Tag Archives: AnimatedGIF

Tumble, as endorsed by Tina! (Plus, GIF tutorial!)

“The thesaurus.com entry, as endorsed by Tina,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina (click to embiggen it!)

So I went on a little Learning Curve Rabbit Hole today to do today’s The Daily Create, #tdc2750 which is called Thesaurus Fun.

It all started when I went to do a screen capture on my iPad of the thesaurus for tumble, which was just a word that I picked out of the air, and then when I was looking at the words I liked some of them so I thought I would put a little Tina face beside them so you would know that they were special. So I put the screen capture into the Keynote program on my iPad because that is what I do sometimes when I want to make a thing quickly, with layers, before I can do a screen capture to make the final picture for Twitter. I just went to my Twitter and got my picture and made it really small and put it where it needed to go. Then I decided that some words were better than others so I made copies of my picture right beside each other, like a kind of Tina rating scale.

Still, the pictures were kind of small to move for my fingers on the iPad, and I wanted them to be all lined up with each other, so I thought, “I will make it go through the iCloud to my computer and then I can do a select multiple and an align centre for all of the ones in one column and they will look neat!” So I did that.

But then I started to think it would look even better as an animated GIF (because doesn’t almost everything?) and so I wondered how I could make it export so I could GIF it. But then I found out that Keynote does an Export as GIF one now! FUN! So I did that.

But, sad face! The GIF was too big! it was 14 MB, which is a bit much, even for a really good GIF art. I opened it up in Photoshop to confirm my thinking, and found that it was made of all flattened layers, with everything on every layer which makes things really big.

So I thought, I guess I better do it the right way! So I made a PDF of one page and then opened it in Photoshop and then made each little Tina face into it’s own layer so I could turn them on one at a time with just the background screen capture that I started with way back when as the background in it just one time,

It was a lot of work, and in the end I just went back to making copies of the same Tina face (like I did way back in Keynote on my iPad) but in the end, it made a good GIF. It was only 44 KB, which is about 347 times smaller! Then I made it 1:2 for the Twitter, and added my face and the The Daily Create #2750 and URL references, and in the end it was only 146 KB with that added goodness! (Plus, the GIF is 1000 pixels wide, so if you want to embiggen it to read better, you can!)

Then I wrote this little post about it, and now I am back out of the Rabbit Hole! Bye!

“Back from the Rabbit Hole” screen capture by @iamTalkyTina (it’s NOT a GIF)

Kaleidoscope Stairs

For this The Daily Create, #tdc2340: Twisting the Kaleidoscope, the job was to look up at the sky and then make up a thing about like if you were seeing a Kaleidoscope one of it instead of just the regular look of it.

So I was doing a Stairs Tour (that is when I go around and look at stairs, which is another Gig Job that I have sometimes) and so while I was looking at the different stairs, I did the Kaleidoscope thing and so I have a before look and after look at things.

First, I will show the before one, and then beside it is the after one. Plus, the after one is an animated GIF. Because GIFs.

So, this one was a fun time, because I was already on a Stairs Tour, plus Kaleidoscopes.

In case you are wondering about how to see things like a Kaleidoscope, there is a website thing called LunaPic that you can use for them, plus lots of other things.

Here are just some still pictures made with the Kaleidoscope one, not the Kaleidoscope Animation one.

The attributions of it.

I found all the stairs pictures in different places, like:

The History of The Two Swift Kicks for an Ass’ Neck

“Two Swift Kicks for an Ass’ Neck,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

My favourite drink that I like to think reflects me (rather than defines me) is called Two Swift Kicks for an Ass’ Neck.  It is a variation on a historic favourite known as The Horse’s Neck (and The Horse’s Neck with a Kick) and here is the story of it.

The original Horse drink is kind of unique in that it is usually available as both an alcoholic and non-alcoholic variation. Without getting into a long tirade about my continually youthful appearance and my compact vertical proportions, let me just say that there have been times when it has been beneficial for the bartender to be able to appear to be serving me something that is in keeping with my perceived external looks, while at the same time being able to give me what I may actually want or need given my actual age or temperament at the time. Of course, during missions there are times when the opposite may be true, say if I’m needing to maintain my wits while undertaking hours and hours of libation-expedited negotiations.

I will confess that I spent many an evening practicing such tradecraft while visiting with Sir Ian Fleming himself at Goldeneye, and actually suggested the drink to him when he was writing a scene for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — you know, the one in the airport VIP lounge where James Bond is disguised as Sir Hilary Bray? Remember how he goes in for a double brandy and ginger ale? That was my suggestion! 

