The It’s Going to Eat You Up! animated GIF [DS106 AnimatedGIFAssignment1162 ] was definitely fun to create. It combines two very fond childhood memories: The old campy Batman & Robin television show and the Bill Cosby comedy routine Chicken Heart . But the bulk of the project time and energy was put into on-line research to locate and link the images, audio files, and relevant websites that provide the story behind the story. Here are the Why’s and How’s of producing the GIF.

During audio week of the UMW DS106 summer 2013 on-line course in Digital Storytelling, I was introduced by our audio mentor Scottlo to the Arch Oboloer The Devil and Mr. O radio plays.  As I started listening late one night I found that Oboler had created the “Lights Out” radio play Chicken Heart, which inspired the infamous comedy routine by Bill Cosby from his Wonderfulness album that my little sister and I would recreate playing inside an old gutted radio cabinet.

Excited by my find, I eagerly began what turned out to be a fruitless quest to locate the original 1937 Oboler recording. Sadly, I discovered it was one of his lost episodes. 🙁 Recordings of the original radio play and rebroadcasts in 1938 and 1942 are lost or unavailable, although he later recreated the episode for a record album in 1962 – which I couldn’t locate.  There is an 8 min abridged version that many mistake for the original.  And amazingly while researching this blog post, I actually came across a December 31, 2008 recreation of the entire Chicken Heart radio play by the Post Meridian Radio Players.

From Wikipedia:  Arch Oboler made effective use of atmospheric sound effects, perhaps most memorably in his legendary “Chicken Heart,” a script that debuted in 1937 and was rebroadcast in 1938 and 1942. It features the simple but effective “thump-thump” of an ever-growing, ever-beating chicken heart which, thanks to a scientific experiment gone wrong, threatens to engulf the entire world. Although the story bears similarities to an earlier Cooper episode (about an ever-growing amoeba that makes an ominous “slurp! slurp!” sound), Oboler’s unique choice of monster was inspired by a Chicago Tribune article announcing that scientists had succeeded in keeping a chicken heart alive for a considerable period of time after its having been removed from the chicken. Recordings of the original radio broadcasts are lost or unavailable, although Oboler later recreated this episode for a record album in 1962.

Credits & Notes:

• Link to Blog Post for Chicken Heart: Images taken from The Cosby Kids cartoon show.
• Link to PSD of Batman & Robin Running Away
• Link to DS106 AnimatedGIFAssignments1162
• Link to Girl listening to radio (wikipedia creative commons)
• Short abridged 8 min recording of the Chicken Heart radio play.
• 30 min full-length recreation of the Chicken Heart radio play by Post Meridian Radio Players
• Link to Bill Cosby comedy routine – Part 2: Chicken Heart  ||  Part 1: Snakey Lick set-up

To create the GIFs and other images I first downloaded:

• The PSD of Batman & Robin Running Away
  

  Philco 41-280 Radio

  •         see their other adventures here
• Images from The Cosby Kids “Fish out of Water” episode.
•               images captured on a blog post 
•               Original full-length cartoon [10:20 for Chicken Heart]
• Girl listening to radio (wikipedia creative commons)
• Batman, Robin & Catwoman photo
• And a photo of what I remember as the hallowed out radio where my sister and I performed our radio plays.

 

Using Photoshop Elements 11 for the mac I created a composite image of a little girl listening to the radio by using the magic wand tool to copy out representative chicken heart images from the cartoons.  I then adjusted the transparency of the cartoon images to 80% to give the impression of an imaginative mind at work before I merged the layers.

 

It took more steps in the process than I was expecting to create the background image for the Chicken Heart.  It was important to make it clear that it was terrorizing the city.  In order to do that I had to shift the Batman & Robin images from the original center to the far right…

… and move the original Chicken Heart image to the far left. This resulted in a blank area on the right hand side of the image that was corrected by duplicating the Chicken Heart graphic as a new layer and sliding it over to right. 

At one point I had the blue car mysteriously hanging in mid air, which I promptly fixed. And the color mismatch you see above on the street is hidden behind Batman & Robin, but I had to be careful and align things properly.

Once I had the background completed, it was time to merge it with each of the 13 provided Batman & Robin image layers.  For the full version of PhotoShop there is no need to merge the individual layers.  If there’s a way to do that in elements, I’d be oh so grateful if you’d share it with me.

To produce the final GIF:

• File=> Save for Web.  
• Check the animate option box on the top right hand menu
• Change the default 0.2 sec frame delay to 0.1 seconds – Otherwise, as I found out, they’ll run too slow, and it’s not as funny.
• Click save and give it a file name.
• To view your GIF, right click on the file name and open it with a web browser.  

 

TA! DA!  Batman & Robin terrorized by the Chicken Heart.