I decided to go with the less creative title “Gifs, Gimp and Me” instead of what I originally thought of, which was “I ain’t no Gimp!” Which struck me as funny and worked on several levels but was a little unprofessional.

I am not a Gimp-ophile. Not by a long shot. I have learned several things, though, and I was able to create my own gifs! Thanks to the internet and what sounds like a preteen girl and a teenage boy. See videos below.

I downloaded Gimp and checked it out to see what I could intuit from it. The answer: NOTHING. I literally could not understand what any of the buttons meant besides the basic: line, fill, lasso. Very humbling. I felt very stupid.

So I Googled: “How to make a gif using Gimp” and got the Gimp website’s tutorial, a girl who explained how to make a gif of Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss Everdeen) shooting an arrow over and over and the boy who drew a stick figure walking. The Gimp website was less than helpful. I could not understand what they meant by “Gaussian blur” or “alpha to selection”. The girl and boy were much better. I learned about layers and timing and playback. (Which is located under Filters -> Animation -> Playback, by the way. Who knew? Talk about a steep learning curve).

I have a presentation coming up in which I will describe how a Flame Ionization Detector (FID) works. Just the basics. Of course, I get the brilliant idea that I will animate the FID diagram to literally illustrate my point. Because what could go wrong?

Have I mentioned that I like to tackle big projects instead of working through little ones first? I do that with baking all the time. Why start small and boring when you can do a BIG EXTRAVAGANZA with FROSTING and FLAVORS and COLORS! Except that it is often more difficult and frustrating than if you would have started small. But the emotional payoff potential is really big. Cost-effective? You decide.

There really is no stopping me – short of dismemberment – once I start so here I go….

The FID diagram by itself:

Now, I need to show that the separated gas coming from the column in the gas chromatograph hits the flame and is ionized. The resulting electrical charge creates a peak on the chromatograph which we can use to identify how much of that particular analyte is present. So easy even a caveman can do it!

My attempts to do this in Gimp resulted in disaster. I do not like how once you create a shape in Gimp it becomes part of the picture. You cannot move the shape without taking the background with it. I’m not used to this. When I create shapes in Excel they are independent until I group them together. I can move them alllllll over the place. It’s great. Not so in Gimp. You better get your placement right the first time otherwise you’re screwed. This is incredibly difficult to do when you are trying to precisely animate a section of gas moving through a column.

Also, each of the layers I created just compounded on each other so instead of the gas moving up through the column; it was just one long line of gas building on top of each other. I tried several things and Googled a lot. Nothing helped so I looked for an easier program. I downloaded Paint.net. Bad idea. Not any easier. So I switched to Paint. Still the problem with the whole placement thing but I figured out a way to get around it.

I am familiar with animation in the traditional, drawing sense so I knew that I needed a frame for each move and I needed the background to always be the diagram. I know that animators use transparent paper to see their changes and then add the background later but I couldn’t figure this out in Gimp. What I did instead was I created a single file for each of the frames that I would need. Starting from one frame, I copied the rectangle shape that I needed and noted it’s location on that previous frame. Then I pasted it in the next frame, same location, and moved it up two pixels by hand. Super tedious. But it worked.

I used that method of noting location and movement for the entire animation. The result: 95 frames cut down to 50 frames for a shorter overall animation time. Then, – thank you Katniss Everdeen Gimp girl! – I used Gimp to take all my frames and put them together in an animation. I thought the animation went too fast for the flame part so I went back and changed the timing on the last few frames – thank you stick figure Gimp boy! (This can be done by right clicking on the layer, selecting Edit Layer Attributes and putting the frame delay (in milliseconds) in paranthesis next to the layer name. Like this: “Layer 1 (250ms)”. The default layer delay is 100ms.)

Here is my animation:

 I also wanted to signal heat for a different part of my presentation so I made this simple one using Excel to create the shapes, copying them into Paint to make it a .png file and then Gimp to animate my two frames. Much easier!

Here is heat:

Next post – getting rid of the background in your picture (.png) using Gimp!

Originally posted 9/30/13 on an internal 3M blog by “HC” a 3M-DS106 Salon member

Sorry that I haven’t taken the time to write a blog post recently, it isn’t from the lack of interest but the lack of time due to various project related pressures all coming together at the same time.