Ian Fleming, reading my suggestions for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Anyway, I remixed and renamed the drink in the early sixties shortly after I did that spot on The Twilight Zone. Telly was being a bit mean to me on the set (part what you see in the episode wasn’t acting on his part), and so the night before the stairs scene I managed to sneak in and swap out his ginger ale for something a little stronger. (For the record, all of this came out in the disclosure before the trial, and was all considered as coincidental and not influential in the final outcome. Plus, remember, it was just a TV show.)  But it was just after that when I renamed it in Erich’s memory.

The other stipulation that I have always made is to ask that the bartender to forego the traditional highball glass. I prefer the tumbler instead. That way, not only do I get to have a little chuckle about Erich and his little trip down the stairs, but I also get two drinks for the price of one! Hence, Two Swift Kicks for the Ass’ Neck is what they give me.

The bartenders know what I like, and if not, they never get it wrong more than once.

Attributions:

A Woman of Letters …

“ASCII Tina,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

So The Daily Create for today, #tdc1971, said to “make an ASCII selfie just like @mhawksey and @felixadog did,” and it even told you how to do it with a website and your webcam.

In case you don’t know what ASCII is, it is like when you make a picture of yourself out of letters. The big letters make a darker part of the picture, and the smaller letters or the dots make a brighter part of the picture. Cool, eh?

I decided that I would use the time to do some investigations into a different way, so I found a way from manytools.org where they had things called Hacker Tools, and so I used one of my iconic pictures called “True Friends”  (I’m thinking it is time to make some more new iconic pictures of me) to make my face out of letters using the Convert Images to Ascii Art, but then did three different versions that it had called:

  • black and white
  • use retro phosphor colours (green/black)
  • invert (black background)

Those three different ways gave me three different pictures, and so I made them into the GIF that you saw up there at the top.

But ManyTools had some more different ways under Hacker Tools called Image to Byte array and ANSI Art Converter that I tried. The first one needed a special printer, but the antsy one was okay to look at although the two different settings gave two different versions even though I used a black and white image even for the colour one.

“ANSI Tina,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

But the ANSI one didn’t seem to be making me into a woman of letters, so I looked for another way.

THEN, I found a really interesting one on called Steganography. What it gave me is in the picture below, although to see how it is so special, you will need to do some research on a site called MobileFish.com. I will leave that to the reader as a very valuable exercise. Don’t tell!

Steganography Tina, image by @iamTalkyTina

Because the Steganography one was so interesting, I went into another rabbit hole on Mobilefish.com. They had lots of different cools tech things, although I didn’t see an ASCII one, but it did have a cool one called Hieroglyphs Generator, which is another way to put a message into a picture, and so I made this:

“Hieroglyphics1,” message by @iamTalkyTina

You will need to uncover the secret letters of these hieroglyphics in order to read the messages. But they are good ones. Plus, not hard to do if you follow the links.

Because that was fun, I made two more:

“Hieroglyphics2,” message by @iamTalkyTina

“Hieroglyphics3,” message by @iamTalkyTina

Because the Hieroglyphics were so much fun, I added them to The Daily Create for folks to do some day when their turn comes around.

So all of those were neat ways to use letters to make different things, like:

  • pictures from letters,
  • pictures with letters,
  • pictures of letters that are letters made with pictures.

All of these things make me a real Woman of Letters.

Coding in Base DS106 is Where It’s At!

TDC1500_TT_Base-DS106_600

It was interesting yesterday when The Daily Create tdc1500 said to celebrate 1500 creates in some way, and my patented @iamTalkyTina Handy-Dandy Base-DS106 Secret Decoder Ring had just arrived in the post from Zazzle! It was so easy for me to test out my ring to translate 1500 into Base DS106 and get @jimgroom|@ds106radio.

But then today’s The Daily Create tdc1501 asked for a media representation of the Meaning of Life (which aficionados all know can be simplistically, yet fundamentally represented as 42) but @mdvfunes said that you can’t use 42. So I turned to my handy-dandy, brand-spankin’ new patented @iamTalkyTina Base-DS106 Handy-Dandy Secret Decoder Ring to convert 42 into Base-DS106.

And should there be any surprise?

TDC1501_TT_42-in-Base-DS106

So it is a wonderful thing to be able to use numbers and secret codes and Base-DS106, plus have an @iamTalkyTina Handy-Dandy Base-DS106 Top Secret Decoder Ring of it.

