me, but it just had me more lost, so I sought the help of my fellow ds106 steeds on twitter (what a magical place).

@bparker5 I’m working on the what people should call me meme but trying to put in GIFs instead of pictures. Any ideas? #ds106

— Karissa Mary Marie (@krisavball08) February 18, 2013

I got distracted for a bit looking a different tutorials that involved GAP which stands for GIMP Animation Plugins, and so I started my trek to finding how to get GAP on my computer, and proved to be unsuccessful, so I went back to the drawing board. I used a great resource from Professor Levine which took an already made GIF and broke it down into different images for you to save, which was such a life saver! So I put all of my GIFs there and saved my photos into a folder (files for DAYS). I started opening them up into layers on my background and sized each and every layer appropriately using the Scale Image tool (this took forever). I discovered this beautiful linking layers feature on GIMP which you can see in your link toolbar (it’s the box next to the eye). If the link shows it is linked to every layer that also shows the link, this way you can move them all at the same time so I could tweak my placement of the layers with ease. Once I had all of my GIFs in place I hit the Filters -> Animation -> Playback, and I was so frustrated with what I saw. The layers just simply go in order, so only one meme would show at a time. Back to the drawing board I go. I then was messing with the layers and saw “Merge Visible Layers”. I knew exactly what I had to do. I merged all the text and background together to be my base and then had some more editing to do. All of my GIFs had different layers depending on how long the animation was, so I had to make them all have the same number of layers, which was the number of the smallest layers (which turned out being 9 layers). So I went back to the drawing board and deleted some layers so that it would be consistent. From there, I merged the layers from the first layer of each GIF together, then the 2nd, 3rd and so on. So my end result had 10 layers including the background.

So I bet after all of this rambling you want to see what I ended up with, right? Here you go!!!

The first one, what my parents think I do is the “I’m not a prize to be won” from Aladdin. This shows how the kings and queens think that their princesses (or Prince in Prince Harry’s case) are rebellious and don’t do as they are told.

Next was what society thinks I do, this was a no brainer. Kate and William <3 <3 They are such a classy couple and she is the ultimate princess. If only being that awesome was that easy.

What my prince thinks I do, they think that we take forever to get ready and are always caring about our hair and looks, so I had Ariel from the Little Mermaid brushing her hair with a fork.

What Disney thinks I do is the typical fairy tale story of Princess and the Frog. I was between doing this GIF of Tiana kissing her frog looking for a prince or doing a book closing saying “and they all lived happily ever after” but I’d like to think that I will live happily ever after despite what Disney says.

What animals think I do was from Enchanted right before Giselle starts singing and cleaning with her New York animal critters of pigeons, roaches and mice. If only life was that easy.

And finally what I really do. I check myself out in the mirror just being classy as always, just like Mia from the Princess Diaries.

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa