The Swedish Chef has always been one of my favourite Muppet characters, and so when MBS (@mbransons) posted Animated GIF Assignment 856: Muppet GIFs, I was quick to start with The Chef.
This source video is posted on YouTube by MuppetsStudio. In it, the Chef seems to be making both popcorn shrimp (?), and regular popcorn, all to the tune of that pre-MOOC Disco 1972 song Popcorn by Hot Butter.
My copy of MPEG StreamClip wouldn’t download the video (it might be an issue with Mountain Lion and AppleMPEG2Codec.component, although it seems to be present in the Library/Quicktime/ directory), and neither would my free copy of the Fastest Free YouTube Downloader. Nuts. However, a quick search of the web produced MacX YouTube Downloader, and that did the trick just fine.
Choosing which segment of the clip to animate was difficult. There were two or three points where I thought I might be able to get a good, close-to-seamless loop, but in the end, I opted for a number of different selections. You might want to tell me which one works best for you.
The first GIF: Drumming on the Counter
Drumming on the Counter, interval of 0.1 sec per frame
The second GIF: The Big Dance
The Chef’s BIG Dance (1.8 MB)
The third GIF: Fingers Up
Swedish Chef Fingers Up dance segment
The fourth GIF: Fingers Up Shortened
Swedish Chef, Fingers Up dance segment (short)
Maybe these are too close to video captures and too far from the cinematic / moving still style, but I think they capture the spirit and energy of the Swedish Chef. I tweaked the timing of the last two GIFs — they were going really fast, so I set the interval to 0.1 seconds per frame, and they view better now in Safari.
From where I am sitting right now, however, I can see the Chef sharpening up his knife for Cårven Der Pümpkîn. Perhaps I’ll post another one of these shortly.
Bork, bork, bork.
Børk, Børk, Brilliant! I love the Swedish Chef!
I’m almost more fascinated with the stand mixer twirling about than I am the chef. I think the timing looks great in all the gifs. If there was a way to capture the tune from the original video clip and embed it so it’s playing in endless loop along with the gif, it would be amazing!
I liked the mixer, too, as well as those two hanging spoons. I’m thinking that the tempo of the music, guiding the (motorized) swinging of the spoons — and also the dancing of the Chef — has made it easier to get edit points that are pretty much synced for everything: mixer, spoons, chef.
I found a neat techno version of Popcorn on Youtube to listen to while I was working on this. But I’d recommend that you watch the actual Muppet video to get the full effect of the music and the Chef. For all the power of the GIF, in this case, the video with the music is pretty powerful.
But now that you mention it, it would be cool to do a frenetic remix of the original vid with the techno track.
“The purpose of any good creativity is to make two pieces of art hang where one hung before.” — Remixing the words of Thorstein Veblen.
I so have his voice in my head right now. I loved the Swedish Chef. And bravo, first muppet GIF!
These are brilliant, and I would actually consider putting them together more seamlessly as a series. It is rampant on Tumblr now, you biut GIFs like this together as a kind of strip, like this: http://deathormaumau.tumblr.com/post/38219989782/darling-forever-is-a-long-long-time-and-time
I’m not sure it has a name, but your gifs would work in this format beautifully.
Wow, very cool. What a great format for illustrating key moments of a narrative that collectively or sequentially tell a story. It would be very interesting to choose select scenes from a film and juxtapose them to highlight themes. Jim, I’m thinking that your “eyes” essay from Bladerunner would work very well in this format, yes?