It was the chance discovery of a sixty-year-old radio show while researching for the last podcast that led me to discover these clips of Ray Bolger dancing with a couple of dead presidents. At the end of Ray Bolger’s segment on the Doris Day Radio Show he says that he will see her on the set the next day as he leaves the stage. A little bit of Googling revealed that he was referring to the 1952 Warner Brothers’ musical April in Paris. Until this week, it was a movie I’d never heard of or knew nothing about. But thanks to YouTube and the web, I’ve got enough material for a series of some fun animated GIFs. As mentioned in earlier posts, I continue to find myself always on the lookout for suitable moments to put in to perpetual loop back.

For me, discovering the the process of putting these things together has been an unexpected treat. Looking back and learning about Hollywood legends such as Stanley Kubrick, Jimmy Durante, Kirk Douglas, Judy Garland, Timothy Carey, Eleanor Powell, Ray Bolger and Doris Day allows me to imagine life and circumstances in an era in America that seems more and more illusory.

Speaking of illusion, how about the idea of a low-level State Department official dancing and singing about being in love as portraits of Presidents Washington and Lincoln come to life and begin hoofing along. Sure it’s light fare, but it’s also a lot of fun.

One disheartening realization in looking back at the entertainment and talent of this era is that I need to reexamine my recent dream to reinvent myself as a song and dance man. Fortunately there’s enough inspiration on offer via the web that this illusion too just might be possible.

I watched many Ray Bolger clips on YouTube while doing research for the last podcast. Several amazing scenes of him dancing have been downloaded and are in the queue to be assembled into animated GIF form. But when I came across Ray’s 1963 appearance on CBS’s The Judy Garland Show, I felt I’d struck gold.

The visual moment I love most, pictured above, comes as Judy asks Ray to sing If I Only Had a Brain. This was his signature song from his role as Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Thirty years prior to this television show is when each of them performed the parts that would, for better or worse, define each of their subsequent careers.

But the most powerful moments in the video are spoken words which obviously don’t lend themselves to animated GIF form. Once such moment was when Ray described the deeper significance of the Oz story as told to him by his mother when he was a boy. The other is Ray recalling how much working with Judy on the movie had meant to him. It’s the sort of nostalgia that could bring a tear to the eye and is very much worth watching.

But there are still a couple more GIFs that might be of interest:

Here’s an extracted moment of Ray singing If I Only Had a Brain. The warmth and affection in Judy’s expression, even if she’s only mugging for the camera, is striking. And given everything else that goes down in the video, I’m of a mind that we are seeing genuine emotion here.

Technically speaking, there’s a bit more jumpiness in this GIF than I’d prefer. In my effort to find beginning and ending points in which the faces, bodies, motions and camera angles coincided, I failed to notice that there was an ever so small camera movement.  That’s why I cropped this image instead of changing the scale as I did with the other two GIFs.

The first two clips were longer sequences than I’ve been capturing lately – each was over than three seconds. Even with a capture rate of  4 fps, I still wound up with over a dozen frames for each GIF. This means that the files sizes are larger than I’d ordinarily prefer.

The same is not true of the final GIF of this series.

The video ends with Ray and Judy doing Follow the Yellow Brick  Road. It speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

As mentioned in the latest Totally Fun and Good Podcast episode, I plan on developing the skills to become a song and dance man in the months ahead. Like the proverb says, “If you can walk you can dance, if can talk you can sing.” In this and subsequent blog posts, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite Hollywood dance sequences as animated GIFs. Careful study of this iconic loops should help me make fast progress.

The clip above features Eleanor Powell from the 1936 MGM classic, Born to Dance. From the brief research I’ve done to date, Powell is considered among the most talented dancers of the era.

Though I don’t have much knowledge of the Hollywood musical canon, I do have a vivid memory of seeing That’s Entertainment with my great-grandfather in the theater in the early 70′s. I recall whining about wanting to see The Poseidon Adventure instead but he would have none of it. He said he wanted me to see what it was like when the movies were magic.

And now, I guess I finally understand what he meant by that.

True confession: One of the greatest appeals of animated GIFs for me is part of a science fiction fantasy. My notebooks contain many attempts at writing a story about digital anthropology graduate students of the future whose task it is to decipher the bits and bytes of information left behind by earlier generations. I like to imagine that there is specialty field within this future discipline that looks specifically at animated GIFs for clues about a particular civilization’s whose cultural record is otherwise inscrutable.

Would these little silent moving miniatures assume the status of the cave paintings in Lascaux, Egyptian heiroglyphics, or Andean Quipus as an entry point into interrogating the earlier times for these scholars? Well certainly for the sake of the radio play I hope to write this would have to happen. And then a fun story arc to imagine is how our grad student would deal with the discovery of a dusty old hard drive full of ds106 animated GIFS? What would she make of a Slide Guy whooshing down a water slide?

I suppose my purpose in beginning this post with this true confession is to provide a bit of explanation as to what animates my interest in these little curios.

Shifting gears: When I woke up this morning I had a sudden recollection of another moment in Paths of Glory that struck me as being good for an animated GIF. This time it’s Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax as he emerges from 701st regiments bunker to lead the charge to retake the anthill from the Germans. The battlefield sequence that follows, shot with handheld camera in a documentary style, is electrifying.

It seems that what I look for in a possible clip for an animated GIF is an isolated brief motion that stands out in some way. The idea of standing out is fuzzy and too subjective. I think what has happened is that I’ve gradually developed an eye for such moments when watching moving pictures. I wonder if others have had the experience of a film scene saying “GIF me” while viewing.

Another Angle: The sequence of Colonel Dax waving his pistol in the direction of the charge lasted less than two seconds. I set the capture rate at 4 frames per second (as opposed to 8 fps for yesterday’s Tavern scene). As there were only five frames captured and too much background movement, there was no cause to use layer masking to reduce the file size. Besides the exploding shell and flying debris are essential to the scene.

The size of this five frame file is 586 kb. The final step of creating an animated GIF in GIMP is to provide the delay rate. This refers to how long each frame is delayed before going to the next one. The default setting is 100 milliseconds (ms). This usually results in a playback rate that is too fast for my liking. I used 140 ms for this one and for the tavern scene. The delay rate is an important variable in determining how realistic the motion in the animated GIF is. I believe it is in some ways affected by the original capture rate from mpeg stream clip.

Though I’ve yet to confirm it, I believe that a clip captured at 4 fps will play back at a different rate than one captured at 8 fps even when an identical delay rate. This is a hypothesis I will need to confirm. If nothing else, I hope the experiment provides interesting data for future digital anthropologists and other scholars.