I am a bit obsessive. Can you tell? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about animated .gifs since my initial foray last night. Armed with a new tool, I ventured back to try and fine tune my newly acquired skills. Thanks to this great new tool, Squared 5 from new contact @peteschneider I was able to abandon GifNinja. I was looking for something that would give me more freedom to play with still frames, and Squared 5 is just the tool. You simply click and drag the few seconds of video onto the editor and export using image sequence. You can adjust the frames per seconds to determine how many images you work with when creating the animation. I still prefer to use Photoshop instead of a gif creator. This is where the fun starts. This is when the art starts. I am slowly beginning to feel comfortable with the basic routine of this task, which is great because now I can begin to think about and work on the subtle craft of animation.
Working with these frames is a bit like choreographing a dance. I am still not to the level of the Lebowski image, but I am getting closer. Bigger, slower, and clearer images.
I am starting to brainstorm ideas of making a .gif with images I take myself, or thinking about how cool would it be to have an animated comic book, although Comic Life on my Mac does not accept .gifs. Any other ideas? Having lots of fun learning new skills over at #ds106.
Another great side effect of this course is the excitement I am feeling about my learning. I don’t remember being this excited about any single assignment during my entire master’s degree at Columbia. I am thinking a lot about how student must feel, when they are given a task or asked to learn something they truly enjoy. This learning does not feel like a chore, it is an obsession. Now how do I create this kind of excitement in my classroom?
Give them time to just play and become obsessed. You do lots of cool things in your classroom, so give them another lesson or two to experiment with the tools and to check out inspiring creations. There isn’t enough time to just muck around, make mistakes, laugh at our earliest attempts before getting down to the task at hand. Schools are rush rush rush. I am introducing Scratch to my extension students in maths. They asked “What is the assignment? Where is the criteria?”. I said “Play. Make something cool”. I also told them to take a couple of lessons to look at the gallery to get inspired. We can’t do this all the time, but other students who aren’t up to extension are asking to have it installed so they can play at home. They all know they are using mathematics too. I am hoping to get it installed on all their computers before I have anything developed. Then, maybe just maybe, we can nut out the assessment together.
Love it!
I wonder if the blog as comic set up might work really nicely for this. It’d keep the gifs from becoming too distracting as a whole but still maintain the comic like feel.
If we were really doing it right we’d make comics out of the class’s cumulative output. Something like “Take 10 animated gifs from your classmates and use them to create a story.”
I really like the idea of the content from the course feeding into other larger pieces of content.
Thanks for the tip on Square 5. I couldn’t get the Image Sequence export to work but got it out another way, but it’s a solid tool for grabbing YouTube vids.
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