What to GIF tonight? I was recalling a few photos I took of something in West Texas I spotted on my trip home in December. Then the lightning bolts flew, so thanks to Rowan Peter for the idea on my Who GIFs to include some Pete Townsend Windmill Powered GIFness I had a series of 10 sequential shots of these windmills in motion: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog At the same spot I had done a Cinegram one, playing with freezing the rightmost tower and making the others move in a fun but not so useful for generating electricity fashion From my series of photos, I imported them all into Photoshop as a Stack. In the animation palette, I converted the layers to frames. By examining the rotation, I was able to find 6 frames that did a smooth repetition, and deleted the rest, I ...

Sure, the Oxford American Dictionary made the verb “to GIF” a word of the year, but they fell short– it should be noun, adjective, adverb, maybe even present past participle of the year, too. Yes, it’s the peak of ds106 GIFfest. And I did not even get close to sending out real holiday cards this year. So here is my GIFfy GIF greeting I GIFfed as a way to reflect on the travels an connections in 2012. This monster GIF includes 100 photos I chose from my flickr stream, with special people and places from 2012 (and if somewhere I likely left you put, sorry!). And I count this for the ds106 GIffest GIFMas Card. It actually works great as a repeating recycling of 2012. In perpetuity. I managed to just about cover North America with people and places I got to see this year, and even this is just ...

Time for a little bit of Rock and Roll GIF-action (“I can’t get no…”) for the ds106 GIFfest, this in response to the Rock ‘n Roll ‘n GIF call… actually a few different music action sequences from the BBC documentary on the Who’s Quadrophenia, Can You See the Real Me?. Besides the retrospective perspectives fro those who were there, te film has some short performance segments from both their Mod days in the 1960s and the early- mid 1970s when the band was performing Quadrophenia in concert. First, we have some windmilling Young Pete Townsend, powering the chords to “Can’t Explain” Much of the old performance portions in this film have a lot of zooming and uneven camera handling, so I ended up working with rather short bits. Next we have some old and young John Entwhistle, him recalling with horror when the band got their “mod” hair cuts: And ...

Here comes my epic multi GIF bonanza as part of the ds106 GIFfest, it might fall into a Multi-GIF story. It’s BROUGHT TO EXCITING LIFE! What follows are 16 GIFfable scenes from the 1948 John Ford Western, Fort Apache. Rented from the nifty little library in Pine, AZ, the movie appeals on several levels, first because of the iconic scenery of Monument Valley it might be 100 miles from the real Fort Apache). Yes, the mittens are familiar, but it’s that vast space the Ford used so well to back narrate the story. You also have some name stars, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, even a adult-ish) Shirley Temple. It’s a slice a bit different from the typical cowboys versus Indians, though both are present, but really dives into the tension of the white settles who had lived long enough in the southwest to appreciate and understand the land and te ...

My menorah is put away, but it seems such a nice symbol to GIF, maybe have to slip it in under Ben Rimes’ GIFmas Card assignment (the first rule of ds106 I tell my students is to change up and break the rules of an assignment, if it makes for good art). Do you need the whole story? I would think the Macabees would dig some GIF miracles. This started with mp photo from night 7 (I forgot to get one on the last night) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But that’s no problem, I was able to magic brush in a copy of one of the middle candles to fill the gap. i also managed to lose two flames by… well I think I forgot to paste. So I copied an isolated flame, and flipped it horizontal to make it looks little different This ...

Stanford is doing it. Harvard is doing it. MIT is doing it. We better do it. Just keep mooing along. Giulia got the GIF going this before me (and cleverly wrapped it into an Instagram-like GIF with dancing panda, speaking of herding behavior, look at the stampeded over to flickr). I knew when I saw this Cow & Cow & Cow & video that I had to GIF it or do something with it. The video is worth it for the zany music and the metamoo-phasis of the cows (all rendered brillaintly in Adobe After Affects). Just look at those Yes Cows. Everybody in agreement. This one was a bit tricky since the entire video had the cows panning. I ended up narrowing it to three frames, and using some pixel nudging to try and align the cows and then crop out the non-overlap. It’s not clean, but neither are ...

Allright, one more GIF (this morning) and then off to do something else. Maybe. This one can fit into two of the categories- RIFF a GIF and GIF the #ds106 (this is a test if I can slip one example into two assignments). Muppets + ds106 #4life

The eclectic Woody Allen has had many romantic encounters, on and off screen. How could he ever forget his lively yet draining down under love affair? I was going to make a new assignment for the #ds106 GIFfest, but sometimes it is more fun to make the GIF fit, in this case making it slip in facetiously under Michael Branson Smith’s I’ll Love You Forever: Help that cinematic love last for eternity by turning it into an animated GIF. There is a good and growing set of GIFable tasks, time now to fill in with examples. So far RIFF a GIF is in the lead. These starry eyed lovers first met at sunset on a brushy hill top north of Adelaide, he the pasty white skinned American burning under the solar flares, she the bouncy yet quixotic marsupial who did not pull punches. They loved, they fought, and mostly just ...