Want to get fit without leaving your chair?  According to infomercial star Tamara Henry, the Hawaii Chair is for you. “It takes the work out of your work-out.” by hula-ing your way to fitness.

See update below for V2: “Groom Does The Hula Hot Seat Happy Dance”

DS106 GIF challenge #4 was to create a GIF of a hilarious infomercial moment that illustrates how ridiculous some infomercials can be. I started the project with a YouTube search for Infomercials.  Up came Top 10 Ridiculous Infomercial Products.  About the 3rd product in I saw the Hawaii Chair.  It piqued my interest and seemed like I could have some fun with it. The rest of the commercial snippets didn’t get much of a rise out of me.

I continued my search to find a better resolution or original copy of the video.  Unfortunately, the original Hawaii Chair Infomercial  was made in 2007, so I didn’t have much choice but to go with a very low 240p resolution version.  I like to use a Firefox video downloader add-on that sits right on my tool bar to download videos to my computer.  I get to choose the downloaded file type from a list of available formats and sizes.  That can often avoid a video converter hassle by not accidentally downloading an .flv or .3gp formatted video.

It’s been a couple of months since I created a GIF from a video clip and that was only once.  “Go Daddy… Wheeeee!!”  So I went back to my own blog post to read how I did it using my video editing software Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac. The key was to select a small 2-3 second clip of the original video then:

Publish+Share => Computer => Image (use for exporting still image) => open the advanced menu and choose “export as sequence” under the video heading, then save.

I also vaguely remembered there was something about reducing the output frame rate to 10 instead of the original video frame rate of 29, so that fewer still images in the sequence would be created.  Now I moved over to Adobe Photoshop Elements to create the GIF.  After importing the 36 JPEG image sequence created from the video file, I culled it down to the first 16 where the Hawaii Chair text flies in. Each of the photos became a layer for the final GIF.

I’ve heard others in the GIF challenge refer to being able to change the length of frame delay for each individual layer.  That’s not the case with the elements version of Photoshop.  I get a single frame delay option, the default being 0.2 seconds.  If I want to increase the time an image stays on the screen, I have to create duplicate layers for that specific image.  That was the case here with the beginning and end of the GIF to make for a smoother transition when it looped back again.

Did the Hawaii Chair live up to its claims?  I don’t know.  I didn’t own one or know someone personally who did. But from the looks of the suggested Youtube videos during my search, it certainly gave a number of comedians fodder for their shows and skits, and one reviewer talked about all they got was a hot butt.

UPDATE: Groom Does the Hula Hot Seat Happy Dance

Mucho thanks to Talky Tina for suggesting…

” …it would be funny with their heads NOT moving and no HAWAII CHAIR words and just the chair parts going and going and going. And they would have silly grins stuck on their heads.”

Now version 2 of my plain infomercial GIF has been DS106ized.  I figured while I was merging the stationary heads snippet (simply cut and pasted the top portion of the first image) into new layers in the Photoshop file, why not add Jim Groom dancing his little happy dance with the ladies.  Voilà! A funnier GIF and Animated GIF assignment 1001 has another submission from Rockylou.