The Good and The Friendly

"Get Offa My Porch, Clint!" animatedGIF by @iamTalkyTina

“Get Offa My Porch, Clint!” animatedGIF by @iamTalkyTina

Well, it was the True Friend who at one time thought that I was the nemesis of him and made mean words at me all the time, but I sorted him out in The Rumble, my True Friend Ben (@techsavvyed) who made an MBS (@mbransonsAnimated GIF Assignment #1896 called Get Off My Porch with my good buddy called Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name earlier this evening for #western106 and it caught my attention so I did it too. Because that is how we ride on the range in #ds106.

The assignment as written by Michael provides the source GIF of Clint Eastwood with a nice transparent background. The process to complete the assignment requires that you open the GIF in your photo editor (GIMP or Photoshop), and add your chosen background image below all of the existing GIF layers so that it shows behind each frame. Save the GIF back out as a revised file and you should be done! An easy 3 stars! (Or are they bullets, in #western106?)

Making the GIF File Size Smaller

The transparent GIF provided for this assignment has 105 frames (one is missing!) and weighs in at a paltry 18.9 MB. Actually, that’s huge for a GIF. We need it to be smaller!

Getting your GIF file size down but still looking good is a holdover from before the days of broadband Internet. Back in the original days of 1986/87 when peoples only had like a 2400 baud modem, it took forever to download graphics so CompuServe invented the GIF and you had to make them small. So it’s still a thing.

Some things that I did to make the GIF a bit smaller in file size were:

  • to take out a bunch of the frames
  • to use the same frames moving away from me as I used in looking towards me
  • to make it into a black and white one
  • to make the dimensions of it smaller (to 600 pixels wide, which is good for my WordPress, plus that Tumblr).
  • to fiddle with the GIF settings on the way out of Photoshop (type of, dimensions, dithering percentage, number of colours)

Some things that I did that made the GIF a bit bigger again (but better)

  • to add in the double take, which meant more frames in the GIF but also more story.

In the end, I compromised with a file size of 1.7 MB for a black and white GIF at 600 x 337 pixels with 30 frames.

Clean Up On The Porch

Because I used my favourite personal iconic photo of me called Midnight Scrapbooking as the background, I noticed that there was a white outline around Clint in all of the frames that made it look more fake than it should have. So I used a special Photoshop trick that got rid of a lot of the pixel borders that were white right around the Clint cutouts.

In this GIF you can see how I fixed it to make it look better and not fake. It shows the process as applied to ONE frame in the original Get-Off-My-Porch source GIF.

Removing Outline GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Removing Outline GIF by @iamTalkyTina

FOR EACH FRAME (!!)

  1. Click on the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers palate with the Command (Ctrl on PC) key down to make the dancing ants around Clint’s existing self
  2. Use Select >> Modify >> Contract (3 pixels) to make the ants dance in a slightly smaller perimeter
  3. Use Select >> Inverse to select everything OUTSIDE of that slightly decreased perimeter, which is basically the white outline stuff that you don’t want.
  4. Use the eraser over the dancing ants to basically remove all of the pixels outside of the slightly reduced dancing ants perimeter.
  5. Deselect everything and maybe tidy up any little white bits that might still remain, but there weren’t any.
  6. Repeat for each frame that you need to get rid of the outline for (all of the ones that you want to use).

ENJOY!

The Time I Photobombed Jim While He Photobombed Tim

"Tina Photobombs Jim Photobombing Tim" animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

“Tina Photobombs Jim Photobombing Tim” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

So there was this one time when UNCLE Jim (@jimgroom, on Twitter) was photobombing Tim Berners-Lee at a conference, and he was being all stealth and everything so that Tim wouldn’t notice, but he didn’t even notice when I was photobombing him!

So he posted his picture on the Internet on his bavatuesdays.com, and then I posted my picture right after (it’s right up there, up above!), just to show him.

So that is what True Friends are all about, right Jim?

Well, bye!

Rover is Ready For Her Close-Up, Mr. McGoohan

"Old Rover, Retouched," animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

“My True Friend Rover, Retouched,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

I fondly remember the first day I met Rover.

I was taking a little walk on the beach during my first day in Portmeirion. The offshore breeze was beautiful and I was taking in the gulls and the flowers and the bull kelp when a sixth sense alerted me to the fact that I wasn’t alone.

I gracefully executed Monkey Glides Smoothly on Banana Peel and transitioned flawlessly into Chimp On a Jungle Vine,   — and found myself face-to-face with Rover.

It may have been our respective abilities in stealthy manoeuvres, but I have to think that she and I were both taken aback with our first glances at one another.

