Today’s DS106 animated GIF challenge was Assignment 1001.  We are asked to take the template GIF of Jim Groom dancing and add a background and foreground, to make him dance in an interesting place.  The title of the assignment “Dancing Jim All Over The World”  inspired my GIF of dancing on top of the earth, as well as one created here by Kevin Hodgson (@dogtrax).  I also had an astronaut floating around at one point.  But it looked “odd” with him in his space suit and there was Groom out in the open, unprotected, dancing and whooping it up with DS106 Radio. Okay… I admit it… No matter what I did with Jim it was going to look weird, but the astronaut stayed inside the ship during the final GIF merging step. As you can obviously tell there are several image layers involved with the final GIF image.

• Tiled star background from 1-background.com [Link]
• Modified Dancing Jim Groom GIF from John Johnston & TalkyTina   [Link to file]
• Red Supergiant Star V838 Monocerotis posted on the hubblesite.org site [Link]
• Earth Image as seen from the Apollo 17 Mission [Link to Wikipedia Commons Image]
• Space Shuttle NASA X38: Sorry no official link.  I found this a few years ago on the NASA site, didn’t log the web address then, and now I can’t find it for a proper linking. 🙁
• DS106 Radio Flag (Look real close.  It’s on the nose of the space shuttle where the US flag used to be.
• DS106 Website Banner

Assembling in Adobe Photoshop 11 Elements

1. Tiled the black star background to cover the image canvas
2. Eraser tool to delete the starscape background around the red supergiant star.
3.  Quick selection tool to extract the earth image and space shuttle from their respective backgrounds.
4. Applied a black filter to the DS106 banner logo to turn it from white to black.
5. Band-aide tool to erase the “United States of America” & US Flag from the space shuttle.
6. I liked the effect of having the NASA logo with the sharp red lines sticking out under the DS106 logo, so I left it there.
7. Merged Space Shuttle, DS106 Radio Flag, and DS106 logo into one layer.
8. Assembled layers in proper order and merged: Starry Background, Red Star, Jim Groom, Earth, Modified Space Shuttle
9. FILE=>Save For Web=> Select GIF & check “Animate” box. Time set at 0.2 sec.

My astronauts can float around now that Jim Groom has gone home to bed. And it looks like they’re all ready for the Headless DS106 to start on August 26th, 2013.

So you don’t have to go through the hassle of lassoing the images (I already did that for you.) to add to one of your future art projects, here’s my DS106 space shuttle and astronaut.

Dancing Groom GIF (Right click to download then open it in your editing program as layers.