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?