After we each backed up a pace or two and performed a threat assessment, we both seemed to mutually decide that we were more than compatible, and we settled down side-by-side on a log to enjoy the afternoon and converse about our respective philosophies.

It was the first of many such wonderful days that first summer. The two of us were peas in a pod on and off the set, and we did a good job of covering for one another whenever there was a prank or two to be pulled on the cast and crew. Between the two of us, no one ever got caught out and we managed to put over some epic doozies on Pat and the folks.

Things turned a bit dark towards the end of the series, when the funding started to dry up. The production company was re-using stock footage by then (you know — the lava lamp and the Rover rising up out of the water sequence) and Rover stopped getting call-backs. Her original sheen had worn off, and despite all the mending and patching and buffing that I was able to do, Rover was pretty despondent. There came a day when I went down to the beach to visit, and Rover wasn’t there. I followed Rover’s footprint for a mile or so (basically a series of roll-and-hop-marks in the sand), but I lost the trail at Penrhyndeudraeth. Rover was gone on a midnight train.

The GIF above is one of my most treasured keepsakes of that summer with Rover. Based on the original footage from 1967-68, it has suffered from the ravages of time. I spent considerable time this afternoon restoring it to as close to its original spender as possible. Perhaps you can spot (no way!) the sections where I did some major retouching.

"Rover Gets a Makeover," animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

“Rover Gets a Makeover,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

 

A New Life for Rover

It was a few years ago that I was overseas on a little errand and I ran into Rover again. After more than three decades out of the biz, she had found a new lease on life performing at large-venue concerts during intermissions. She had had some wonderful plastic work done, and was looking great! She was reliving the glory days, performing in character as her old self, complete with the original theme music from The Prisoner, and having a fantastic time! Imagine how happy we were to get re-aquainted!

I hung around in the venue after the show shot some wonderful promo videos of her for her portfolio (see below). After that we just spent the weekend hanging out and reminiscing. It was great to re-kindle our friendship. Things were going so well that she was off to perform in Dubai the last I heard.

"Rover Promo Video" animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

“Rover Promo Video” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

True Friends are True Friends

With the recent ds106-ification of #prisoner106, I realized that it was high time that I acknowledge Rover with her own True Friend badge. True Friends never begrudge the time it takes to receive their badge, as long as they finally receive it. And so, without further ado, I award Rover her official badge!  We should #BeSeeingHer around this summer!

iamTalkyTinaSaysSo_Rover

Don’t Make it Too Easy, John!

Well, my True Friend John (@johnjohnston on Twitter) is a GIFfriend Master who also likes to teach a computer how to make a GIF for you.

A recent experiment by John allows just anybody to just upload a picture and press a button and make a Dancing Jim one of UNCLE Jim (@jimgroom on Twitter) without any hard work at all.

I decided that I would try it out with a couple of pictures I had left lying around from when I did Heavy Metal Bands for #ds106 True Friends and also Movie Posters Without Any Icons from last time.

Here is what I made with John’s one-click GIF-JIm-Dancing.

"Dancing Jim - HippyMOOCSlaughter" animated GIF

“Dancing Jim – HippyMOOCSlaughter” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

"Dancing Jim - Apocalypse" animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

“Dancing Jim – Apocalypse” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Plus, because it has a special place in his heart, here is one where UNCLE Jim is Escaping from New York.

Dancing Jim - Escapes from NY" animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Dancing Jim – Escapes from NY” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

It sure is easy, but it makes the Dancing Jim All Over the World assignment already into an even easier one so that is only one star.

Which might be a short term save for you at the last minute on a Sunday night early on in the course, but it won’t stretch your real skillz, plus it’s not nearly as much fun as doing them the proper way.

Are You Feeling Artsy, Hippy?

"Are You Feeling Artsy, Hippy?" animated GIF by iamTalkyTina

“Are You Feeling Artsy, Hippy?” animated GIF by iamTalkyTina

UNCLE Jim Groom (UNCLE Jim Groom, @jimgroom on Twitter, on Twitter) was writing today about a GIF that Spencer Scott made of him that was a Clint Eastwood one.

But when I saw it, I was thinking about when the Hippies where putting flowers in the guns and that UNCLE Jim would probably have a Hippy one with flowers in it. Plus a Hippies Flower Power badge of it.

UNCLE Jim’s flower came from this GIPHY garden.

So this is an AnimatedGIF Assignments 859 Riff-A-GIF based on Spencer’s picture but now is a GIF.