Grandson and son-in-law having fun last summer at the park.

Our only required DS106 assignment this week was to create an animated GIF from a Twilight Zone episode.  Me bad… I didn’t use a Twilight Zone clip…  But according to Talky Tina, who gave us the assignment, my GIF fulfills most of the other requirements. It’s B&W.  And it’s capturing a really nice childhood moment.

“But that’s okay, because a black-and-white sequence makes for a smaller GIF anyway! Can you help me relive my childhood (and perhaps your childhood, or that of your parents?) with some nice, friendly b&w animated GIFs From The Twilight Zone and Beyond?  Try to capture all of the really nice childhood moments! You know the really, really best and funnest parts!

I’ve never created a GIF before, so this was a bit of an adventure.  I had to first figure out what these things were all about.  Luckily my daughter was over for family Sunday dinner tonight and she pointed me to some fun examples at James Vander Memes.  It turned out after doing some research on the web and viewing a few tutorials on YouTube that my Mac versions of Adobe Premiere Elements 11 and Photoshop Elements 11 software would work.

The clip I’m using was taken from a video of my grandson and son-in-law called “Playtime With Daddy” that I created and posted to YouTube at the beginning of the year.  At the time I was acquainting myself with new video editing software and was having fun trying out new effects like changing the speed of the video and adding in an old news reel effect.

I had some trouble figuring out which format to publish the video clip so that it would turn into sequenced images. Publish+Share => Computer => Image (use for exporting still image) => open the advanced menu and choose “export as sequence” under the video heading, then save.  My next glitch showed up as I was moving each of the still images into a single Photoshop file.  For some reason my Photoshop Elements wasn’t letting me easily copy and paste the layers between files like I had done with earlier versions.  I found a work around. Again, after some trial and error, when saving it to the web as a GIF I needed to check the sequence box.  Then it would only play in reverse?  What the ….??? After trying, without success, to manually reorder the layers I finally found a checkbox that said reverse on it, and I was on my way. Only to be stymied one last time when I previewed my blog entry and the original Flickr link didn’t work correctly.  I ended up just inserting my own media.  I’ll update my post if I get it working correctly.

I enjoyed this assignment and am looking forward to learning more about what others have done with a GIF.  I wonder how I’ll be using this form of story telling in the future?