As we have given away our TV about 6 months ago (we gave it away because we noticed we haven’t plugged our TV into the power socket for over a year), we haven’t been following what is the latest in TV apart from what one might read on blogs, newspaper articles or hearing this or that.  Manly what has gone viral (or back in my day, ‘hot’).

Talent shows usually get a lot of press and in themselves, there are stories about their background.  This time I am looking further than that in the case of Kenichi Ebina, the winner of 2013 America’s Got Talent (AGT).  Having found out that he won, I went back through his previous performances and agree that they are all amazing.  Unfortunately my curiosity told me to look into his back catalogue of performances online, all the way back to 2001 when he won with the group “BiTriP”, including a presentation at TED in 2007.

Back then, he was a good dancer but compared to what he can do now, he would be considered moderately good.  What captured my attention is his toolbox of ‘tricks’.  He has been building his toolbox since the beginning and not only replacing tools that doesn’t fit in the set but polishing those he use so it is shiny and fancy when it is pulled out.  The moving light tricks as well as the pulling of the clothing forwards/backwards was shown in the TED presentation, the sliding head and interacting with people behind each other was seen in 2001 with BiTriP just to name a few.  The use of video in the background is new in 2013 and that fits in quite well with the DS106 course.

One of his ‘wow’ performance in AGT was his ‘flying’ during his performance, using a strobe light to assist in the viewer’s experience.  There was a lot of gasps and clapping when he executed this move:

In 2011 at a break dancing convention in London, Kenichi was in this performance and the finale was the strobe effect of this Ninja being ‘born’ and in action.  The segment was longer than I am showing but this literally is the last thing the audience sees (he starts to fly around in a circle before this final leap and then all goes dark for the end).

The audience (different ones) also gave the same gasps and clapping from amazement.

So what does all of this have to do with product development?  I personally think this is what some good product developers probably have been doing and they may or may not know it:

• 1) Build your toolkit (e.g. dance moves).  In 3M, the technical employees have access huge toolkit to work with (our Technology Platforms – Click on the technologies menu title to view.) as well as ones being developed at the bench.
• 2) Test out the technologies in prototypes (e.g. various performances).  Take them out for a spin to see and understand how it works and is it something you can easily work with.  Polish it as you work on it.
• 3) Build a story on how your product will work for the end-use, using the technologies you incorporate into it (e.g. choreography to tell a story).

I remember my mentor (now retired Carlton winner and Corporate Scientist, Wayne Dunshee) telling me once that I should be building and working with different technologies as well as understand how they can interact with each other then put it on the shelf.  Wait until there is a need for it and you can go back to your shelf, polish it up and there is your product.  Of course there are other steps involved to bring it through commercialisation.

Any product developers (seasoned and new) out there like to comment on these thoughts?  I am still a ‘fresh’ product developer in the 3M community so any comments are welcome.

For those interested, here is the background notes on how I made the two animations without the annoying “flashes” (the flashes is actually what you want).

1) I went to youtube.com and downloaded the mp4 videos containing the clips I am interested in.  There is probably a better way to do it without getting the whole video (which themselves are large in size) but I don’t know yet.

2) Using Windows Movie Maker, I opened up the large files, clipped out the few seconds of interest and saved those clips.

3) Found this program called Super (C).  It supposed to be able to do multiple video format conversions but be very very careful in how you install the program.  The program itself is free, but they have this installer that asks lots of questions if you want to install stuff – but it isn’t for the actual program itself!  I kept saying no (or having to find out how to say now) before it ran out of junk software to install, then the installer disappears and then the proper installer for Super (C) opens up and installed quickly without issues.

4) Ran Super (C), dragged-dropped the .wmv  (saved when I used Movie Maker) clips and selected the output as gif and let it do what it advertised it can do – and it does.

5) Opened GIMP and loaded the animated GIF file and then scrolled through to copy the frames where Kenichi is lit instead of the black background.  I pasted those frames into a new GIF file with a black background.  Set the frame rate appropriately and then saved the animation.  Feel free to download these files and rip them open in GIMP to see the individual frames I took.