I finished up my visual assignments with this 3-star animated gif.  Die Hard is without a doubt my favorite Christmas movie, so I decided it was the film to use.  This is a scene toward the end of the movie, and I think it sums up the relationship between Hans Gruber and John McLane quite well.  John laughs at Hans, Hans pretends not to care but secretly cares a lot, Hans tries to shoot John, John beats him to it.  That’s pretty much the movie in a nutshell.

The hardest part of this assignment was getting the clip to use for it.  I really wanted to get the last scene in the movie (the one where the crazed German terrorist with awesome hair seemingly returns from the dead before he’s finally finished off by Sgt. Al Powell), but it was very hard to find on youtube.  I did eventually find it and made this gif from it:

Anyway I decided I liked the laughing scene more, so I found a clip of that instead.  I used this tutorial to make the gifs.  This entailed installing realplayer to download the youtube clip I needed, then breaking that clip up into individual frames using MPEG_Streamclip.  The tutorial walks through this step by step.  MPEG_Streamclip lets you export the frames as individual images, and these images can be opened in GIMP as layers.  I did this, then saved the project as an animated gif.  I wound up making 5 in total, as I wasn’t satisfied with my first few attempts.  If there aren’t enough frames it looks choppy, and if there are too many you might as well just post a video clip.  Both of the gifs above have a little bit more motion than I would’ve liked, but I suppose that is to be expected when dealing with action sequences.