I’m going to be honest from the start and say that I had no idea what a gif was. Well, after googling it, I realized what it was, but I didn’t realize that’s what those things were called.
Am I confusing anyone out there? Well just hold on and I’ll explain more about these gifs in a minute.
So this week in ds106 we have our first official digital storytelling assignment, “Say it like the Peanut Butter.” Say What? I’m still not sure how the title of the assignment goes with the whole gif thing… but I digress.
Anywho, so we were to take a scene from our favorite or least favorite movie(s) and create these animated gifs. The first step for me was to download Gimp, and MPEG Streamclip. I also downloaded fastest youtube downloader, but found it to not work as quickly as I wanted/needed it to, so instead I downloaded my Youtube videos with KeepVid.
Next up was to decide on which movie(s) to make my gif out of. I decided on Pitch Perfect. I knew that I wanted to use Fat Amy’s “horizontal running” and found this youtube video.
Honestly I’m not thrilled with how this Gif turned out, but since I’d never done it before, I tried not to stress to much over it.
Next I decided to give The Lion King a chance and see what I could do with that. Sidenote: I am obsessed with the broadway version of The Lion King! I’ve seen it three times (2 times off-broadway) and seriously I could watch it a million times more. So I chose this video, which focuses on the famous “Hakuna Matata” song.
If you all remember, Pumba is a little “smelly” so here he is at the watering hole.
I’m going to work on some more because they are really fun to make. I had some slight difficulties, but by watching tutorials and using the ds106 handbook I feel like I was successful in this first assignment.
I do want to learn how to add wording into the gifs, so that will be the next task!
Kaitlyn,
Wonderful work! Another GIF Artist joins the fold!
GIFs are, indeed, a great source of fun!
One really neat aspect of animated GIFs is the time we invest looking at a very small part of what is typically a much larger story. In focusing on that one small bit, we often see things that we might otherwise miss or gloss over in the larger flow of the story. For example, the instant death of the flies in the Pumba GIF — I can’t say I’ve ever noticed them in the film until now! Seeing them all “drop like flies” (LOL) adds to and extends our understanding of Pumba’s character.
As for your first GIF, I can’t say I fully get it, — is she doing leg lifts? (or maybe that’s the horizontal running you mentioned?) — but I’m glad you were motivated to GIF something that means something to you. I think we much more easily home/hone in on a key sequence for GIFfing when we first understand it — that understanding helps us select or isolate a key storytelling moment that somehow represents the larger story arc.
Looking forward to seeing more GIFs!!
Andy
Thank you for your feed back.
So with the first gif, “Fat Amy” from the movie Pitch perfect is doing this thing called horizontal running. But My gif doesn’t show her lifting/moving both legs, I’m not sure why that’s not happening, because I could have sworn I had trimmed the clip to include that. I should probably remake it.
I LOVE PITCH PERFECT! Good movie choice!
Well thank you!