{"id":9542,"date":"2013-07-08T22:40:15","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T02:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/?p=9542"},"modified":"2013-07-08T22:41:25","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T02:41:25","slug":"gifestivus-2012-is-the-learning-fun-over-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/2013\/07\/08\/gifestivus-2012-is-the-learning-fun-over-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"GIFestivus 2012: Is the Learning Fun Over?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 style=\"text-align: left;\">Wow! Has <strong>GIFestivus2012<\/strong> been a blast, or what?<\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">As I write this (originally dated January 18, 2013, but only published July 8th, 2013), I have something on the order of 14 posts on <strong>de\u2022tri\u2022tis<\/strong> that are tagged with\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/tags\/GIFestivus2012\/\">GIFestivus2012<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0couple of those have several GIFs on them, putting me at about <strong>20 completed and posted GIFS<\/strong>. (As I scan through my Animated GIFs work folder, I see <strong>another 12 <span style=\"color: #339966;\"><del>11<\/del><\/span>\u00a0<del>10<\/del>-odd<\/strong> GIF endeavours in various stages of completion (3 or 4 of them are multiple GIF projects), and I must be sure to include two other projects that have been waiting on some improved skillz for quite some time &#8212; my summer 2012 Bladerunner GIFs, and my <a title=\"Still No Sign of Land \u2026 ?\" href=\"http:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/2012\/10\/12\/still-no-sign-of-land\/\">secret-project my ds106 t-shirt has arrived GIF.<\/a>* Their completion is now assured. (AddedJuly 2013: \u00a0well, maybe not as quickly as I had thought when I first drafted but didn&#8217;t post this in January 2013)<\/p>\n<p>Much of my learning has come through<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"> brute force experimentation<\/span> within Photoshop, with a few instances when it became clear I had a <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">specific question that needed clarification<\/span> via some kind of YouTube tutorial. <strong>Google<\/strong> and <strong>YouTube<\/strong> are nothing short of marvellous at helping answer &#8220;how to&#8221; questions these days, once you understand your question well enough to ask it properly. I found that frequently a full sentence question in the safari\/google search revealed the same question &#8212; previously asked &#8212; and already answered.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The two big questions that I really needed to dig into were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the relationship between the layers and the frames (that took quite a while to sort out by playing around)<\/li>\n<li>how to make layer masks (I&#8217;d watched Jim&#8217;s GIMP tutorial, but couldn&#8217;t find the right commands in Photoshop. Eventually, I located them with the help of a video &#8212; and the process was virtually identical to Jim&#8217;s.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Many, but not all, of my GIFs have started as clips from video. The tutorial about MPEG StreamClip and Photoshop was really helpful with that. \u00a0Some of my GIFS have <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">far too many frames<\/span> or <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">too much overall movement<\/span> to fit into the \u00a0Cinemagraph\/Cinematic GIF category. However, in general, I&#8217;ve been pleased with what I&#8217;ve learned along the way, and the resulting products.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The other &#8220;big thing&#8221; that I&#8217;ve been working on is <em>developing an eye for seeing\u00a0things that are truly GIF-able.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>This aspect of GIFestivus2012 has been a wonderful learning experience.<\/em>\u00a0And it has been that &#8212; experience. I very much enjoy the &#8220;AHA&#8221; feeling that comes now when I suddenly see something and say &#8212;\u00a0<em>that needs to be a GIF! \u00a0<\/em>Diane Bedard&#8217;s (@Windsori) Feral Cat sequence last week was such an example.\u00a0It was a lot of work to accomplish (lots of good learning in a difficult animated GIF), but very rewarding.<em>\u00a0(In the end, I really had to cheat on the last frame. Can you tell?)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In terms of &#8220;selecting&#8221; things to GIF, that was informed in a big way by seeing the kinds of wonderful GIFs folks in the ds106 community have been doing over the past two years. When I think back to the original incarnation of ds106 as an Open Online Course (an OOC, how&#8217;s that? Jim? Alan? ), I remember the pre-christmas excitement that I observed as folks started making animated GIFs, even before the official start of the class. There was a kind of manic energy there. That, coupled with the birth of\u00a0<strong>ds106radio<\/strong>\u00a0early in the course, are two significant formative memories from my initial involvement, limited in participation, but informed by observation when I had time. \u00a0The other key source of motivation was the wonderful collection of cinematic GIFS on <a title=\"IWDRM: If We Don't, Remember Me \" href=\"http:\/\/iwdrm.tumblr.com\" target=\"_blank\">IWDRM: If We Don&#8217;t, Remember Me<\/a><\/p>\n<p>As for my question in the title &#8212; Is the Learning Fun Over? \u00a0&#8212; my answer, a resounding <strong>NOT YET!!<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u00a0In Part II, I&#8217;m reflecting on key variables I&#8217;ve come to better understand that influence the quality of an animated GIF<\/li>\n<li>In Part III, I&#8217;m going to tell my story of the evolution of techniques I&#8217;ve learned that help me to minimize the file size.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As for\u00a0<em>your<\/em> GIFestivus\/GIFest\/GIFmas &#8212;\u00a0Are there &#8220;big questions&#8221; or &#8220;big learnings&#8221; that you&#8217;ve come away with over the past few weeks?<\/p>\n<p>(Again, this post was originally drafted a couple weeks after the unofficial &#8220;end&#8221; of the December 2012 GIFfest \/ GIFestivus \/ 12 Days of GIFestivus, but has languished, unpublished, for close to six months. I&#8217;m posting it now &#8212; and calling out myself to write Part II and Part III in response to some recent questions about making animated GIFs. Although I&#8217;ve stopped tagging my GIFs with GIFestivus2012, I have not (by a long shot) stopped making the durn things. I may post a Part IV before doing II and III, as I already have a post underway, about this affliction I have developed, called GIF-Eye-Tis. Perhaps you, too, have become afflicted?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wow! Has GIFestivus2012 been a blast, or what? As I write this (originally dated January 18, 2013, but only&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[235,15,13,168,12,169],"tags":[298,218,328,297,1078,502,323,329,217,1076,327,326],"class_list":["post-9542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animated-gif-ds106assignments","category-ds106","category-learning","category-ds106reflections","category-thoughts","category-ds106thoughtsideas","tag-windsordi","tag-animatedgif","tag-big-ideas","tag-diane-bedard","tag-ds106","tag-ds106zone","tag-feral-cat","tag-fun","tag-gifestivus2012","tag-learning","tag-photoshop","tag-techniques"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2UvWF-2tU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9542"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10800,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9542\/revisions\/10800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}