Windsordi’s Feral Cat as GIF, by aforgrave, on Flickr
You all think I have such an easy life,
Endless days of napping on comfy sunlit carpet,
Free tasty fish food,
Fresh water,
Attention when I allow it,
And independence and own-time all the rest.
You only see me when I want.
And maybe you see me as spoiled.
It’s not all purrs and naps for a cat.
We’re the ones who notice first that the litter box needs cleaning.
You don’t see our near-escapes with unfriendly doggies,
You don’t see the Evil in trees that draw us in and don’t let go.
Imagine being spurned and avoided because YOUR fur is a certain colour and you happen to walk ahead of someone.
YOU try fearing water and only having your tongue to keep YOU clean! Hairballs are like a major near-death experience for us, and all you worry about is that little mess on the floor!
We all deplore having litter of kitties with an absentee father and not knowing if you can provide for them or see them through the winter.
And to be unwanted …. or homeless ….
Maybe you could see things a little differently, and cut us some slack?
It’s not all purrs and naps for a cat.
Now.
About that litter box.
Can’t you get me something with a flush action?
The poem above was written yesterday for The Daily Create of January 9th: tdc367: “Make a poem that casts cats in a glamourous life.”
I’d already started GIF fing Windsordi‘s Feral Cat sequence (eight lives left, by Windsordi, on Flickr)
after seeing it on Tuesday afternoon. And so once The Daily Create prompt came along, I was under the gun to get the GIF done to go along with it.
This GIF was a lot of work. While the original images look similar, not all were shot with the same zoom or angle, and so there was considerable work necessary to choose a proper reference frame, match up the ice, and ensure that there was only one cat per frame. All told, I think I have something like 18 layers of bits for what represents only seven visible frames. However, the file size is nice for this one — 164K for seven frames at 256 colours.
There are some artifacts of my process visible in the finished product — in the end, I just had to call a stop and declare it done. I’m still working on my understanding of how Photoshop tracks changes to a layer in one frame as opposed to changes in another. We’ll get that, too.
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