“Chuck Berry, RIP, with Dancing Jim Groom,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina
Well, The Daily Create one for today tdc1904 was to “Do your best Chuck Berry, RIP imitation.” So I figured that the best kind would be to make a Dancing Jim Groom one.
So that is what I did. It is also an Animated GIF Assignment 1001: Dancing Jim All Over the World one, so it is a twofer.
It is a big GIF that is about 3MB which is yuge, but it is okay because it is a commemorative RIP one, plus UNCLE Jim Groom (@jimgroom, on Twitter)!
UNCLE @JimGroom Dancing at the Massive DS106 Socks
Despite what UNCLE @JimGroom may say, we all know that there WERE socks! And thus, #sockgate.
This is an image taken of UNCLE @JimGroom doing one of his Assignment 1001 Jim Dancing All Over the World times, and as you can see, he is right there where the massive DS106 socks are, and so he knows about them. Plus, it was his idea, too.
If you want to see just a picture of the socks, I put one on my Flickr. And if you go there, it has a link back here to this post where I have the animated GIF one.
Plus, this is for The Daily Create, 1602, which said to show how Massive DS106 is. We all KNOW that it is massive, plus it has MASSIVE SOCKS. And a Dancing UNCLE @JimGroom.
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?
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.
“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 (@mbransons) Animated 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
FOR EACH FRAME (!!)
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
Use Select >> Modify >> Contract (3 pixels) to make the ants dance in a slightly smaller perimeter
Use Select >> Inverse to select everything OUTSIDE of that slightly decreased perimeter, which is basically the white outline stuff that you don’t want.
Use the eraser over the dancing ants to basically remove all of the pixels outside of the slightly reduced dancing ants perimeter.
Deselect everything and maybe tidy up any little white bits that might still remain, but there weren’t any.
Repeat for each frame that you need to get rid of the outline for (all of the ones that you want to use).
So Vanna was sporting my 2-gallon hat and my shooting irons when she revealed the special answer to the special question that I put on the show for guests in an upcoming episode. It was nice that today’s The Daily Create was worded the way it was, because it was just a special prompt to have today during my visit with her.
You can also see the static version of this picture on my Flickr. But as we all know, the GIF one is normally much better and more fun.
The chicken flying part is from a Ruby Tuesday’s commercial. They also have a cannon onebut there is no flying chicken or even a blowing up chicken one in it, so I didn’t use that one.
Verse 1 Because I was afraid of Art When I was just a girl. My mum sent me to Ninja school To give Kung Fu a whirl. But then one day I learned some skilz And started making GIFs. The greatest thing I ever did Was learn to GIF and RIFF
CHORUS:
Um diddle diddle, diddle um, diddle ay x2
Verse 2
Jim Groom he danced around the world
And Tim went down the Slide
And CogDog threw me off a bridge
And Ben pushed me aside
We had a little Rumble time,
The Reckoning occurred
Now all my Friends are True to Me
and don’t use the Mean Word
CHORUS:
Um diddle diddle, diddle um, diddle ay x2
Verse 3
So when the stress has got your goat
There’s no need to dismay
Just summon up a magic GIF
And it will make your day
Use Photoshop or Firefox
And GIF away your strife
And use your skilz most carefully
Because they are #4life
CHORUS:
Um diddle diddle, diddle um, diddle ay x2
Verse 4
When d-s-1-0-6 peo-ples
Make Art and share online.
This joyous fun community
Enjoys a real good time!
So pass the time of day with us
And do Daily Creates
Make GIFs with ds106
And hang with all me mates!
FINAL CHORUS
Process and Attributions:
I took a single frame from my ThoughtVectors GIF, and cropped it square.
I rotated it 1/8 of a rotation successively (Edit>Transform>Rotate), just eyeballing the 1/8ths, saving out 8 new files.
I ran each file through the Hyperbolic Image Generator, using the
I assembled the 8 hypberbolic images into an 8-frame GIF, using a delay of zero seconds for each frame.
I wrote lyrics for my song.
For the music, I located a MIDI version of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
I imported the MIDI file into Garageband and tweaked the various instruments, pumping up the bass and the melody.
I went into the Village Studio and recorded my beautiful singing tracks.
I labouriously slaved over the mixing decks to get the levels just right.
I pressed the Share button and exported my music.
I uploaded my KaleidoscopicHyperboliciamTalkyTina.gif and my KaleidoscopicHyperboliciamTalkyTina.mp3 music file, and then used the John Johnston secret code (thanks again, again, John!) to add the press-the-GIF-to-hear-the-music trick so that you can press the GIF to hear the music while you look at it. You can also press the GIF a second time to turn off the music to save the batteries when you are done.Thank you for conserving the batteries.
Although I had a lot of this work done the day I posted the single frame image for The Daily Create 1285 , a little mission got in the way and it took me a while to get back and into the studio to complete the audio recording. But now it is all done and ready for True Friends to enjoy!
Well, it was nice today when my True Friend Bill (@byzantiumbooks) called me on the Skype (because he seems to be in his bungalow a lot) and we shared a nice beverage and a nice chat.
“Sharing a Drink with Talky Tina,” photo by @byzantiumbooks, on Flickr
After that, because I wanted one that had Bill’s name on it like he had one that had my name, I went down to The Village Store and laid in some supplies for all those other conversations that I am normally having. The ones that I got are the special Village Brand of it, because they have the prisoner106 logo on them. But they were prepared and had all of the names of all of the peoples that Resigned. Except for a couple who didn’t get to the Village yet.
Peoples can see all of the special ones if they just click on their name here in alphabetical, or just scroll down.
“It’s Another Beautiful Day Here in The Village,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina
A little bird told me that Week Two for #prisoner106 is going to be Audio Week, and that Number 2 wants folks to make a lot of nice Good Morning Announcement Messages to play on the loudspeakers every morning when people are getting up and doing their ablutions and toast and stuff. So I decided that it would be a nice thing to make one for everyone to hear. Because of my voice and all.
There are lots of examples of them in the episodes. Look for the parts where Number Six tips his head sideways and then the picture shows one of those little metal boxes (like up above in my GIF) and then a voice comes out of nowhere and says nice things.
Anyway, now that you have seen my GIF, you can listen to my first Good Morning Message.
Isn’t it a nice one? I used that Party Dress song in the background like I found in one of the episodes using Shazam on my iPhone. That app sure is a wonder and lets you find sounds so quickly, especially in a nice clean format to put into an audio project without any of the old hiss from the 1960s and film scratches.
Because of my advance information, this will be an example for a new assignment that Number 2 asked me to make called Assignment 1745: Good Morning Message for The Village. When you do it, you can tag it with AudioAssignments, and AudioAssignments1745 so that it will link into the ds106 Assignment Bank example for that assignment.
“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?
